Rising and falling cases in the UK do seem locked into whether or not the kids are in school regardless of any sort of vaccination program or otherwise...
Might be a coincidence but it's interesting
Crotchfruit are the real super spreaders.
I was supposed to spend last weekend staying with some friends, but their rugrat tested positive on Friday and now appears that they have spread it all around (mainly) all the other rugrats in that friendship group. I dodged a bullet there.
On topic I agree entirely with the thread header. Difficult but not impossible. An important prior agreement that was based on a mutual assumption that both countries would continue to operate within the EU framework. Not easy to square the circle of extremely close relations between the parts of Ireland and rather more distant ones between the UK and the EU.
It is a mystery to me how anyone thought that this would be easy and I say that as someone who was in favour of Brexit. The honest answer is that our political leaders just didn't care enough about NI to want to address the problem properly.
What kills me about Frost is how he claims no-one knew this would happen. Kwarteng tried the same line on Beth Rigby and she pointed out the three former PMs who all repeatedly said this would happen.
Its like Team Boris know they are the dumbest people in the room, but think that if they can normalise dumb that nobody will notice.
They are not dumb, they are dishonest. The reality was, as the thread header indicates, that the GFA needed to be seriously and earnestly renegotiated to reflect the new realities. In some ways this would have reduced the effect of the GFA in ways that Ireland would not have liked but the honest truth was that so long as they remained committed to the terms of EU membership that was inevitable. The only alternative would be a united Ireland. But no one was really up for this discussion either in London or in Dublin so lies were told about some oven ready deal or the like. Now the lies are exposed and we want to change the deal but the problem that the lies were intended to conceal is still there.
When we've had this discussion before it seems to play out with @Charles saying the GFA needs to be amended and a lot of other people going, but on what basis / core / foundations do you start amending / renegotiating it.
The whole point of the GFA was that with the EU sat above both the UK and Ireland there was a firm foundation upon which an agreement could be built. But with that foundation gone, what mutually agreeable things exist that allow a new agreement to be built from.
A spirit of compromise and willingness to fudge things to make it work, as was done in the GFA itself, is what should have been mutually agreeable.
Unfortunately May was pissweak and NI was weaponised.
Wonder why Johnson bottled No Deal. Instead chose to sign a Bad Deal and then renege on it.
As it would have been pure but led to a likely recession for GB and a clear majority in Scotland now for independence and a resumption of violence on the Nationalist side in NI once the hard border with Ireland was imposed
Mmm. No Deal WTO terms never a real world option then. Guess that's generally accepted now. Has ever a Not Happening Event been so interminably discussed and speculated upon and exploited for nefarious means as this one was? I think not.
Rising and falling cases in the UK do seem locked into whether or not the kids are in school regardless of any sort of vaccination program or otherwise...
Might be a coincidence but it's interesting
I'd actually guess that this is the reduction in indoor activity due to the Euros ending, schools in England are still in until today/tomorrow.
Schools broke up 9th July here.
Are there summer remedial classes dealing with spelling by any chance? Damn, its been corrected.
Just for centrist balance, encouraging case numbers, but I think I'd want to see a few days of trend, and it's all a phoney war right now until the effects of Monday's opening start to show up in next week's data.
The effect of Monday's opening, where as everyone can see behaviour in shops didn't change at all, and ravers moved from houseparties to commercial clubs. Having a really hard time to see any actual behavioural change which will show up. People either moved to the final unlock for themselves in May, or they won't want to do it until next spring, regardless of the official status.
Hopefully you're correct but it's too early to really see the effect on known cases of Monday's reopening. Today's case numbers are very good though.
Oliver Johnson @BristOliver · 22m Just for centrist balance, encouraging case numbers, but I think I'd want to see a few days of trend, and it's all a phoney war right now until the effects of Monday's opening start to show up in next week's data.
What's more, the problem isn't the Good Friday Agreement. It's much more fundamental than that: it was the fact that both Ireland and the UK were in the EU, and therefore in the Single Market with free movement of people and near-zero bureaucracy for trading across the border, that made the whole concept of a peaceful resolution of the Troubles possible. There's no 'renegotiation' of the GFA (even if anyone wanted to renegotiate it) which would square that circle.
For much the same reason, but thankfully without the violent history, Brexit makes Scottish independence extremely problematic.
But it will also make Scottish Independence so much more entertaining to watch from the southern side of the border.
Nicola Sturgeon doing her Boris tribute act will raise a few wry smiles, to be sure.
Good figures today re cases but any effect from the easing of restrictions especially in terms of nightclubs won’t be showing up in the data yet.
My question is how many clubbers are likely to get tested?
a) for many young guns, covid will be indistinguishable from a handover and/or comedown b) there's a huge disincentive for them too get tested – the risk of ten days at Her Majesty's Pleasure, incarcerated in their own flat in the middle of summer...
We can't let the Northern Irish tail wag the British dog. If the democratic decision of the British people five yeras ago means the GFA doesn't work, we need to look again at the GFA, not the other way around.
Better still, get shot of the embarassing and ruinously expensive anomaly that is Northern Ireland entirely.
But I imagine we'll find a way to fudge it eventually. Northern Ireland itself is a fudge, after all. And so is the GFA itself.
I don't think Biden will make a particularly big deal about it while he wants to reunite the west to confront China.
Is this the most uninformed post ever in the history of PB?
I dunno, it's a high bar.
Some of the posts on trans issues take a lot of beating tbf.
Reported cases for England, with day-of-week differences highlighted:
Cases by specimen date look to be following similar trajectories, even with incomplete data so far. Hospital admissions increasing quite rapidly, but this reflects a week ago when cases were still rising rapidly. Should ramp up to the mid-900s or so in a few days and then (IF this plateau is sustained) level off there. Should see the number in hospital in England climb to c. 5000 by the weekend and HOPEFULLY level off there.
All dependent on IF this levelling off is sustained, but it's a positive step to be talking about the realistic possibility.
Really like this chart -> think it shows things very clearly. Might be wrong but this looks like the first day where reported cases were lower than reported cases 7 days earlier?
Rising and falling cases in the UK do seem locked into whether or not the kids are in school regardless of any sort of vaccination program or otherwise...
Might be a coincidence but it's interesting
Crotchfruit are the real super spreaders.
I was supposed to spend last weekend staying with some friends, but their rugrat tested positive on Friday and now appears that they have spread it all around (mainly) all the other rugrats in that friendship group. I dodged a bullet there.
The last school year pretty much involved me getting messages telling me someone close to my kids has tested positive and we had to isolate for a while.
Tempted to ask a refund for the days they weren't at school.
Rising and falling cases in the UK do seem locked into whether or not the kids are in school regardless of any sort of vaccination program or otherwise...
Might be a coincidence but it's interesting
I'd actually guess that this is the reduction in indoor activity due to the Euros ending, schools in England are still in until today/tomorrow.
Schools broke up 9th July here.
Are there summer remedial classes dealing with spelling by any chance? Damn, its been corrected.
Yes, remedial work done quickly here!
Let's see how "Freedom Day" and Eid affect the figures before calling a peak. We haven't seen those impacts yet.
We can't let the Northern Irish tail wag the British dog. If the democratic decision of the British people five yeras ago means the GFA doesn't work, we need to look again at the GFA, not the other way around.
Better still, get shot of the embarassing and ruinously expensive anomaly that is Northern Ireland entirely.
But I imagine we'll find a way to fudge it eventually. Northern Ireland itself is a fudge, after all. And so is the GFA itself.
I don't think Biden will make a particularly big deal about it while he wants to reunite the west to confront China.
Is this the most uninformed post ever in the history of PB?
On topic I agree entirely with the thread header. Difficult but not impossible. An important prior agreement that was based on a mutual assumption that both countries would continue to operate within the EU framework. Not easy to square the circle of extremely close relations between the parts of Ireland and rather more distant ones between the UK and the EU.
It is a mystery to me how anyone thought that this would be easy and I say that as someone who was in favour of Brexit. The honest answer is that our political leaders just didn't care enough about NI to want to address the problem properly.
What kills me about Frost is how he claims no-one knew this would happen. Kwarteng tried the same line on Beth Rigby and she pointed out the three former PMs who all repeatedly said this would happen.
Its like Team Boris know they are the dumbest people in the room, but think that if they can normalise dumb that nobody will notice.
They are not dumb, they are dishonest. The reality was, as the thread header indicates, that the GFA needed to be seriously and earnestly renegotiated to reflect the new realities. In some ways this would have reduced the effect of the GFA in ways that Ireland would not have liked but the honest truth was that so long as they remained committed to the terms of EU membership that was inevitable. The only alternative would be a united Ireland. But no one was really up for this discussion either in London or in Dublin so lies were told about some oven ready deal or the like. Now the lies are exposed and we want to change the deal but the problem that the lies were intended to conceal is still there.
When we've had this discussion before it seems to play out with @Charles saying the GFA needs to be amended and a lot of other people going, but on what basis / core / foundations do you start amending / renegotiating it.
The whole point of the GFA was that with the EU sat above both the UK and Ireland there was a firm foundation upon which an agreement could be built. But with that foundation gone, what mutually agreeable things exist that allow a new agreement to be built from.
The honest answer is that it depends how much freedom and flexibility the EU either gives or Ireland wants. So we have agreed a continuation of the CTA, for example. We can continue to have bodies that can seek to coordinate government activities and policies north and south of the border. We can continue to give each other the right to vote in local elections. But we are not in a Customs Union anymore. We are not in a SM anymore. We are not both bound by CJE rules anymore. These are just facts. If the parties are willing to turn a blind eye to these facts then fine. Who cares? But if they are not there cannot be an agreement on them.
Ignoring a third party importing goods into the single market isn't I think possible - as were the EU to do so for the UK in Northern Ireland other countries would be asking for the same treatment.
COVID strategy seems like a score draw because whilst our vaccine programme was excellent, the Tories have done their absolute best to mess up everything else
Reported cases for England, with day-of-week differences highlighted:
Cases by specimen date look to be following similar trajectories, even with incomplete data so far. Hospital admissions increasing quite rapidly, but this reflects a week ago when cases were still rising rapidly. Should ramp up to the mid-900s or so in a few days and then (IF this plateau is sustained) level off there. Should see the number in hospital in England climb to c. 5000 by the weekend and HOPEFULLY level off there.
All dependent on IF this levelling off is sustained, but it's a positive step to be talking about the realistic possibility.
Really like this chart -> think it shows things very clearly. Might be wrong but this looks like the first day where reported cases were lower than reported cases 7 days earlier?
Yes, first time in this wave. Though we still have the unknown of what step 4 restrictions will bring in terms of new cases this is still a bit of good news. If the former is not a big deal then we also know that 2-3 weeks from now numbers in hospital will start to decrease as the funnel has fewer people entering than leaving.
On topic I agree entirely with the thread header. Difficult but not impossible. An important prior agreement that was based on a mutual assumption that both countries would continue to operate within the EU framework. Not easy to square the circle of extremely close relations between the parts of Ireland and rather more distant ones between the UK and the EU.
It is a mystery to me how anyone thought that this would be easy and I say that as someone who was in favour of Brexit. The honest answer is that our political leaders just didn't care enough about NI to want to address the problem properly.
What kills me about Frost is how he claims no-one knew this would happen. Kwarteng tried the same line on Beth Rigby and she pointed out the three former PMs who all repeatedly said this would happen.
Its like Team Boris know they are the dumbest people in the room, but think that if they can normalise dumb that nobody will notice.
They are not dumb, they are dishonest. The reality was, as the thread header indicates, that the GFA needed to be seriously and earnestly renegotiated to reflect the new realities. In some ways this would have reduced the effect of the GFA in ways that Ireland would not have liked but the honest truth was that so long as they remained committed to the terms of EU membership that was inevitable. The only alternative would be a united Ireland. But no one was really up for this discussion either in London or in Dublin so lies were told about some oven ready deal or the like. Now the lies are exposed and we want to change the deal but the problem that the lies were intended to conceal is still there.
When we've had this discussion before it seems to play out with @Charles saying the GFA needs to be amended and a lot of other people going, but on what basis / core / foundations do you start amending / renegotiating it.
The whole point of the GFA was that with the EU sat above both the UK and Ireland there was a firm foundation upon which an agreement could be built. But with that foundation gone, what mutually agreeable things exist that allow a new agreement to be built from.
The honest answer is that it depends how much freedom and flexibility the EU either gives or Ireland wants. So we have agreed a continuation of the CTA, for example. We can continue to have bodies that can seek to coordinate government activities and policies north and south of the border. We can continue to give each other the right to vote in local elections. But we are not in a Customs Union anymore. We are not in a SM anymore. We are not both bound by CJE rules anymore. These are just facts. If the parties are willing to turn a blind eye to these facts then fine. Who cares? But if they are not there cannot be an agreement on them.
Reported cases for England, with day-of-week differences highlighted:
Cases by specimen date look to be following similar trajectories, even with incomplete data so far. Hospital admissions increasing quite rapidly, but this reflects a week ago when cases were still rising rapidly. Should ramp up to the mid-900s or so in a few days and then (IF this plateau is sustained) level off there. Should see the number in hospital in England climb to c. 5000 by the weekend and HOPEFULLY level off there.
All dependent on IF this levelling off is sustained, but it's a positive step to be talking about the realistic possibility.
If it goes significantly back down will Rugby Oz reverse ferret?
Reported cases for England, with day-of-week differences highlighted:
Cases by specimen date look to be following similar trajectories, even with incomplete data so far. Hospital admissions increasing quite rapidly, but this reflects a week ago when cases were still rising rapidly. Should ramp up to the mid-900s or so in a few days and then (IF this plateau is sustained) level off there. Should see the number in hospital in England climb to c. 5000 by the weekend and HOPEFULLY level off there.
All dependent on IF this levelling off is sustained, but it's a positive step to be talking about the realistic possibility.
If it goes significantly back down will Rugby Oz reverse ferret?
Rising and falling cases in the UK do seem locked into whether or not the kids are in school regardless of any sort of vaccination program or otherwise...
Might be a coincidence but it's interesting
I'd actually guess that this is the reduction in indoor activity due to the Euros ending, schools in England are still in until today/tomorrow.
Schools broke up 9th July here.
That's a very weird system unique within England to Leicestershire – it's not going to make any real difference to the national picture. Most schools broke up yesterday and some are still in.
Reported cases for England, with day-of-week differences highlighted:
Cases by specimen date look to be following similar trajectories, even with incomplete data so far. Hospital admissions increasing quite rapidly, but this reflects a week ago when cases were still rising rapidly. Should ramp up to the mid-900s or so in a few days and then (IF this plateau is sustained) level off there. Should see the number in hospital in England climb to c. 5000 by the weekend and HOPEFULLY level off there.
All dependent on IF this levelling off is sustained, but it's a positive step to be talking about the realistic possibility.
Really like this chart -> think it shows things very clearly. Might be wrong but this looks like the first day where reported cases were lower than reported cases 7 days earlier?
But does tyhat take into account the government-tacitly-encouraged abandonment of reporting?
The Police and their Federation really are incompetent and is further evidence the police in this country need major reforms.
I mean are they so stupid that until quite recently they had confidence in Priti Patel?
The Police Federation of England and Wales has said it no longer has confidence in Home Secretary Priti Patel they called a pay freeze for officers "the final straw".
Yes, first time in this wave. Though we still have the unknown of what step 4 restrictions will bring in terms of new cases this is still a bit of good news. If the former is not a big deal then we also know that 2-3 weeks from now numbers in hospital will start to decrease as the funnel has fewer people entering than leaving.
Yes, although we've still got at least one more doubling and probably more than that already baked in to the hospitalisation figures. If it's limited to one doubling, or just a little more than that, then we'd have just winged it, I think (albeit with a lot of people suffering a nasty bout of illness).
Reported cases for England, with day-of-week differences highlighted:
Cases by specimen date look to be following similar trajectories, even with incomplete data so far. Hospital admissions increasing quite rapidly, but this reflects a week ago when cases were still rising rapidly. Should ramp up to the mid-900s or so in a few days and then (IF this plateau is sustained) level off there. Should see the number in hospital in England climb to c. 5000 by the weekend and HOPEFULLY level off there.
All dependent on IF this levelling off is sustained, but it's a positive step to be talking about the realistic possibility.
Really like this chart -> think it shows things very clearly. Might be wrong but this looks like the first day where reported cases were lower than reported cases 7 days earlier?
But does tyhat take into account the government-tacitly-encouraged abandonment of reporting?
That'd be reflected in a drop in tests, which hasn't happened.
Rising and falling cases in the UK do seem locked into whether or not the kids are in school regardless of any sort of vaccination program or otherwise...
Might be a coincidence but it's interesting
I'd actually guess that this is the reduction in indoor activity due to the Euros ending, schools in England are still in until today/tomorrow.
Yes, I've always thought that the huge rise in cases was mainly down to the Euros, and the relatively poor weather that accompanied them, pushing people into homes and pubs. And of course an awful lot of schoolkids also watch football with their mates. The timings seem spot on for football being the dominant, if not sole, explainer, for the recent rise and the current levelling off.
Rising and falling cases in the UK do seem locked into whether or not the kids are in school regardless of any sort of vaccination program or otherwise...
Might be a coincidence but it's interesting
I'd actually guess that this is the reduction in indoor activity due to the Euros ending, schools in England are still in until today/tomorrow.
Schools broke up 9th July here.
Scotland, private schools, some counties have broken up. Others are still to go on holiday.
One would expect there to be a further drop off for the next four weeks, when pretty much all schools are off.
Hopefully, come the beginning of September, we'll be that much more vaccinated and therefore schools returning will have less of an impact. (It would help if we vaccinated children.)
Since first appearing in India in late 2020, the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 has become the predominant strain in much of the world. Researchers might now know why Delta has been so successful: people infected with it produce far more virus than do those infected with the original version of SARS-CoV-2, making it very easy to spread.
Yes, first time in this wave. Though we still have the unknown of what step 4 restrictions will bring in terms of new cases this is still a bit of good news. If the former is not a big deal then we also know that 2-3 weeks from now numbers in hospital will start to decrease as the funnel has fewer people entering than leaving.
Yes, although we've still got at least one more doubling and probably more than that already baked in to the hospitalisation figures. If it's limited to one doubling, or just a little more than that, then we'd have just winged it, I think (albeit with a lot of people suffering a nasty bout of illness).
It should be less than one doubling because cases this week are not double cases last week and the rise in hospital numbers is already slower than the rise in cases. We're probably looking at a 30-50% rise in hospital numbers before things fall assuming no significant effect from step 4 restrictions lifting (which is a huge assumption that I don't think will stand up).
Rising and falling cases in the UK do seem locked into whether or not the kids are in school regardless of any sort of vaccination program or otherwise...
Might be a coincidence but it's interesting
I'd actually guess that this is the reduction in indoor activity due to the Euros ending, schools in England are still in until today/tomorrow.
And perhaps people modifying their behaviour because they can see cases rising and are probably hearing about friends and relatives getting quite ill. Certainly that seems to be a factor in my circle.
Yes, and in mine. Friends and relatives are being cautious again because we all know several people who've got the disease, including some who are double jabbed. By cautious I don't mean not going out - I really just mean avoiding crowded places.
This could turn out to be the best covid news of the day: The UK new cases appear to be starting descent, 39,906 today (not on this @ourWorldofData graph yet). https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk
On topic I agree entirely with the thread header. Difficult but not impossible. An important prior agreement that was based on a mutual assumption that both countries would continue to operate within the EU framework. Not easy to square the circle of extremely close relations between the parts of Ireland and rather more distant ones between the UK and the EU.
It is a mystery to me how anyone thought that this would be easy and I say that as someone who was in favour of Brexit. The honest answer is that our political leaders just didn't care enough about NI to want to address the problem properly.
What kills me about Frost is how he claims no-one knew this would happen. Kwarteng tried the same line on Beth Rigby and she pointed out the three former PMs who all repeatedly said this would happen.
Its like Team Boris know they are the dumbest people in the room, but think that if they can normalise dumb that nobody will notice.
They are not dumb, they are dishonest. The reality was, as the thread header indicates, that the GFA needed to be seriously and earnestly renegotiated to reflect the new realities. In some ways this would have reduced the effect of the GFA in ways that Ireland would not have liked but the honest truth was that so long as they remained committed to the terms of EU membership that was inevitable. The only alternative would be a united Ireland. But no one was really up for this discussion either in London or in Dublin so lies were told about some oven ready deal or the like. Now the lies are exposed and we want to change the deal but the problem that the lies were intended to conceal is still there.
When we've had this discussion before it seems to play out with @Charles saying the GFA needs to be amended and a lot of other people going, but on what basis / core / foundations do you start amending / renegotiating it.
The whole point of the GFA was that with the EU sat above both the UK and Ireland there was a firm foundation upon which an agreement could be built. But with that foundation gone, what mutually agreeable things exist that allow a new agreement to be built from.
The honest answer is that it depends how much freedom and flexibility the EU either gives or Ireland wants. So we have agreed a continuation of the CTA, for example. We can continue to have bodies that can seek to coordinate government activities and policies north and south of the border. We can continue to give each other the right to vote in local elections. But we are not in a Customs Union anymore. We are not in a SM anymore. We are not both bound by CJE rules anymore. These are just facts. If the parties are willing to turn a blind eye to these facts then fine. Who cares? But if they are not there cannot be an agreement on them.
Interestingly what he is suggesting there regarding NI only imports wouldn't help M&S unless they closed all their stores in Southern Ireland. I suspect ignoring goods only destined to NI is not the fix he thinks it is.
Worth noting that the Netherlands (who were closest to us in their third wave) has also seen their case numbers drop very rapidly. While it's too early to break out the champagne, that is also pretty encouraging.
This could turn out to be the best covid news of the day: The UK new cases appear to be starting descent, 39,906 today (not on this @ourWorldofData graph yet). https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk
Worth noting that the Netherlands (who were closest to us in their third wave) has also seen their case numbers drop very rapidly. While it's too early to break out the champagne, that is also pretty encouraging.
The achieved that by reintroducing restrictions, we've done the opposite here with basically everything open and masks now definitely feeling much more optional than before. On the tube today I'd guess about 50-60% masks vs usually around 80-90%. It doesn't help that the Central line is just stupidly hot all the time. Even the Northern Line was pretty awful, on Tuesday I thought some woman sitting opposite was going to collapse.
Been a bad day for the far right in the courts this week.
A student who founded two banned neo-Nazi groups has been jailed for seven years after calling for the rape and hanging of policewomen.
Andrew Dymock, 24, a politics undergraduate from Bath, was accused of being a Satanist and had once carved a swastika into a girlfriend’s buttock using a nail.
Detectives believe Dymock, a student at Aberystwyth University and the privately educated son of a dental professor and a microbiologist, saw himself as an online neo-Nazi “influencer”....
...Dymock was found guilty of a total of 15 charges for offences including encouraging terrorism, disseminating terrorist publications, funding terrorism, and stirring up racial hatred and hatred based on sexual orientation.
Detectives discovered he had established a series of virulently racist and antisemitic websites, starting in 2017, which he used to encourage lone-wolf terrorist attacks to provoke a race war.
Among his associates was Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, then aged 18 from Acton, west London, who used a gaming message board to publish an image saying that Prince Harry should be shot as a “race traitor”.
Rising and falling cases in the UK do seem locked into whether or not the kids are in school regardless of any sort of vaccination program or otherwise...
Might be a coincidence but it's interesting
I'd actually guess that this is the reduction in indoor activity due to the Euros ending, schools in England are still in until today/tomorrow.
And perhaps people modifying their behaviour because they can see cases rising and are probably hearing about friends and relatives getting quite ill. Certainly that seems to be a factor in my circle.
Yes, and in mine. Friends and relatives are being cautious again because we all know several people who've got the disease, including some who are double jabbed. By cautious I don't mean not going out - I really just mean avoiding crowded places.
Football related cases now washing out of the system? Plus very very warm weather keeping a lot of people outdoors?
Reported cases for England, with day-of-week differences highlighted:
Cases by specimen date look to be following similar trajectories, even with incomplete data so far. Hospital admissions increasing quite rapidly, but this reflects a week ago when cases were still rising rapidly. Should ramp up to the mid-900s or so in a few days and then (IF this plateau is sustained) level off there. Should see the number in hospital in England climb to c. 5000 by the weekend and HOPEFULLY level off there.
All dependent on IF this levelling off is sustained, but it's a positive step to be talking about the realistic possibility.
Really like this chart -> think it shows things very clearly. Might be wrong but this looks like the first day where reported cases were lower than reported cases 7 days earlier?
Thanks. Looking at the graph, it is the first such day on the graph. If I were to extend it a week further back, the 17th and 18th of May both were down on the week earlier; that's how far back we have to go to get a day where the reported case numbers in England were not up on the same day a week earlier.
Kakistocracy Watch. Parliament increasingly resembling that of a 3rd world country today with an MP being barred from the chamber for accurately calling out the PM as a liar.
The Police and their Federation really are incompetent and is further evidence the police in this country need major reforms.
I mean are they so stupid that until quite recently they had confidence in Priti Patel?
The Police Federation of England and Wales has said it no longer has confidence in Home Secretary Priti Patel they called a pay freeze for officers "the final straw".
I'm surprised there hasn't been more of an outcry from police officers and teachers over the pay freeze, when health workers are getting 3%. Both coppers and teachers could argue that they've had a tough time from Covid as well. Maybe the outcry is about to start.
Kakistocracy Watch. Parliament increasingly resembling that of a 3rd world country today with an MP being barred from the chamber for accurately calling out the PM as a liar.
Worth noting that the Netherlands (who were closest to us in their third wave) has also seen their case numbers drop very rapidly. While it's too early to break out the champagne, that is also pretty encouraging.
The achieved that by reintroducing restrictions, we've done the opposite here with basically everything open and masks now definitely feeling much more optional than before. On the tube today I'd guess about 50-60% masks vs usually around 80-90%. It doesn't help that the Central line is just stupidly hot all the time. Even the Northern Line was pretty awful, on Tuesday I thought some woman sitting opposite was going to collapse.
Many Central Line passengers will be looking forward to the opening of Crossrail since it has air conditioning and serves many of the same stations. I don't know what the latest estimate is for when it'll open.
We can't let the Northern Irish tail wag the British dog. If the democratic decision of the British people five yeras ago means the GFA doesn't work, we need to look again at the GFA, not the other way around.
Better still, get shot of the embarassing and ruinously expensive anomaly that is Northern Ireland entirely.
But I imagine we'll find a way to fudge it eventually. Northern Ireland itself is a fudge, after all. And so is the GFA itself.
I don't think Biden will make a particularly big deal about it while he wants to reunite the west to confront China.
Is this the most uninformed post ever in the history of PB?
Not even today given @HYUFD treatise on the role of Parish Councils in the granting of planning consents this morning…
Rising and falling cases in the UK do seem locked into whether or not the kids are in school regardless of any sort of vaccination program or otherwise...
Might be a coincidence but it's interesting
I'd actually guess that this is the reduction in indoor activity due to the Euros ending, schools in England are still in until today/tomorrow.
And perhaps people modifying their behaviour because they can see cases rising and are probably hearing about friends and relatives getting quite ill. Certainly that seems to be a factor in my circle.
Yes, and in mine. Friends and relatives are being cautious again because we all know several people who've got the disease, including some who are double jabbed. By cautious I don't mean not going out - I really just mean avoiding crowded places.
And going forward too. My running club was going to start meeting indoors again (we have a room in a school we use on Sundays) with a trial event this weekend, it has been put off due to high case numbers. A shame, because it would be nice to get everyone together and different length/speed runs going off from the same point. At the moment there are at least three different things happening on Sunday mornings.
Worth noting that the Netherlands (who were closest to us in their third wave) has also seen their case numbers drop very rapidly. While it's too early to break out the champagne, that is also pretty encouraging.
The achieved that by reintroducing restrictions, we've done the opposite here with basically everything open and masks now definitely feeling much more optional than before. On the tube today I'd guess about 50-60% masks vs usually around 80-90%. It doesn't help that the Central line is just stupidly hot all the time. Even the Northern Line was pretty awful, on Tuesday I thought some woman sitting opposite was going to collapse.
India led the way with Delta and it had an arrowhead wave, Scotland has had the same, Netherlands has had the same and I think we will.
It seems to be what Delta does, quickly up, quickly down.
As the UK government aren't (for some unknown reason) listening to either Philip or HYUFD, we will have to await developments.
What will make for entertaining reading is the reaction of allies and future trading relationship partners like America. They made very clear how they will react to us crapping over the GFA and not honouring treaties.
The UK government is edging to my position. Lord Frost all but confirmed this week that the conditions are right to invoke Article 16 if we choose to do so.
Just as the UK government edged to my position pre-Brexit away from May's.
If they'd just let me be in control of this whole thing, it would go so much smoother. Or not. 😉
Lol - yes lets have the world expert in charge!
The problem with "just invoke Article 16" is all the downstream consequences of doing so. Your position is blissfully naive - then again so was Frost's so yes maybe they should.
I know that you are the fountain of all knowledge and that everything is simple, but in the real world it isn't simple. We can't just either invoke A16 and problem solved, or not stay aligned and just do what we want no matter how many times you say it.
The classic fudge solution is coming. We are aligned now, so all barriers could be dropped now. We say that we reserve the right to diverge, and propose a 3rd party arbiter if either side raises a standards challenge in future. We all get along. So when our new trade deal gets signed with America and we protect food standards as we say we will, there are no problems.
To get there we need to drop our absolutes. I dropped mine, can you drop yours, or is every mistake or difference of opinion to be met with "liar"?
Your proposed solution misses the point of what this is all about, and the US trade deal is a complete red herring. It's about whether we accept the principle of EU regulatory hegemony beyond its borders. If we're going to do that, then Brexit would be completely pointless.
No I get it entirely - principle. In practice our standards are their standards because we wrote their standards. We have said we will only increase our standards, as have the EU. So we're both at the same point heading in the same direction.
The sensible compromise is to accept that. At some future point we may diverge in how quickly we increase our standards but that will be timing and not direction. So fudge it. The problem is we don't even want to recognise the status quo - we demand 3rd country status and checks for the GB zone despite being wholly aligned to the EEA.
Standards aren't simply a game of higher or lower. They are inherently political.
EU just approved feeding of matter from dead pigs to chickens, because they are scared of "lower cost" competition from overseas.
Is that an increase or a decrease in standards? (A real question - not rhetorical. EuCo says science supports it)
Kakistocracy Watch. Parliament increasingly resembling that of a 3rd world country today with an MP being barred from the chamber for accurately calling out the PM as a liar.
To pretend that the existence of rules on parliamentary language signify anything at all is just plain ridiculous. Lots of non third world countries have such conventions for a start. MPs don't have any problem excoriating the PM without breaching such conventions, so anyone doing it is clearly engaged in a stunt.
Worth noting that the Netherlands (who were closest to us in their third wave) has also seen their case numbers drop very rapidly. While it's too early to break out the champagne, that is also pretty encouraging.
The achieved that by reintroducing restrictions, we've done the opposite here with basically everything open and masks now definitely feeling much more optional than before. On the tube today I'd guess about 50-60% masks vs usually around 80-90%. It doesn't help that the Central line is just stupidly hot all the time. Even the Northern Line was pretty awful, on Tuesday I thought some woman sitting opposite was going to collapse.
The Netherlands going out of the Euros and the end of schools last week probably played a factor too: certainly, daily cases are down very sharply, which is encouraging.
Been a bad day for the far right in the courts this week.
A student who founded two banned neo-Nazi groups has been jailed for seven years after calling for the rape and hanging of policewomen.
Andrew Dymock, 24, a politics undergraduate from Bath, was accused of being a Satanist and had once carved a swastika into a girlfriend’s buttock using a nail.
Detectives believe Dymock, a student at Aberystwyth University and the privately educated son of a dental professor and a microbiologist, saw himself as an online neo-Nazi “influencer”....
...Dymock was found guilty of a total of 15 charges for offences including encouraging terrorism, disseminating terrorist publications, funding terrorism, and stirring up racial hatred and hatred based on sexual orientation.
Detectives discovered he had established a series of virulently racist and antisemitic websites, starting in 2017, which he used to encourage lone-wolf terrorist attacks to provoke a race war.
Among his associates was Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, then aged 18 from Acton, west London, who used a gaming message board to publish an image saying that Prince Harry should be shot as a “race traitor”.
Freedom of speech, innit? Nobody was hurt, were they? And if I want to use a nail to carve a swastika into my girlfriend's buttock, that's my business, not the state's.
Not technically, the GFA only prevents security checkpoints.
It does not prevent customs posts at the Irish border if Boris decided to move the hard border from the Irish Sea to Ireland, albeit that also means the end of the EU trade deal and WTO terms for the UK
Are you sure you get the picture?
You might need to divert your tanks from Scotland to the Emerald Isle.
At this rate we’re going to have more places to invade than we have tanks.
No. HYUFD is going to have more places to invade than he has tanks.
Been a bad day for the far right in the courts this week.
A student who founded two banned neo-Nazi groups has been jailed for seven years after calling for the rape and hanging of policewomen.
Andrew Dymock, 24, a politics undergraduate from Bath, was accused of being a Satanist and had once carved a swastika into a girlfriend’s buttock using a nail.
Detectives believe Dymock, a student at Aberystwyth University and the privately educated son of a dental professor and a microbiologist, saw himself as an online neo-Nazi “influencer”....
...Dymock was found guilty of a total of 15 charges for offences including encouraging terrorism, disseminating terrorist publications, funding terrorism, and stirring up racial hatred and hatred based on sexual orientation.
Detectives discovered he had established a series of virulently racist and antisemitic websites, starting in 2017, which he used to encourage lone-wolf terrorist attacks to provoke a race war.
Among his associates was Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, then aged 18 from Acton, west London, who used a gaming message board to publish an image saying that Prince Harry should be shot as a “race traitor”.
Freedom of speech, innit? Nobody was hurt, were they? And if I want to use a nail to carve a swastika into my girlfriend's buttock, that's my business, not the state's.
Worth noting that the Netherlands (who were closest to us in their third wave) has also seen their case numbers drop very rapidly. While it's too early to break out the champagne, that is also pretty encouraging.
The achieved that by reintroducing restrictions, we've done the opposite here with basically everything open and masks now definitely feeling much more optional than before. On the tube today I'd guess about 50-60% masks vs usually around 80-90%. It doesn't help that the Central line is just stupidly hot all the time. Even the Northern Line was pretty awful, on Tuesday I thought some woman sitting opposite was going to collapse.
India led the way with Delta and it had an arrowhead wave, Scotland has had the same, Netherlands has had the same and I think we will.
It seems to be what Delta does, quickly up, quickly down.
That's is quite extraordinarily cold. Not even a 'we had a constructive discussion' or 'we agreed to continue talking'.
If Boris thinks Lord Frost's bizarre antics are going to work, he's an even prizer prize fool than we all thought.
I think that the only way forward for Frost is to admit that the NI protocol that he negotiated is unworkable and to resign the portfolio, asking someone fresh to take over.
Worth noting that the Netherlands (who were closest to us in their third wave) has also seen their case numbers drop very rapidly. While it's too early to break out the champagne, that is also pretty encouraging.
The achieved that by reintroducing restrictions, we've done the opposite here with basically everything open and masks now definitely feeling much more optional than before. On the tube today I'd guess about 50-60% masks vs usually around 80-90%. It doesn't help that the Central line is just stupidly hot all the time. Even the Northern Line was pretty awful, on Tuesday I thought some woman sitting opposite was going to collapse.
The Netherlands going out of the Euros and the end of schools last week probably played a factor too: certainly, daily cases are down very sharply, which is encouraging.
Yes, that probably was a big factor.
Next things to look out for - Saturday's reported numbers. They will backfill cases for Thursday which is when we should start seeing the first symptomatic cases coming through from Sunday night's reopening of clubs and bars. Friday's always tend to be pretty low in terms of specimen date and usually a lot of those swabs get sent in on Monday for processing along with some weekend ones.
If next Wednesday's reported figures are flat or down I'd be much more confident for the summer. After that the date to look for case numbers is the following Friday which will relate back to the coming weekend which, from scanning the london-socials channel on slack, is going to fucking massive for under 30s and pretty mega for under 40s too. I can imagine Camden and other night spots will be carnage as teenagers and people in their early twenties make up for a year of lost partying.
Been a bad day for the far right in the courts this week.
A student who founded two banned neo-Nazi groups has been jailed for seven years after calling for the rape and hanging of policewomen.
Andrew Dymock, 24, a politics undergraduate from Bath, was accused of being a Satanist and had once carved a swastika into a girlfriend’s buttock using a nail.
Detectives believe Dymock, a student at Aberystwyth University and the privately educated son of a dental professor and a microbiologist, saw himself as an online neo-Nazi “influencer”....
...Dymock was found guilty of a total of 15 charges for offences including encouraging terrorism, disseminating terrorist publications, funding terrorism, and stirring up racial hatred and hatred based on sexual orientation.
Detectives discovered he had established a series of virulently racist and antisemitic websites, starting in 2017, which he used to encourage lone-wolf terrorist attacks to provoke a race war.
Among his associates was Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, then aged 18 from Acton, west London, who used a gaming message board to publish an image saying that Prince Harry should be shot as a “race traitor”.
Freedom of speech, innit? Nobody was hurt, were they? And if I want to use a nail to carve a swastika into my girlfriend's buttock, that's my business, not the state's.
Kakistocracy Watch. Parliament increasingly resembling that of a 3rd world country today with an MP being barred from the chamber for accurately calling out the PM as a liar.
It's unparliamentary language, isn't it?
We’re now going to do that whole ritualistic thing where people say “it’s a disgrace! Dawn Butler was telling the truth! Solidarity!” when the reality is she knows the rule, she knows the score, and she was just grandstanding.
Kakistocracy Watch. Parliament increasingly resembling that of a 3rd world country today with an MP being barred from the chamber for accurately calling out the PM as a liar.
It's unparliamentary language, isn't it?
Sure, but isn't the unparliamentary behaviour of lying to Parliament something the Speaker should act on too?
On topic I agree entirely with the thread header. Difficult but not impossible. An important prior agreement that was based on a mutual assumption that both countries would continue to operate within the EU framework. Not easy to square the circle of extremely close relations between the parts of Ireland and rather more distant ones between the UK and the EU.
It is a mystery to me how anyone thought that this would be easy and I say that as someone who was in favour of Brexit. The honest answer is that our political leaders just didn't care enough about NI to want to address the problem properly.
What kills me about Frost is how he claims no-one knew this would happen. Kwarteng tried the same line on Beth Rigby and she pointed out the three former PMs who all repeatedly said this would happen.
Its like Team Boris know they are the dumbest people in the room, but think that if they can normalise dumb that nobody will notice.
They are not dumb, they are dishonest. The reality was, as the thread header indicates, that the GFA needed to be seriously and earnestly renegotiated to reflect the new realities. In some ways this would have reduced the effect of the GFA in ways that Ireland would not have liked but the honest truth was that so long as they remained committed to the terms of EU membership that was inevitable. The only alternative would be a united Ireland. But no one was really up for this discussion either in London or in Dublin so lies were told about some oven ready deal or the like. Now the lies are exposed and we want to change the deal but the problem that the lies were intended to conceal is still there.
When we've had this discussion before it seems to play out with @Charles saying the GFA needs to be amended and a lot of other people going, but on what basis / core / foundations do you start amending / renegotiating it.
The whole point of the GFA was that with the EU sat above both the UK and Ireland there was a firm foundation upon which an agreement could be built. But with that foundation gone, what mutually agreeable things exist that allow a new agreement to be built from.
The honest answer is that it depends how much freedom and flexibility the EU either gives or Ireland wants. So we have agreed a continuation of the CTA, for example. We can continue to have bodies that can seek to coordinate government activities and policies north and south of the border. We can continue to give each other the right to vote in local elections. But we are not in a Customs Union anymore. We are not in a SM anymore. We are not both bound by CJE rules anymore. These are just facts. If the parties are willing to turn a blind eye to these facts then fine. Who cares? But if they are not there cannot be an agreement on them.
Been a bad day for the far right in the courts this week.
A student who founded two banned neo-Nazi groups has been jailed for seven years after calling for the rape and hanging of policewomen.
Andrew Dymock, 24, a politics undergraduate from Bath, was accused of being a Satanist and had once carved a swastika into a girlfriend’s buttock using a nail.
Detectives believe Dymock, a student at Aberystwyth University and the privately educated son of a dental professor and a microbiologist, saw himself as an online neo-Nazi “influencer”....
...Dymock was found guilty of a total of 15 charges for offences including encouraging terrorism, disseminating terrorist publications, funding terrorism, and stirring up racial hatred and hatred based on sexual orientation.
Detectives discovered he had established a series of virulently racist and antisemitic websites, starting in 2017, which he used to encourage lone-wolf terrorist attacks to provoke a race war.
Among his associates was Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, then aged 18 from Acton, west London, who used a gaming message board to publish an image saying that Prince Harry should be shot as a “race traitor”.
Freedom of speech, innit? Nobody was hurt, were they? And if I want to use a nail to carve a swastika into my girlfriend's buttock, that's my business, not the state's.
Is anyone arguing that was freedom of speech?
No idea, I was merely being whimsical. I guess Mr Dymock would be beyond the pale even for Toby Young's FSU.
On topic I agree entirely with the thread header. Difficult but not impossible. An important prior agreement that was based on a mutual assumption that both countries would continue to operate within the EU framework. Not easy to square the circle of extremely close relations between the parts of Ireland and rather more distant ones between the UK and the EU.
It is a mystery to me how anyone thought that this would be easy and I say that as someone who was in favour of Brexit. The honest answer is that our political leaders just didn't care enough about NI to want to address the problem properly.
What kills me about Frost is how he claims no-one knew this would happen. Kwarteng tried the same line on Beth Rigby and she pointed out the three former PMs who all repeatedly said this would happen.
Its like Team Boris know they are the dumbest people in the room, but think that if they can normalise dumb that nobody will notice.
They are not dumb, they are dishonest. The reality was, as the thread header indicates, that the GFA needed to be seriously and earnestly renegotiated to reflect the new realities. In some ways this would have reduced the effect of the GFA in ways that Ireland would not have liked but the honest truth was that so long as they remained committed to the terms of EU membership that was inevitable. The only alternative would be a united Ireland. But no one was really up for this discussion either in London or in Dublin so lies were told about some oven ready deal or the like. Now the lies are exposed and we want to change the deal but the problem that the lies were intended to conceal is still there.
When we've had this discussion before it seems to play out with @Charles saying the GFA needs to be amended and a lot of other people going, but on what basis / core / foundations do you start amending / renegotiating it.
The whole point of the GFA was that with the EU sat above both the UK and Ireland there was a firm foundation upon which an agreement could be built. But with that foundation gone, what mutually agreeable things exist that allow a new agreement to be built from.
The honest answer is that it depends how much freedom and flexibility the EU either gives or Ireland wants. So we have agreed a continuation of the CTA, for example. We can continue to have bodies that can seek to coordinate government activities and policies north and south of the border. We can continue to give each other the right to vote in local elections. But we are not in a Customs Union anymore. We are not in a SM anymore. We are not both bound by CJE rules anymore. These are just facts. If the parties are willing to turn a blind eye to these facts then fine. Who cares? But if they are not there cannot be an agreement on them.
An excellent commentary as always from Mike Smithson. These thoughts are from one who supported Brexit but wanted 'Norway for Now' in the belief that a long term process was essential.
1) If Brexit and GFA are actually incompatible then Remain incomprehensibly failed to say so, and failed to say what the limits on Brexit would be. That is because they are not incompatible.
2) The UK and the RoI are sovereign states (the sort with seats at the UN and armies).
3) The EU is an extensive trade association, and not a state.
4) If it is realistic to say that the UK can bend its sovereignty red lines to the extent of separating the GB and the NI internal market as the protocol requires, it is realistic to say that the EU can bend its trade association rules to contain an anomaly which protects the interests of one of their members, the RoI, and those of a friendly neighbour with equivalently high standards, the UK.
5) Which obvious truth is why Remain did not campaign on the basis that a (non EFTA) Brexit was impossible.
Been a bad day for the far right in the courts this week.
A student who founded two banned neo-Nazi groups has been jailed for seven years after calling for the rape and hanging of policewomen.
Andrew Dymock, 24, a politics undergraduate from Bath, was accused of being a Satanist and had once carved a swastika into a girlfriend’s buttock using a nail.
Detectives believe Dymock, a student at Aberystwyth University and the privately educated son of a dental professor and a microbiologist, saw himself as an online neo-Nazi “influencer”....
...Dymock was found guilty of a total of 15 charges for offences including encouraging terrorism, disseminating terrorist publications, funding terrorism, and stirring up racial hatred and hatred based on sexual orientation.
Detectives discovered he had established a series of virulently racist and antisemitic websites, starting in 2017, which he used to encourage lone-wolf terrorist attacks to provoke a race war.
Among his associates was Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, then aged 18 from Acton, west London, who used a gaming message board to publish an image saying that Prince Harry should be shot as a “race traitor”.
Been a bad day for the far right in the courts this week.
A student who founded two banned neo-Nazi groups has been jailed for seven years after calling for the rape and hanging of policewomen.
Andrew Dymock, 24, a politics undergraduate from Bath, was accused of being a Satanist and had once carved a swastika into a girlfriend’s buttock using a nail.
Detectives believe Dymock, a student at Aberystwyth University and the privately educated son of a dental professor and a microbiologist, saw himself as an online neo-Nazi “influencer”....
...Dymock was found guilty of a total of 15 charges for offences including encouraging terrorism, disseminating terrorist publications, funding terrorism, and stirring up racial hatred and hatred based on sexual orientation.
Detectives discovered he had established a series of virulently racist and antisemitic websites, starting in 2017, which he used to encourage lone-wolf terrorist attacks to provoke a race war.
Among his associates was Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, then aged 18 from Acton, west London, who used a gaming message board to publish an image saying that Prince Harry should be shot as a “race traitor”.
Freedom of speech, innit? Nobody was hurt, were they? And if I want to use a nail to carve a swastika into my girlfriend's buttock, that's my business, not the state's.
Kakistocracy Watch. Parliament increasingly resembling that of a 3rd world country today with an MP being barred from the chamber for accurately calling out the PM as a liar.
It's unparliamentary language, isn't it?
Sure, but isn't the unparliamentary behaviour of lying to Parliament something the Speaker should act on too?
I'm sure there are ways to challenge what has been said. But they clearly weren't interested in that.
Been a bad day for the far right in the courts this week.
A student who founded two banned neo-Nazi groups has been jailed for seven years after calling for the rape and hanging of policewomen.
Andrew Dymock, 24, a politics undergraduate from Bath, was accused of being a Satanist and had once carved a swastika into a girlfriend’s buttock using a nail.
Detectives believe Dymock, a student at Aberystwyth University and the privately educated son of a dental professor and a microbiologist, saw himself as an online neo-Nazi “influencer”....
...Dymock was found guilty of a total of 15 charges for offences including encouraging terrorism, disseminating terrorist publications, funding terrorism, and stirring up racial hatred and hatred based on sexual orientation.
Detectives discovered he had established a series of virulently racist and antisemitic websites, starting in 2017, which he used to encourage lone-wolf terrorist attacks to provoke a race war.
Among his associates was Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, then aged 18 from Acton, west London, who used a gaming message board to publish an image saying that Prince Harry should be shot as a “race traitor”.
Kakistocracy Watch. Parliament increasingly resembling that of a 3rd world country today with an MP being barred from the chamber for accurately calling out the PM as a liar.
Been a bad day for the far right in the courts this week.
A student who founded two banned neo-Nazi groups has been jailed for seven years after calling for the rape and hanging of policewomen.
Andrew Dymock, 24, a politics undergraduate from Bath, was accused of being a Satanist and had once carved a swastika into a girlfriend’s buttock using a nail.
Detectives believe Dymock, a student at Aberystwyth University and the privately educated son of a dental professor and a microbiologist, saw himself as an online neo-Nazi “influencer”....
...Dymock was found guilty of a total of 15 charges for offences including encouraging terrorism, disseminating terrorist publications, funding terrorism, and stirring up racial hatred and hatred based on sexual orientation.
Detectives discovered he had established a series of virulently racist and antisemitic websites, starting in 2017, which he used to encourage lone-wolf terrorist attacks to provoke a race war.
Among his associates was Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, then aged 18 from Acton, west London, who used a gaming message board to publish an image saying that Prince Harry should be shot as a “race traitor”.
Kakistocracy Watch. Parliament increasingly resembling that of a 3rd world country today with an MP being barred from the chamber for accurately calling out the PM as a liar.
It's unparliamentary language, isn't it?
Is that bollox for "The Truth"
No, just that it was a deliberate stunt to get kicked out, rather than a serious attempt to get at the truth.
Kakistocracy Watch. Parliament increasingly resembling that of a 3rd world country today with an MP being barred from the chamber for accurately calling out the PM as a liar.
To pretend that the existence of rules on parliamentary language signify anything at all is just plain ridiculous. Lots of non third world countries have such conventions for a start. MPs don't have any problem excoriating the PM without breaching such conventions, so anyone doing it is clearly engaged in a stunt.
But Opposiiton MPs can seem to have a hard time getting it across to people (not all of them au fait with Parliamentary conventions) that the Prime Minister is a liar.
Kakistocracy Watch. Parliament increasingly resembling that of a 3rd world country today with an MP being barred from the chamber for accurately calling out the PM as a liar.
It's unparliamentary language, isn't it?
We've got an unparliamentary PM. Policing language won't help.
Not technically, the GFA only prevents security checkpoints.
It does not prevent customs posts at the Irish border if Boris decided to move the hard border from the Irish Sea to Ireland, albeit that also means the end of the EU trade deal and WTO terms for the UK
Are you sure you get the picture?
You might need to divert your tanks from Scotland to the Emerald Isle.
At this rate we’re going to have more places to invade than we have tanks.
No. HYUFD is going to have more places to invade than he has tanks.
No need to invade anywhere, Sturgeon is doing sod all about indyref2 and failed to win an SNP majority in May, hence the fury amongst hardline nationalists and Alba with her and in any case Union matters are reserved to the UK Government under the Scotland Act 1998.
Most Northern Irish voters still want to stay in the UK even after the Boris deal
Kakistocracy Watch. Parliament increasingly resembling that of a 3rd world country today with an MP being barred from the chamber for accurately calling out the PM as a liar.
It's unparliamentary language, isn't it?
Is that bollox for "The Truth"
No, just that it was a deliberate stunt to get kicked out, rather than a serious attempt to get at the truth.
So parliamentary privilege allows you to break court injunctions, name soldiers accused of murder on Bloody Sunday but you get thrown out for accusing the Prime Minister of lying.
Kakistocracy Watch. Parliament increasingly resembling that of a 3rd world country today with an MP being barred from the chamber for accurately calling out the PM as a liar.
To pretend that the existence of rules on parliamentary language signify anything at all is just plain ridiculous. Lots of non third world countries have such conventions for a start. MPs don't have any problem excoriating the PM without breaching such conventions, so anyone doing it is clearly engaged in a stunt.
But Opposiiton MPs can seem to have a hard time getting it across to people (not all of them au fait with Parliamentary conventions) that the Prime Minister is a liar.
No they don't. He is routinely attacked in and out of the Commons for all manner of failings, including misleading people, deceiving them or being just plain untrustworthy. Calling him a liar in the Commons won't wake people up to him being a liar, people either don't believe he is or they think he is but for other reasons still support him.
I despise childish stunts, designed to make people feel good about themselves or to get applause rather than achieve anything, and this was definitely childish, as most such stunts are. Other than that, I don't see the political or even comic value of such an act.
An excellent commentary as always from Mike Smithson. These thoughts are from one who supported Brexit but wanted 'Norway for Now' in the belief that a long term process was essential.
1) If Brexit and GFA are actually incompatible then Remain incomprehensibly failed to say so, and failed to say what the limits on Brexit would be. That is because they are not incompatible.
2) The UK and the RoI are sovereign states (the sort with seats at the UN and armies).
3) The EU is an extensive trade association, and not a state.
4) If it is realistic to say that the UK can bend its sovereignty red lines to the extent of separating the GB and the NI internal market as the protocol requires, it is realistic to say that the EU can bend its trade association rules to contain an anomaly which protects the interests of one of their members, the RoI, and those of a friendly neighbour with equivalently high standards, the UK.
5) Which obvious truth is why Remain did not campaign on the basis that a (non EFTA) Brexit was impossible.
Remain certainly pointed out that Brexit meant a border on the land unless other solutions were found. These didn't have to be EFTA, for example May's Deal, or even simply dynamic alignment on standards. The fact that the English media ignored the Irish dimension doesn't mean that it was not raised.
Been a bad day for the far right in the courts this week.
A student who founded two banned neo-Nazi groups has been jailed for seven years after calling for the rape and hanging of policewomen.
Andrew Dymock, 24, a politics undergraduate from Bath, was accused of being a Satanist and had once carved a swastika into a girlfriend’s buttock using a nail.
Detectives believe Dymock, a student at Aberystwyth University and the privately educated son of a dental professor and a microbiologist, saw himself as an online neo-Nazi “influencer”....
...Dymock was found guilty of a total of 15 charges for offences including encouraging terrorism, disseminating terrorist publications, funding terrorism, and stirring up racial hatred and hatred based on sexual orientation.
Detectives discovered he had established a series of virulently racist and antisemitic websites, starting in 2017, which he used to encourage lone-wolf terrorist attacks to provoke a race war.
Among his associates was Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, then aged 18 from Acton, west London, who used a gaming message board to publish an image saying that Prince Harry should be shot as a “race traitor”.
Freedom of speech, innit? Nobody was hurt, were they? And if I want to use a nail to carve a swastika into my girlfriend's buttock, that's my business, not the state's.
Actually, I don't think he was charged or convicted in relation to carving a swastika on his then girlfriend. Not a freedom of speech point but a consent one established by R v Wilson (1996) which involved similar facts.
The incident was, I believe, relevant to disproving his account that he'd been set up and his interest in the far right was essentially academic. It was a salacious detail that caught the imagination of sub-editors, but wasn't really at the centre of the case against him which was essentially inciting racial hatred and domestic terrorism offences.
Kakistocracy Watch. Parliament increasingly resembling that of a 3rd world country today with an MP being barred from the chamber for accurately calling out the PM as a liar.
It's unparliamentary language, isn't it?
Is that bollox for "The Truth"
No, just that it was a deliberate stunt to get kicked out, rather than a serious attempt to get at the truth.
So parliamentary privilege allows you to break court injunctions, name soldiers accused of murder on Bloody Sunday but you get thrown out for accusing the Prime Minister of lying.
If people want to argue the rules are stupid that's fine, but they are the rules and everyone involved knows that, playing the martyr for the oh so daring act of calling the PM a liar is just pathetic.
A point people seem to be missing on rising infections , now almost as high as the January peak, is that as a proportion of those tested, they are nowhere near as high as back then. See graphic, via Shore Capital. Suggests cases in fact much lower
Kakistocracy Watch. Parliament increasingly resembling that of a 3rd world country today with an MP being barred from the chamber for accurately calling out the PM as a liar.
It's unparliamentary language, isn't it?
We've got an unparliamentary PM. Policing language won't help.
His behaving poorly and having poor standards doesn't mean we have to sink to a lower level ourselves. Even if using such language were acceptable, what value does it even add? It's not a fresh accusation.
Kakistocracy Watch. Parliament increasingly resembling that of a 3rd world country today with an MP being barred from the chamber for accurately calling out the PM as a liar.
It's unparliamentary language, isn't it?
We’re now going to do that whole ritualistic thing where people say “it’s a disgrace! Dawn Butler was telling the truth! Solidarity!” when the reality is she knows the rule, she knows the score, and she was just grandstanding.
Comments
Damn, its been corrected.
@BristOliver
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22m
Just for centrist balance, encouraging case numbers, but I think I'd want to see a few days of trend, and it's all a phoney war right now until the effects of Monday's opening start to show up in next week's data.
a) for many young guns, covid will be indistinguishable from a handover and/or comedown
b) there's a huge disincentive for them too get tested – the risk of ten days at Her Majesty's Pleasure, incarcerated in their own flat in the middle of summer...
Might be wrong but this looks like the first day where reported cases were lower than reported cases 7 days earlier?
Tempted to ask a refund for the days they weren't at school.
Let's see how "Freedom Day" and Eid affect the figures before calling a peak. We haven't seen those impacts yet.
But I've been calling the top in a week's time quite a lot. Have to be right eventually.
https://twitter.com/CER_Grant/status/1418227832862519299?s=20
https://twitter.com/ZoraSuleman/status/1418234265179930627
I mean are they so stupid that until quite recently they had confidence in Priti Patel?
The Police Federation of England and Wales has said it no longer has confidence in Home Secretary Priti Patel they called a pay freeze for officers "the final straw".
https://twitter.com/ZoraSuleman/status/1418234265179930627
It is likely we will be at almost 100k cases/day when Sajid Javid will remove the mandate on masks.
https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/1411587338145308679?s=20
One would expect there to be a further drop off for the next four weeks, when pretty much all schools are off.
Hopefully, come the beginning of September, we'll be that much more vaccinated and therefore schools returning will have less of an impact. (It would help if we vaccinated children.)
Whole year group sent home after one child turned up at school AFTER TESTING POSITIVE!
For goodness sake.
And got it within 0.125%.
Taraaaa !
(Claim your successes, or somebody else will.)
Since first appearing in India in late 2020, the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 has become the predominant strain in much of the world. Researchers might now know why Delta has been so successful: people infected with it produce far more virus than do those infected with the original version of SARS-CoV-2, making it very easy to spread.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01986-w
The UK new cases appear to be starting descent, 39,906 today (not on this @ourWorldofData graph yet). https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1418235741138681858?s=20
PM @BorisJohnson called to present the UK Command paper on the Irish/Northern Irish Protocol.
The EU will continue to be creative and flexible within the Protocol framework. But we will not renegotiate.
We must jointly ensure stability and predictability in Northern Ireland.
https://twitter.com/vonderleyen/status/1418163146947239940
That's is quite extraordinarily cold. Not even a 'we had a constructive discussion' or 'we agreed to continue talking'.
If Boris thinks Lord Frost's bizarre antics are going to work, he's an even prizer prize fool than we all thought.
A student who founded two banned neo-Nazi groups has been jailed for seven years after calling for the rape and hanging of policewomen.
Andrew Dymock, 24, a politics undergraduate from Bath, was accused of being a Satanist and had once carved a swastika into a girlfriend’s buttock using a nail.
Detectives believe Dymock, a student at Aberystwyth University and the privately educated son of a dental professor and a microbiologist, saw himself as an online neo-Nazi “influencer”....
...Dymock was found guilty of a total of 15 charges for offences including encouraging terrorism, disseminating terrorist publications, funding terrorism, and stirring up racial hatred and hatred based on sexual orientation.
Detectives discovered he had established a series of virulently racist and antisemitic websites, starting in 2017, which he used to encourage lone-wolf terrorist attacks to provoke a race war.
Among his associates was Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, then aged 18 from Acton, west London, who used a gaming message board to publish an image saying that Prince Harry should be shot as a “race traitor”.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/neo-nazi-student-called-rape-jailed-lm8lq7frt
Looking at the graph, it is the first such day on the graph. If I were to extend it a week further back, the 17th and 18th of May both were down on the week earlier; that's how far back we have to go to get a day where the reported case numbers in England were not up on the same day a week earlier.
It seems to be what Delta does, quickly up, quickly down.
Is that an increase or a decrease in standards? (A real question - not rhetorical. EuCo says science supports it)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/22/eu-to-lift-its-ban-on-feeding-animal-remains-to-domestic-livestock
@BAES_Maritime Govan, Glasgow Shipyard Ship where 3,000 people work.
Our trade deals with Norway New Zealand Canada Australia will increase export opportunities for these vessels and associated services.
Huge opportunities in the pipeline.
Trade = jobs
https://twitter.com/trussliz/status/1417865682885169156?s=20
Next things to look out for - Saturday's reported numbers. They will backfill cases for Thursday which is when we should start seeing the first symptomatic cases coming through from Sunday night's reopening of clubs and bars. Friday's always tend to be pretty low in terms of specimen date and usually a lot of those swabs get sent in on Monday for processing along with some weekend ones.
If next Wednesday's reported figures are flat or down I'd be much more confident for the summer. After that the date to look for case numbers is the following Friday which will relate back to the coming weekend which, from scanning the london-socials channel on slack, is going to fucking massive for under 30s and pretty mega for under 40s too. I can imagine Camden and other night spots will be carnage as teenagers and people in their early twenties make up for a year of lost partying.
We’re now going to do that whole ritualistic thing where people say “it’s a disgrace! Dawn Butler was telling the truth! Solidarity!” when the reality is she knows the rule, she knows the score, and she was just grandstanding.
https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1418227484613509121
The GFA and Brexit are incompatible.
Either Brexit breaks or Northern Ireland does and, with it, the union.
1) If Brexit and GFA are actually incompatible then Remain incomprehensibly failed to say so, and failed to say what the limits on Brexit would be. That is because they are not incompatible.
2) The UK and the RoI are sovereign states (the sort with seats at the UN and armies).
3) The EU is an extensive trade association, and not a state.
4) If it is realistic to say that the UK can bend its sovereignty red lines to the extent of separating the GB and the NI internal market as the protocol requires, it is realistic to say that the EU can bend its trade association rules to contain an anomaly which protects the interests of one of their members, the RoI, and those of a friendly neighbour with equivalently high standards, the UK.
5) Which obvious truth is why Remain did not campaign on the basis that a (non EFTA) Brexit was impossible.
Edit - yep https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tommy-robinson-cocaine-donations-prison-b1787467.html from March.
Simple question
:
“How many jobs will this create in Scotland?”
Liz Truss: “I don’t have that figure”
https://twitter.com/i/status/1418216570933833729
Danish military spots Iranian navy ships in Baltic Sea
https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1418245280600891397?s=20
Most Northern Irish voters still want to stay in the UK even after the Boris deal
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/new-border-poll-survey-reveals-53-of-people-in-ni-want-to-stay-in-the-uk-40531085.html
Any other military action outside of defending Gibraltar or the Falklands would be done with NATO, UN or US support
https://twitter.com/adamwagner1/status/1418246124532604930?s=21
I despise childish stunts, designed to make people feel good about themselves or to get applause rather than achieve anything, and this was definitely childish, as most such stunts are. Other than that, I don't see the political or even comic value of such an act.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-politics-49988057
The incident was, I believe, relevant to disproving his account that he'd been set up and his interest in the far right was essentially academic. It was a salacious detail that caught the imagination of sub-editors, but wasn't really at the centre of the case against him which was essentially inciting racial hatred and domestic terrorism offences.
https://twitter.com/JeremyWarnerUK/status/1418247006414376961?s=20
I think he means cases in January were much higher...