Did we not discuss this recently on a thread by @Cyclefree ? The position, AIUI, is that the draft legislation removed the criteria that the offence of assisting illegal immigration had to be "for profit". The context was that there was apparently a practice of prosecuting those who steered the boat if they got a discount in their fare for doing so. The purpose of that nonsense is presumably to make it easier to deport the steerers.
The question is what does this have to do with the RNLI? I think their concern is that if they pick people up in distress in the channel and bring them ashore they could now be caught by the legislation. The government is clear that this is rescue work, not "assisting illegal immigration". This is so obviously so that I am frankly a bit suspicious that the person or persons raising the alarm has another agenda.
On a separate point I agree with those criticising @Cocky_cockney for copying and pasting the latest Heath drivel in its entirety. Mike has had letters from lawyers about this before and has been clear that we should not do it. It really should be removed.
We did indeed.
The intention may not be to criminalise the RNLI or anyone else performing rescue work. But the draft legislation - as currently drafted - does have that consequence. If the government wanted it could easily and quickly amend the draft Bill. It hasn't.
The Bill has a specific exemption for charities which exist to assist refugees. So the government has clearly at some level realised what the Bill will do and has thought about exemptions. But it has not included the RNLI within those exemptions.
Where is the bill in the drafting process?
If it’s out for comment it makes sense you’d make all the changes in one go rather than pull it for 1 change and then have to start the process again
Given that the government has already thought about exemptions it is a little odd that they did not already include the RNLI in the existing exemption clause. Either they did not realise it was caught or they deliberately excluded it.
The trouble is that if they exempt the RNLI and the Coastguard they need to exempt every other vessel which might come across people in a dinghy as well, not least because the Law of the Sea would probably override this legislation if it were ever challenged.
It is also worth noting that the bill is not restricted to what one does at sea.
I never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence
And don't assume the two qualities are mutually exclusive.
To me the whole thing appears to come down to really really thoughtless drafting. Believe me I’ve done enough of that to know what it looks like.
Drafting is often horrible, and parliament seems to be really bad at improving things (and government resistent to permitting it), as there's no incentive for MPs to develop such a skill even if they could.
Whilst I don't disagree this is exactly the same sort of thinking that gave us the war on drugs: catch those preying on the vulnerable by supplying this filth and the problem will be solved. Well, we lost and there will be a similarly endless supply of people who are willing to get involved in people trafficking too. So by all means punish these evil people but don't assume that is ever going to resolve the problem.
People need to realise that the people-traffickers and drug cartels are primarily businesses.
The biggest threat to the people-traffickers is borders slamming shut in the western world. They can't lobby governments directly, but if I was running them, I'd do the next best thing, which is to set up a charity and a social media campaign to do the lobbying for me. All cloaked in humanitarianism. You put out lots of press releases and tweets, you always feature children in your pictures. Get a lot of retweets from the naive. You reach out to some celebs who have got a new album out and want to be in the headlines and think going woke will help. Get them to go to a camp in Calais and film them in tears.
You might even decide not to rely on coastguards picking up boats, but instead start your own NGOs to do so. Is it an accident that brand new NGOs with names like "Sea-Eye" and "Sea-Watch" were suddenly founded in 2015 and had boats patrolling the Med? And they weren't just randomly patrolling a vast sea, they were going to pick-up points, which means they were co-operating with the people smugglers.
When the Italian govt criticised them, they got pushback from naive people saying, "But these are charities". As though being a charity automatically means you are pure. But anyone can set up a charity, it's the least regulated sector.
And then there are the other parts of the operation - someone is supplying and procuring dinghies, they don't just appear out of thin air. If you stopped that part of the operation, you'd halt the sailings. And so on.
But my guess is that these businesses are being run as professionally as Facebook is, with control of all parts of the operation, including lobbying to try to prevent laws from being passed that might hinder them.
I expect the well meaning videos of the RNLI and so forth are making it across various Whatsapps and encouraging further attempts. When push and shove comes we are a nation of bleeding hearts compared to France in particular. As the lives of those crossing are saved and seen to be saved, more will attempt to make the crossing - this is irrefutable fact, human nature and kindness rolled into one.
We don't take many refugees and the ones we do take are a small fraction of immigration. I think this issue is primarily emotional. The notion of our country being "penetrated" and "taken for fools" etc. It gets people's backs up.
The consequences of two decades of failure to control immigration in general.
There would be more willingness to take refugees if economic migration was under control.
That applies to refugees not 'refugees' - I've heard multiple times over the years "if they're refugees why are they all young men, where are the women and children ?" - trust has long gone on this issue.
Tony Blair, who even the severest critics have never accused of lack of political instinct, once said at a private meeting (quoting from memory): "The public will support a reasonable programme to resettle a moderate flow of refugees here in an orderly fashion. What they will never tolerate is a perception of chaos - refugees hanging onto the undercarriage in Eurotunnel, being smuggled in lorries, and so on. If they feel the Government has a grip they will accept it being a reasonably generous grip. If they feel we've lost control they won't accept anything."
A pitch perfect response.
And lets add to that, it is absurdly perilous to human life to do anything but discourage illegal crossings.
Discourage yes, but you have to deal with the fact of them happening humanely.
I expect the well meaning videos of the RNLI and so forth are making it across various Whatsapps and encouraging further attempts. When push and shove comes we are a nation of bleeding hearts compared to France in particular. As the lives of those crossing are saved and seen to be saved, more will attempt to make the crossing - this is irrefutable fact, human nature and kindness rolled into one.
We don't take many refugees and the ones we do take are a small fraction of immigration. I think this issue is primarily emotional. The notion of our country being "penetrated" and "taken for fools" etc. It gets people's backs up.
The consequences of two decades of failure to control immigration in general.
There would be more willingness to take refugees if economic migration was under control.
That applies to refugees not 'refugees' - I've heard multiple times over the years "if they're refugees why are they all young men, where are the women and children ?" - trust has long gone on this issue.
Tony Blair, who even the severest critics have never accused of lack of political instinct, once said at a private meeting (quoting from memory): "The public will support a reasonable programme to resettle a moderate flow of refugees here in an orderly fashion. What they will never tolerate is a perception of chaos - refugees hanging onto the undercarriage in Eurotunnel, being smuggled in lorries, and so on. If they feel the Government has a grip they will accept it being a reasonably generous grip. If they feel we've lost control they won't accept anything."
That is a good quote, particularly about a generous grip.
It's unlikely, I guess, that there are any Rwandans reading PB. But if there were, they might be pretty ypissed off at the casual willingness of many on here to dump our problems on them.
Someone will no doubt come up with an anecdote about a Rwandan acquaintance who coincidentally entirely agrees with whatever happens to be their view is of the subject.
Strangely, I just finished a black cab ride. Driven by a Rwandan.....
" 'ad that Habyarimana in the back, once. Proper 'gent 'e was. Tipped proper. Not like the current...."
As the Father of a lifeboat crew member I completely endorse the thread header and it is intolerable the issue has even arisen
Patel needs to deal with this
In her head she has. Incredibly.
A member of my extended family is a lifeboat crew member in another country; his father describes the situation as 'his alarm goes and he's off out. Immediately!"
Yes, lifeboatmen do meet idiots who should never have gone to sea. That doesn't mean they should be left to drown.
I know a couple of people who do mountain rescue. They’re forever risking their own lives, to pick up people dressed in shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops with severe hypothermia, or who went for a walk and got completely lost as weather closed in. Idiots the lot of them, but still humans.
The only way the boat crossings stop, is if the demand goes away. It’s clear that the French government doesn’t care, and is turning a blind eye to people eager to leave France to live in a safe country. We need to take the Denmark route, of facilitating settlement in a safe third country, and let it be known that anyone arriving by boat from France will be resettled elsewhere.
Yes, got a (former, too old now) mountain rescuer in the EF, too. And a couple of surf rescuers down in Cornwall. Admirable people, those who do that.
Is Denmark getting a reduction in asylum seekers? Or do they get processed more quickly than here? In any event, apparently treated more humanely than appears to be the case in UK?
What Denmark are doing is opening a migrant processing centre, likely to be in Rwanda. Anyone arriving in Denmark and claiming asylum is sent there, and if their application is successful they’re allowed to settle in Rwanda, with the Danish government paying the Rwandan government for each settled migrant. No-one arriving in Denmark by boat and claiming asylum, will be allowed to resettle in Denmark.
Surely there is a simple step - take a breath, ignore the froth on either side, and think. Denmark has *proposed* such a thing. It doesn't exist yet hence "likely to be in Rwanda". The likelihood of a foreign government accepting someone else's migrants for cash seems so unlikely as to be absurd. "They're allowed to settle in Rwanda" - are they imprisoned there? Won't they just leave and head somewhere they want to settle?
As for the idea that the Danes pay Rwanda for settled migrants, for how long? Imagine the headlines here "Your Taxpayers fund foreigners living abroad" - whatever agreement we managed to make with Madagascar would be torn up at the next budget review. "We negotiated and signed this deal, but we had no idea that it meant we had to keep paying".
We know where "lets deport them somewhere else" came from. Its truly shameful that we have people advocating Nazi policies and yes that includes the idiots in the Danish government.
What should we do to those arriving by boat?
1. Allow them to settle in the U.K.? 2. Deport them back to the safe country they came from (France or Belgium)? 3. Process them offshore and allow the genuine refugees somewhere to live in a safe country?
If we go with 1, should I buy a dingy and push my wife off the beach at Calais? Because that would save me shedloads of time and money, compared to trying to arrange legal migration through the proper channels.
Lets go through these one at a time: 1. Allow them to settle in the UK. If their claim is accepted, yes. If not, deport them. Asylum Seekers become a major problem because despite "take back control of our border" the smirking traitor has cut Border Force and the Police and the Home Office. We can't process claims with any speed so they get housed in "murder row" accommodation (e.g. on Teesside and in Sunderland the refugee houses were the ones that the housing association couldn't let), receive not enough to live on vouchers for sustenance and legally can't work. So they go into the black labour market.
That is a problem of our own making. Accepting Asylum Seekers into the UK for processing is not a guarantee they can stay.
2. The "safe country" myth. This is simply not present in the UN Refugee Convention, a position backed up by UK case law. So as there is no compulsion on refugees to settle in France there is no legal way to force the French to accept the deportees back. If we had international agreements to distribute refugees then perhaps we could, but Brexit killed that and we withdrew from the Dublin convention doing precisely that
3. Process them offshore as the Nazis proposed for the Jews. A fantasy. Denmark has proposed it. The idea that Madagascar is willing to take our deportees for cash AND the deportees stay there and don't just try again is laughable. How long would the UK need to pay this foreign government to house our foreign undesirables? What happens when the UK stops paying the bill? Would the foreign government be required to imprison them there?
1. The fact hat they’ve come from France or Belgium is enough to deny their asylum application. Those are not unsafe countries, and the migrants are not fleeing state persecution there. 2. It’s impossible in practice to deport anyone who arrives with no papers, that’s the biggest problem. 3. 8:30 in the morning and Godwin already? That doesn’t deserve a response.
Except (1) is a bit of a nonsense. If refugees have to claim asylum in the 1st safe country they reach we'd get hardly any.
Refugees have to claim asylum in the first safe country they reach.
That’s international law, as defined by the 1951UN Refugee Convention, and the 1967 UN Refugee Protocol.
Whereas Amnesty International says this:
Neither the 1951 Refugee Convention nor EU law requires a refugee to claim asylum in one country rather than another.
There is no rule requiring refugees to claim in the first safe country in which they arrive.
Anyone fancy adjudicating? Fight? Best of three?
@Sandpit I've looked at this in detail - there is nothing that says you need to claim asylum in the first safe country you arrive at. Which is why Turkey, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria etc make themselves as unwelcoming as possible to ensure they continue the journey.
Hmm, I thought I’d looked at it too, but it does seem that UK a case law disagrees, and says that it’s possible to claim asylum providing you’ve not tried to claim asylum elsewhere.
The obligation is on the first safe country they reach to hear their claim, but there’s no obligation to claim asylum in that first safe country.
The EU sought to impose that obligation upon refugees by the Dublin III regulations but it was always questionable whether this agreement between states could derogate from the rights of refugees under the UN Convention. The scope of Dublin III and its practical impact is also something that is frequently exaggerated. This came from a briefing note provided to the House of Commons last year:
"The UK received 2,236 requests from EU member states to accept transfers of individuals to the UK, and 714 transfers took place. The majority of these (496) were from Greece. • The UK made 3,259 transfer requests to EU member states, and 263 transfers took place. 40% (104) went to Germany and 20% (53) went to France."
So, in that period, Dublin allowed us to transfer back 263 potential asylum seekers, a frankly trivial number. Dublin III did give rights to prioritise the unification of families and as can be seen rather more people came to the UK on that basis.
The real problem here is that the UN Convention for Refugees is not fit for purpose in a highly unstable and mobile world. It was written to reflect the problems Jews had fleeing the Nazis and a desire that that should not happen again. The modern reality is that there are hundreds of millions, probably billions of people living in absolute shit holes and many who may be particularly at risk because they throw gays off high buildings, for example. We have in theory signed up to give these people refuge but no government really wants to honour that obligation and I strongly suspect that most of the residents of these islands don't either.
Edit, the period in question was 2019.
It is very sad how hardened people have become to human suffering. As long as it isn't them they largely no longer care. Our "lets send them to Madagascar like the Jews" idea is about as reactionary as it gets - lets not fix the problem, lets just send it elsewhere. The problem elsewhere is why Europe has a refugee crisis!
As other threads have commented, the UK has a growing structural problem where there is a growing percentage of pensioners needing to be kept by a shrinking number of workers. We need migration more than ever but a lengthy campaign by the right has hardened people's attitudes.
The next one will be Hong Kong. We absolutely have obligations to the people there and have given 5.4m people the right to a visa to live and work in the UK. Even though the Home Office only forecast 300k in the next few years (and we know how accurate their past forecasts have been...) they will be coming at a time when people are acutely hardened to non-Brits coming here - even though they have been invited!
If we are going to be heartless to asylum seekers from elsewhere in the world are we really going to be welcoming to the BNOs and their dependants as they settle here?
And then there are the Uighurs in China. Not many of them are making their way out, but if they did I'm not sure they'd be that welcome here.
My grandmother did escape to here from Vienna before the war, but it wasn't made easy, and lots of her friends and family weren't so lucky. The self-congratulatory tone used in relation to things like the Kindertransport really anger me when compared with how those efforts were treated at the time, or similar efforts treated now.
And this then relates back to the International Aid budget, and our foreign policy more generally. If various places weren't shit holes, or we didn't help people bomb them to smithereens, perhaps there would be fewer people desperate to escape from them?
As the Father of a lifeboat crew member I completely endorse the thread header and it is intolerable the issue has even arisen
Patel needs to deal with this
In her head she has. Incredibly.
A member of my extended family is a lifeboat crew member in another country; his father describes the situation as 'his alarm goes and he's off out. Immediately!"
Yes, lifeboatmen do meet idiots who should never have gone to sea. That doesn't mean they should be left to drown.
I know a couple of people who do mountain rescue. They’re forever risking their own lives, to pick up people dressed in shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops with severe hypothermia, or who went for a walk and got completely lost as weather closed in. Idiots the lot of them, but still humans.
The only way the boat crossings stop, is if the demand goes away. It’s clear that the French government doesn’t care, and is turning a blind eye to people eager to leave France to live in a safe country. We need to take the Denmark route, of facilitating settlement in a safe third country, and let it be known that anyone arriving by boat from France will be resettled elsewhere.
Yes, got a (former, too old now) mountain rescuer in the EF, too. And a couple of surf rescuers down in Cornwall. Admirable people, those who do that.
Is Denmark getting a reduction in asylum seekers? Or do they get processed more quickly than here? In any event, apparently treated more humanely than appears to be the case in UK?
What Denmark are doing is opening a migrant processing centre, likely to be in Rwanda. Anyone arriving in Denmark and claiming asylum is sent there, and if their application is successful they’re allowed to settle in Rwanda, with the Danish government paying the Rwandan government for each settled migrant. No-one arriving in Denmark by boat and claiming asylum, will be allowed to resettle in Denmark.
Surely there is a simple step - take a breath, ignore the froth on either side, and think. Denmark has *proposed* such a thing. It doesn't exist yet hence "likely to be in Rwanda". The likelihood of a foreign government accepting someone else's migrants for cash seems so unlikely as to be absurd. "They're allowed to settle in Rwanda" - are they imprisoned there? Won't they just leave and head somewhere they want to settle?
As for the idea that the Danes pay Rwanda for settled migrants, for how long? Imagine the headlines here "Your Taxpayers fund foreigners living abroad" - whatever agreement we managed to make with Madagascar would be torn up at the next budget review. "We negotiated and signed this deal, but we had no idea that it meant we had to keep paying".
We know where "lets deport them somewhere else" came from. Its truly shameful that we have people advocating Nazi policies and yes that includes the idiots in the Danish government.
What should we do to those arriving by boat?
1. Allow them to settle in the U.K.? 2. Deport them back to the safe country they came from (France or Belgium)? 3. Process them offshore and allow the genuine refugees somewhere to live in a safe country?
If we go with 1, should I buy a dingy and push my wife off the beach at Calais? Because that would save me shedloads of time and money, compared to trying to arrange legal migration through the proper channels.
Lets go through these one at a time: 1. Allow them to settle in the UK. If their claim is accepted, yes. If not, deport them. Asylum Seekers become a major problem because despite "take back control of our border" the smirking traitor has cut Border Force and the Police and the Home Office. We can't process claims with any speed so they get housed in "murder row" accommodation (e.g. on Teesside and in Sunderland the refugee houses were the ones that the housing association couldn't let), receive not enough to live on vouchers for sustenance and legally can't work. So they go into the black labour market.
That is a problem of our own making. Accepting Asylum Seekers into the UK for processing is not a guarantee they can stay.
2. The "safe country" myth. This is simply not present in the UN Refugee Convention, a position backed up by UK case law. So as there is no compulsion on refugees to settle in France there is no legal way to force the French to accept the deportees back. If we had international agreements to distribute refugees then perhaps we could, but Brexit killed that and we withdrew from the Dublin convention doing precisely that
3. Process them offshore as the Nazis proposed for the Jews. A fantasy. Denmark has proposed it. The idea that Madagascar is willing to take our deportees for cash AND the deportees stay there and don't just try again is laughable. How long would the UK need to pay this foreign government to house our foreign undesirables? What happens when the UK stops paying the bill? Would the foreign government be required to imprison them there?
1. The fact hat they’ve come from France or Belgium is enough to deny their asylum application. Those are not unsafe countries, and the migrants are not fleeing state persecution there. 2. It’s impossible in practice to deport anyone who arrives with no papers, that’s the biggest problem. 3. 8:30 in the morning and Godwin already? That doesn’t deserve a response.
Except (1) is a bit of a nonsense. If refugees have to claim asylum in the 1st safe country they reach we'd get hardly any.
Refugees have to claim asylum in the first safe country they reach.
That’s international law, as defined by the 1951UN Refugee Convention, and the 1967 UN Refugee Protocol.
Whereas Amnesty International says this:
Neither the 1951 Refugee Convention nor EU law requires a refugee to claim asylum in one country rather than another.
There is no rule requiring refugees to claim in the first safe country in which they arrive.
Anyone fancy adjudicating? Fight? Best of three?
@Sandpit I've looked at this in detail - there is nothing that says you need to claim asylum in the first safe country you arrive at. Which is why Turkey, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria etc make themselves as unwelcoming as possible to ensure they continue the journey.
Hmm, I thought I’d looked at it too, but it does seem that UK a case law disagrees, and says that it’s possible to claim asylum providing you’ve not tried to claim asylum elsewhere.
The obligation is on the first safe country they reach to hear their claim, but there’s no obligation to claim asylum in that first safe country.
The EU sought to impose that obligation upon refugees by the Dublin III regulations but it was always questionable whether this agreement between states could derogate from the rights of refugees under the UN Convention. The scope of Dublin III and its practical impact is also something that is frequently exaggerated. This came from a briefing note provided to the House of Commons last year:
"The UK received 2,236 requests from EU member states to accept transfers of individuals to the UK, and 714 transfers took place. The majority of these (496) were from Greece. • The UK made 3,259 transfer requests to EU member states, and 263 transfers took place. 40% (104) went to Germany and 20% (53) went to France."
So, in that period, Dublin allowed us to transfer back 263 potential asylum seekers, a frankly trivial number. Dublin III did give rights to prioritise the unification of families and as can be seen rather more people came to the UK on that basis.
The real problem here is that the UN Convention for Refugees is not fit for purpose in a highly unstable and mobile world. It was written to reflect the problems Jews had fleeing the Nazis and a desire that that should not happen again. The modern reality is that there are hundreds of millions, probably billions of people living in absolute shit holes and many who may be particularly at risk because they throw gays off high buildings, for example. We have in theory signed up to give these people refuge but no government really wants to honour that obligation and I strongly suspect that most of the residents of these islands don't either.
Edit, the period in question was 2019.
It is very sad how hardened people have become to human suffering.
That's basically the story of humanity until very recently isnt it? It's good that that now surprises us, as the capacity to muddle along, compartmentalize and ignore during horrible, horrible times is a very human thing.
Whilst I don't disagree this is exactly the same sort of thinking that gave us the war on drugs: catch those preying on the vulnerable by supplying this filth and the problem will be solved. Well, we lost and there will be a similarly endless supply of people who are willing to get involved in people trafficking too. So by all means punish these evil people but don't assume that is ever going to resolve the problem.
People need to realise that the people-traffickers and drug cartels are primarily businesses.
The biggest threat to the people-traffickers is borders slamming shut in the western world. They can't lobby governments directly, but if I was running them, I'd do the next best thing, which is to set up a charity and a social media campaign to do the lobbying for me. All cloaked in humanitarianism. You put out lots of press releases and tweets, you always feature children in your pictures. Get a lot of retweets from the naive. You reach out to some celebs who have got a new album out and want to be in the headlines and think going woke will help. Get them to go to a camp in Calais and film them in tears.
You might even decide not to rely on coastguards picking up boats, but instead start your own NGOs to do so. Is it an accident that brand new NGOs with names like "Sea-Eye" and "Sea-Watch" were suddenly founded in 2015 and had boats patrolling the Med? And they weren't just randomly patrolling a vast sea, they were going to pick-up points, which means they were co-operating with the people smugglers.
When the Italian govt criticised them, they got pushback from naive people saying, "But these are charities". As though being a charity automatically means you are pure. But anyone can set up a charity, it's the least regulated sector.
And then there are the other parts of the operation - someone is supplying and procuring dinghies, they don't just appear out of thin air. If you stopped that part of the operation, you'd halt the sailings. And so on.
But my guess is that these businesses are being run as professionally as Facebook is, with control of all parts of the operation, including lobbying to try to prevent laws from being passed that might hinder them.
Sigh. Nothing so complex. The NGOs would spring up by themselves - plenty of people who will give generously to such causes out there.
As to the boats - well, you are running a legit RIB dealership. A nicely dressed chap turns up and orders some boats. Pays well. Keeps coming back. Then he sends some friends round - they are ordering as well. You have a nice business going. More money for your daughters braces. Plus you've expanded the business now. Taken on another employee. If you look too closely... and it's not as if it is drugs. Just selling a good product for a good price. Of course when you see an upturned boat on the news, you may need a couple of shots to help with the sleep........
The tip offs happened, of course.
Which then brings you to the moral question. You have been told that x number of refugees will be pretty much dumped in the ocean at point y. What do you do?
As other threads have commented, the UK has a growing structural problem where there is a growing percentage of pensioners needing to be kept by a shrinking number of workers. We need migration more than ever but a lengthy campaign by the right has hardened people's attitudes.
The government has solved that problem by giving asylum to 6 million people fleeing the EU's poor economy and giving asylum to 3 million Hong Kongers fleeing China.
That's 9 million people - that's plenty to arrive in a very short time.
If we weren't taking anyone at all, you might have a point. But we're at the stage where we've taken too many.
You can't just increase the population by 10% every decade - you get into problems with congestion, air quality, people getting stressed by being packed in like rats. And eventually you get a water problem. If you double the number of people living in a square mile, you don't double the rainfall falling on that square mile. With climate change coming up, people need to spread out around the world a bit instead of all trying to squash onto a small island.
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Mum's in hospital with shortness of breath. If she's diagnosed Covid it'll be a "diagnosis with covid whilst in hospital". I can assure the Telegraph readers here she hasn't gone in with a broken leg.
Wish her well. Not a good time to be in hospital with something like that!
My mother had the ill fortune to go into hospital for an x-ray on a suspected hip fracture (it wasn't) at the very start of the pandemic when hospitals were covid incubators. She was dead 11 days later.
Nasty. Similar thing happened the husband of an ex-colleague of my wife's. She's still very bitter about it.
Every sympathy.
I've got a consultant appointment early this afternoon, by telephone. Why can't they use Zoom or Skype or similar?
Quite a few doctors are.
When I take my mother-in-laws blood pressure, I do it live, on camera, so the doctor can see I am not stuffing it up.
It is very sad how hardened people have become to human suffering. That's basically the story of humanity until very recently isnt it? It's good that that now surprises us, as the capacity to muddle along, compartmentalize and ignore during horrible, horrible times is a very human thing.
Quite. When have people not been hardened to human suffering?
Because Grace fucking Darling deserves every penny we can spare her.
The pot of charitable funding is not infinitely elastic, so why are we all cheering donations to an appallingly rich institution dedicated to smoothing the way of well heeled tossers who cannot read a tide table or work a diesel engine?
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
And then there are the Uighurs in China. Not many of them are making their way out, but if they did I'm not sure they'd be that welcome here.
My grandmother did escape to here from Vienna before the war, but it wasn't made easy, and lots of her friends and family weren't so lucky. The self-congratulatory tone used in relation to things like the Kindertransport really anger me when compared with how those efforts were treated at the time, or similar efforts treated now.
And this then relates back to the International Aid budget, and our foreign policy more generally. If various places weren't shit holes, or we didn't help people bomb them to smithereens, perhaps there would be fewer people desperate to escape from them?
Aye, operations like Kindertransport seem to have been subsumed into myths of national virtue rather than seen as what they are, extraordinary efforts by individuals invariably fighting against bureaucratic indifference or antipathy. See also ‘we fought WWII to stop the Holocaust’.
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
And yet still just one medal (a silver) in rowing, usually one of our most reliable medal factories. Hopefully a few good individual results from elsewhere will make up for it and our expected decline in track cycling and sailing vs 2016.
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
I think that, if we are well organised, we can beat the Russians. And it would annoy Putin. So that would be good to aim for.
I see that the Aussies are currently above the Russians. Good on them.
As other threads have commented, the UK has a growing structural problem where there is a growing percentage of pensioners needing to be kept by a shrinking number of workers. We need migration more than ever but a lengthy campaign by the right has hardened people's attitudes.
The government has solved that problem by giving asylum to 6 million people fleeing the EU's poor economy and giving asylum to 3 million Hong Kongers fleeing China.
That's 9 million people - that's plenty to arrive in a very short time.
If we weren't taking anyone at all, you might have a point. But we're at the stage where we've taken too many.
You can't just increase the population by 10% every decade - you get into problems with congestion, air quality, people getting stressed by being packed in like rats. And eventually you get a water problem. If you double the number of people living in a square mile, you don't double the rainfall falling on that square mile. With climate change coming up, people need to spread out around the world a bit instead of all trying to squash onto a small island.
Interestingly, at the peak of mass immigration (so far), we were taking in *less* people than were theoretically required to stop the population imbalance leading to pension issues etc.
Almost no one in this debate has talked about a desired population level for the country, with a desired demographic structure.
I don't know what that makes me, but that would be my starting point - then from that, immigration rates, infrastructure etc....
It's unlikely, I guess, that there are any Rwandans reading PB. But if there were, they might be pretty ypissed off at the casual willingness of many on here to dump our problems on them.
Someone will no doubt come up with an anecdote about a Rwandan acquaintance who coincidentally entirely agrees with whatever happens to be their view is of the subject.
As other threads have commented, the UK has a growing structural problem where there is a growing percentage of pensioners needing to be kept by a shrinking number of workers. We need migration more than ever but a lengthy campaign by the right has hardened people's attitudes.
The government has solved that problem by giving asylum to 6 million people fleeing the EU's poor economy and giving asylum to 3 million Hong Kongers fleeing China.
That's 9 million people - that's plenty to arrive in a very short time.
If we weren't taking anyone at all, you might have a point. But we're at the stage where we've taken too many.
You can't just increase the population by 10% every decade - you get into problems with congestion, air quality, people getting stressed by being packed in like rats. And eventually you get a water problem. If you double the number of people living in a square mile, you don't double the rainfall falling on that square mile. With climate change coming up, people need to spread out around the world a bit instead of all trying to squash onto a small island.
Interestingly, at the peak of mass immigration (so far), we were taking in *less* people than were theoretically required to stop the population imbalance leading to pension issues etc.
Almost no one in this debate has talked about a desired population level for the country, with a desired demographic structure.
I don't know what that makes me, but that would be my starting point - then from that, immigration rates, infrastructure etc....
Because, with an aging population, what’s ‘desired’ by the politicians is completely unacceptable to the public.
Remember Blair’s comments on expecting 10,000 immigrants from Poland?
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Quite. When have people not been hardened to human suffering?
We're in a different world now for one reason: communications. We can see the suffering elsewhere in the world, and it comes right into our sitting rooms. It makes it hard to ignore.
We saw this with the Ethiopian famine in ?1984? Thirty years earlier, a brave reporter might have written a dispatch for a newspaper, or even the radio. Some might have read it and thought, "How horrible" and given some money to Oxfam. The TV broadcasts made it much more immediate.
The problem is that there is so much suffering, and the solutions are non-trivial. Do I try to help Syrian refugees or someone starving in Africa? Do I campaign for the Urghurs, Rohingya or Palestinians?
As other threads have commented, the UK has a growing structural problem where there is a growing percentage of pensioners needing to be kept by a shrinking number of workers. We need migration more than ever but a lengthy campaign by the right has hardened people's attitudes.
The government has solved that problem by giving asylum to 6 million people fleeing the EU's poor economy and giving asylum to 3 million Hong Kongers fleeing China.
That's 9 million people - that's plenty to arrive in a very short time.
If we weren't taking anyone at all, you might have a point. But we're at the stage where we've taken too many.
You can't just increase the population by 10% every decade - you get into problems with congestion, air quality, people getting stressed by being packed in like rats. And eventually you get a water problem. If you double the number of people living in a square mile, you don't double the rainfall falling on that square mile. With climate change coming up, people need to spread out around the world a bit instead of all trying to squash onto a small island.
Interestingly, at the peak of mass immigration (so far), we were taking in *less* people than were theoretically required to stop the population imbalance leading to pension issues etc.
Almost no one in this debate has talked about a desired population level for the country, with a desired demographic structure.
I don't know what that makes me, but that would be my starting point - then from that, immigration rates, infrastructure etc....
Because, with an aging population, what’s ‘desired’ by the politicians is completely unacceptable to the public.
Remember Blair’s comments on expecting 10,000 immigrants from Poland?
The idea that you can run a country on the basis of "we Proper People own parliament and the courts, by the time the reality hits, there will be nothing they can do", falls down on one small problem. The Head Count have votes.
And unlike Ancient Rome, the system isn't structured carefully to make their votes worthless.
Personally I think choreographed martial arts should be an event - it's extremely impressive, and it's just like some other performative events which require a judge's score, only if you go wrong Iko Uwais kicks you in the face.
It's unlikely, I guess, that there are any Rwandans reading PB. But if there were, they might be pretty ypissed off at the casual willingness of many on here to dump our problems on them.
Someone will no doubt come up with an anecdote about a Rwandan acquaintance who coincidentally entirely agrees with whatever happens to be their view is of the subject.
Cue Leon
Sean is currently serving time at HM pleasure, for genocide, at HMP Wormwood Scrubs, in Auchtermuchty.
It's unlikely, I guess, that there are any Rwandans reading PB. But if there were, they might be pretty ypissed off at the casual willingness of many on here to dump our problems on them.
Someone will no doubt come up with an anecdote about a Rwandan acquaintance who coincidentally entirely agrees with whatever happens to be their view is of the subject.
… and some of their best friends are Scots, so they cannot possibly be Scotophobes.
Did we not discuss this recently on a thread by @Cyclefree ? The position, AIUI, is that the draft legislation removed the criteria that the offence of assisting illegal immigration had to be "for profit". The context was that there was apparently a practice of prosecuting those who steered the boat if they got a discount in their fare for doing so. The purpose of that nonsense is presumably to make it easier to deport the steerers.
The question is what does this have to do with the RNLI? I think their concern is that if they pick people up in distress in the channel and bring them ashore they could now be caught by the legislation. The government is clear that this is rescue work, not "assisting illegal immigration". This is so obviously so that I am frankly a bit suspicious that the person or persons raising the alarm has another agenda.
On a separate point I agree with those criticising @Cocky_cockney for copying and pasting the latest Heath drivel in its entirety. Mike has had letters from lawyers about this before and has been clear that we should not do it. It really should be removed.
We did indeed.
The intention may not be to criminalise the RNLI or anyone else performing rescue work. But the draft legislation - as currently drafted - does have that consequence. If the government wanted it could easily and quickly amend the draft Bill. It hasn't.
The Bill has a specific exemption for charities which exist to assist refugees. So the government has clearly at some level realised what the Bill will do and has thought about exemptions. But it has not included the RNLI within those exemptions.
Where is the bill in the drafting process?
If it’s out for comment it makes sense you’d make all the changes in one go rather than pull it for 1 change and then have to start the process again
Given that the government has already thought about exemptions it is a little odd that they did not already include the RNLI in the existing exemption clause. Either they did not realise it was caught or they deliberately excluded it.
The trouble is that if they exempt the RNLI and the Coastguard they need to exempt every other vessel which might come across people in a dinghy as well, not least because the Law of the Sea would probably override this legislation if it were ever challenged.
It is also worth noting that the bill is not restricted to what one does at sea.
I never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence
And don't assume the two qualities are mutually exclusive.
To me the whole thing appears to come down to really really thoughtless drafting. Believe me I’ve done enough of that to know what it looks like.
And I’ve read enough thoughtless drafting by lawyers to know what it looks like..,
‘Ex-Scottish Labour spin doctor urges 'progressive alliance' with Lib Dems to oust SNP’
… It came as Scottish Lib Dem leadership candidate Alex Cole-Hamilton signalled he would be willing to enter a future Holyrood coalition with Labour.
… [Andrew Liddle] suggested a “non-aggression pact” might “serve both parties well”. Liddle concluded: “The inescapable fact is this: we have done it before, and it worked. So why not do it again?"
Launching his Lib Dem leadership bid in an Edinburgh cafe yesterday, Cole-Hamilton reached out to Sarwar: “If we are to see a change in Government from the SNP, who have stagnated for 14 years in power, then we need to seek out a progressive alternative. And that might be a coalition with Labour.”
The Olympics are fun and all that, but Jesus. what price are they going to pay?
They could end up with a truly hideous outbreak of a variant that can only be controlled by universal vaccination (they have months to go to get there) or quarantine so fierce it makes Wuhan in Feb 2020 look like a universal holiday
As the Father of a lifeboat crew member I completely endorse the thread header and it is intolerable the issue has even arisen
Patel needs to deal with this
In her head she has. Incredibly.
A member of my extended family is a lifeboat crew member in another country; his father describes the situation as 'his alarm goes and he's off out. Immediately!"
Yes, lifeboatmen do meet idiots who should never have gone to sea. That doesn't mean they should be left to drown.
I know a couple of people who do mountain rescue. They’re forever risking their own lives, to pick up people dressed in shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops with severe hypothermia, or who went for a walk and got completely lost as weather closed in. Idiots the lot of them, but still humans.
The only way the boat crossings stop, is if the demand goes away. It’s clear that the French government doesn’t care, and is turning a blind eye to people eager to leave France to live in a safe country. We need to take the Denmark route, of facilitating settlement in a safe third country, and let it be known that anyone arriving by boat from France will be resettled elsewhere.
As the "lets deport the forrin to Madagascar" proposal isn't realistic, we need to look at what is. Europe faces a massive refugee problem because of the burning mess on its borders. One way to stop the flow is to fix these problems. If Afghanistan, Libya, Syria were safe and functioning then less migrants need to flee.
As that isn't very realistic then plan B - share the burden. Refugees can be distributed out amongst safe countries by agreement. But as its Britain Uber Alles these days we will enter no such agreement. Not that we need to considering we only get a small number of refugees anyway.
Then we have Plan C. Make it so awful for refugees that the word gets to them not to come. Hence the "Drown the Migrants" bill.
Plan take refugees from camps close to the crisis. Judge anyone else who arrives outside an airport by economic migrant standards and process them offshore.
The problem is that no offshore country seems willing to take them. Rwanda keeps being mentioned, but is there any evidence that Rwanda has seriously been interested?
Australia managed to send its to PNG and Nauru, but these have been defacto colonies for some time, and I think even PNG got fed up with being used this way.
An internment camp in the UK seems the obvious solution, with asylum courts on site, as well as medical facilities etc. Far fewer would come if they couldn't dissappear into the underground economy.
Performative cruelty is not going to work on people who have often walked a few hundred miles across deserts, and trapped by gangs in Libya etc. It is just not viable to be more cruel than what they have already suffered.
Why not go the full hog and put prison hulks off the south coast, only need to send the odd tender out with food once a week. Some gunships to circle them and make sure no-one makes a dash for it.
At last a possible use for the new "Flaggy McFlagface" royal yacht replacement?
I have no desire to use prison hulks but the current pressures on social accommodation here in Kent do make me wonder if a disused cruise ship could be parked in Dover Harbour as a processing and/or quarantine facility. Decent accommodation in an unused asset. I could see the “prison hulk” headlines but the reality would be far from that.
Are you sure the Mail wouldn’t write “life of luxury on 5 star ocean liner” stories just to mix it up?
With respect to refugees, I want to see much more focus on tackling and prosecuting people smugglers. Scum are making millions out of the heartache of the refugees, killing hundreds or thousands in the process, and selling many into servitude.
Whilst I don't disagree this is exactly the same sort of thinking that gave us the war on drugs: catch those preying on the vulnerable by supplying this filth and the problem will be solved. Well, we lost and there will be a similarly endless supply of people who are willing to get involved in people trafficking too. So by all means punish these evil people but don't assume that is ever going to resolve the problem.
I don't think the parallels with the drugs trade is quite accurate. But if you think it is, then what is your solution?
There isn't a simple solution or even what might be thought to be a humane one. In the longer term help in stabilising the countries they come from would work but this is promising nirvana. The evidence that our aid monies even helps is decidedly mixed.
I think we have to be clear that economic migrants that we have not chosen or authorised to be here will be returned and then actually do it. That means being fairly hard nosed about where the line is between a refugee and an economic migrant. It also means investing seriously in both the immigration system and, even more importantly, its enforcement which is a bit of a joke at the moment. The fact that their country is poor and run by a bunch of religious nutters is unlikely to be enough to qualify for "refugee" status. This is broadly where we are right now and I acknowledge that it is not working.
I think that this is one of the most difficult challenges that governments face and the current explosion in population in Africa means it is going to dominate the next few decades.
Mum's in hospital with shortness of breath. If she's diagnosed Covid it'll be a "diagnosis with covid whilst in hospital". I can assure the Telegraph readers here she hasn't gone in with a broken leg.
One for all the Old Etonians on here, if they have a few shillings kicking about (so not you Johnson).
'Luxury' race will be among most expensive on earth
… Highland Kings Ultra, a four-day camping race covering 120 miles on the west coast of Scotland, costs £15,499 per person to enter.
… The only running race known to BBC Scotland which costs more than the Highland Kings Ultra is the World Marathon Challenge, which involves seven marathons on seven continents. The entry is between 39,900 Euros (£34,112) and 42,000 Euros (£35,908), and includes accommodation and business flights between each country
With respect to refugees, I want to see much more focus on tackling and prosecuting people smugglers. Scum are making millions out of the heartache of the refugees, killing hundreds or thousands in the process, and selling many into servitude.
But how do you do that - the people at the top are going to be wealthy in a place that won't care and won't have an extradition treaty.
It has to be international. There should be no safe haven for people smugglers.
The international slave trade went from being internationally acceptable in 1800 to being seen as evil by 1900 in almost all countries, and certainly be 2000. It has been replaced by an equally evil trade.
The French and Spanish and Portuguese increased their involvement in slaving to “fill the gap in the market” once the Brits banned it.
It was only once the Foreign Office grew a pair and started boarding their ships to search for slaves it became more difficult
It's unlikely, I guess, that there are any Rwandans reading PB. But if there were, they might be pretty ypissed off at the casual willingness of many on here to dump our problems on them.
Someone will no doubt come up with an anecdote about a Rwandan acquaintance who coincidentally entirely agrees with whatever happens to be their view is of the subject.
Funny that you should mention it, but my cab driver yesterday was from Rwanda and he said….
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
New: PM's spokesman: "We've just realised, a bit late, that if we join Farage and Grimes in slagging off the RNLI it may not go down too well. So we agree with Sajid Javid's tweet yesterday".
At the risk of falling into a logical black hole I've just invented a word. It is "categorismus" to describe the process of making something seem real by putting a name to it.
Eg. “the British Isles”.
“Scotland”
Yes Jim, we feel the love.
What I do find amusing about your love-in for Jim Murphy is that you keep reposting this photo of him in the referendum campaign suggesting that he was a negative influence.
And yet No won...
It illustrates one of the key fallacies of the BetterTogether platform: that Unionists love Scotland. As so often illustrated on these threads, Unionists often despise Scotland and do everything within their power to denigrate the country.
Stuart, you really need to learn to differentiate between that embarrassing shambles that calls itself the Scottish government and the country. However much the SNP wish it were otherwise their administration is not the country and laughing at or despairing of their idiocy is not in any way denigrating the latter.
What is exasperating about all the devolved administrations is just how bad they are. You have effectively three fiefdoms of one-party states, where realistically only one party can win power no matter how awful they are or what they do - and they are awful and do many bad things - where the opposition is just as bad, and where the real underlying problems we were assured devolution would deal with are not only not dealt with but in many cases made worse.
All so Tony Blair could win a few seats he was going to win anyway.
It’s very depressing, and to be honest while Blair will forever be tainted by Iraq his actions on devolution were a far worse mistake. Not merely the effects, but the hubris. Remember his ‘parish council’ remark?
How is N Ireland a “one-party state”? It’s not even close.
And the Welsh and Scottish legislatures are finely balanced.
It is only Westminster where one party has a large majority, on a minority of the votes.
It's unlikely, I guess, that there are any Rwandans reading PB. But if there were, they might be pretty ypissed off at the casual willingness of many on here to dump our problems on them.
Someone will no doubt come up with an anecdote about a Rwandan acquaintance who coincidentally entirely agrees with whatever happens to be their view is of the subject.
Funny that you should mention it, but my cab driver yesterday was from Rwanda and he said….
With respect to refugees, I want to see much more focus on tackling and prosecuting people smugglers. Scum are making millions out of the heartache of the refugees, killing hundreds or thousands in the process, and selling many into servitude.
But how do you do that - the people at the top are going to be wealthy in a place that won't care and won't have an extradition treaty.
It has to be international. There should be no safe haven for people smugglers.
The international slave trade went from being internationally acceptable in 1800 to being seen as evil by 1900 in almost all countries, and certainly be 2000. It has been replaced by an equally evil trade.
The French and Spanish and Portuguese increased their involvement in slaving to “fill the gap in the market” once the Brits banned it.
It was only once the Foreign Office grew a pair and started boarding their ships to search for slaves it became more difficult
The robust policy of the RN - any violent resistance to being boarded = pirate. And we hang pirates - was helpful.....
One for all the Old Etonians on here, if they have a few shillings kicking about (so not you Johnson).
'Luxury' race will be among most expensive on earth
… Highland Kings Ultra, a four-day camping race covering 120 miles on the west coast of Scotland, costs £15,499 per person to enter.
… The only running race known to BBC Scotland which costs more than the Highland Kings Ultra is the World Marathon Challenge, which involves seven marathons on seven continents. The entry is between 39,900 Euros (£34,112) and 42,000 Euros (£35,908), and includes accommodation and business flights between each country
As other threads have commented, the UK has a growing structural problem where there is a growing percentage of pensioners needing to be kept by a shrinking number of workers. We need migration more than ever but a lengthy campaign by the right has hardened people's attitudes.
The government has solved that problem by giving asylum to 6 million people fleeing the EU's poor economy and giving asylum to 3 million Hong Kongers fleeing China.
That's 9 million people - that's plenty to arrive in a very short time.
If we weren't taking anyone at all, you might have a point. But we're at the stage where we've taken too many.
You can't just increase the population by 10% every decade - you get into problems with congestion, air quality, people getting stressed by being packed in like rats. And eventually you get a water problem. If you double the number of people living in a square mile, you don't double the rainfall falling on that square mile. With climate change coming up, people need to spread out around the world a bit instead of all trying to squash onto a small island.
Interestingly, at the peak of mass immigration (so far), we were taking in *less* people than were theoretically required to stop the population imbalance leading to pension issues etc.
Almost no one in this debate has talked about a desired population level for the country, with a desired demographic structure.
I don't know what that makes me, but that would be my starting point - then from that, immigration rates, infrastructure etc....
Because, with an aging population, what’s ‘desired’ by the politicians is completely unacceptable to the public.
Remember Blair’s comments on expecting 10,000 immigrants from Poland?
The idea that you can run a country on the basis of "we Proper People own parliament and the courts, by the time the reality hits, there will be nothing they can do", falls down on one small problem. The Head Count have votes.
And unlike Ancient Rome, the system isn't structured carefully to make their votes worthless.
Yes, they have the power through the ballot box, it's the essential point of democracy, and at present politicians of the right are getting rewarded for hardball postures on immigration. I like to imagine this switching around. A mass mood change such that the common people of England - red wall, blue wall, wall to wall - rise up as one and simply demand openness and generosity towards refugees and migrants. Then woe betide any grimbo politician or commentator caught giving the wrong impression of the country by jabbering on about there being "no room" and "charity begins at home".
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
Nah, on recent past (and current?) performances it's just part of the government's levelling up agenda, redistributing funds to good honest Yorkshire folk
It's unlikely, I guess, that there are any Rwandans reading PB. But if there were, they might be pretty ypissed off at the casual willingness of many on here to dump our problems on them.
Someone will no doubt come up with an anecdote about a Rwandan acquaintance who coincidentally entirely agrees with whatever happens to be their view is of the subject.
Funny that you should mention it, but my cab driver yesterday was from Rwanda and he said….
Must have been the same cab I was in....
Funny old world.
So you were before me… let me tell you what the cabbie said…
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
A pedant notes, in relation to @londonpubman 's comment, that the UK is not really a small country in population terms - according to worldometers, we're the 21st largest of 200-odd. Granted we're a long way behind the top 6 or 7, but we're also a long way ahead of an awful lot of countries.
We're also about the fifth biggest economy in the world, depending on how these things are measured. On which basis, you'd expect us to come about fifth in the medals table.
Surprisingly (well, to a lot of people), we're now nearly half as big as Russia in population terms.
While I'm about it, I will take the opportunity to remind people that Great Britain is not 'a small island'; it is in fact a very large and very populous island, ranking 8th by area and 3rd by population in the world.
As the Father of a lifeboat crew member I completely endorse the thread header and it is intolerable the issue has even arisen
Patel needs to deal with this
In her head she has. Incredibly.
A member of my extended family is a lifeboat crew member in another country; his father describes the situation as 'his alarm goes and he's off out. Immediately!"
Yes, lifeboatmen do meet idiots who should never have gone to sea. That doesn't mean they should be left to drown.
I know a couple of people who do mountain rescue. They’re forever risking their own lives, to pick up people dressed in shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops with severe hypothermia, or who went for a walk and got completely lost as weather closed in. Idiots the lot of them, but still humans.
The only way the boat crossings stop, is if the demand goes away. It’s clear that the French government doesn’t care, and is turning a blind eye to people eager to leave France to live in a safe country. We need to take the Denmark route, of facilitating settlement in a safe third country, and let it be known that anyone arriving by boat from France will be resettled elsewhere.
Yes, got a (former, too old now) mountain rescuer in the EF, too. And a couple of surf rescuers down in Cornwall. Admirable people, those who do that.
Is Denmark getting a reduction in asylum seekers? Or do they get processed more quickly than here? In any event, apparently treated more humanely than appears to be the case in UK?
What Denmark are doing is opening a migrant processing centre, likely to be in Rwanda. Anyone arriving in Denmark and claiming asylum is sent there, and if their application is successful they’re allowed to settle in Rwanda, with the Danish government paying the Rwandan government for each settled migrant. No-one arriving in Denmark by boat and claiming asylum, will be allowed to resettle in Denmark.
Surely there is a simple step - take a breath, ignore the froth on either side, and think. Denmark has *proposed* such a thing. It doesn't exist yet hence "likely to be in Rwanda". The likelihood of a foreign government accepting someone else's migrants for cash seems so unlikely as to be absurd. "They're allowed to settle in Rwanda" - are they imprisoned there? Won't they just leave and head somewhere they want to settle?
As for the idea that the Danes pay Rwanda for settled migrants, for how long? Imagine the headlines here "Your Taxpayers fund foreigners living abroad" - whatever agreement we managed to make with Madagascar would be torn up at the next budget review. "We negotiated and signed this deal, but we had no idea that it meant we had to keep paying".
We know where "lets deport them somewhere else" came from. Its truly shameful that we have people advocating Nazi policies and yes that includes the idiots in the Danish government.
What should we do to those arriving by boat?
1. Allow them to settle in the U.K.? 2. Deport them back to the safe country they came from (France or Belgium)? 3. Process them offshore and allow the genuine refugees somewhere to live in a safe country?
If we go with 1, should I buy a dingy and push my wife off the beach at Calais? Because that would save me shedloads of time and money, compared to trying to arrange legal migration through the proper channels.
Lets go through these one at a time: 1. Allow them to settle in the UK. If their claim is accepted, yes. If not, deport them. Asylum Seekers become a major problem because despite "take back control of our border" the smirking traitor has cut Border Force and the Police and the Home Office. We can't process claims with any speed so they get housed in "murder row" accommodation (e.g. on Teesside and in Sunderland the refugee houses were the ones that the housing association couldn't let), receive not enough to live on vouchers for sustenance and legally can't work. So they go into the black labour market.
That is a problem of our own making. Accepting Asylum Seekers into the UK for processing is not a guarantee they can stay.
2. The "safe country" myth. This is simply not present in the UN Refugee Convention, a position backed up by UK case law. So as there is no compulsion on refugees to settle in France there is no legal way to force the French to accept the deportees back. If we had international agreements to distribute refugees then perhaps we could, but Brexit killed that and we withdrew from the Dublin convention doing precisely that
3. Process them offshore as the Nazis proposed for the Jews. A fantasy. Denmark has proposed it. The idea that Madagascar is willing to take our deportees for cash AND the deportees stay there and don't just try again is laughable. How long would the UK need to pay this foreign government to house our foreign undesirables? What happens when the UK stops paying the bill? Would the foreign government be required to imprison them there?
1. The fact hat they’ve come from France or Belgium is enough to deny their asylum application. Those are not unsafe countries, and the migrants are not fleeing state persecution there. 2. It’s impossible in practice to deport anyone who arrives with no papers, that’s the biggest problem. 3. 8:30 in the morning and Godwin already? That doesn’t deserve a response.
Except (1) is a bit of a nonsense. If refugees have to claim asylum in the 1st safe country they reach we'd get hardly any.
Refugees have to claim asylum in the first safe country they reach.
That’s international law, as defined by the 1951UN Refugee Convention, and the 1967 UN Refugee Protocol.
Whereas Amnesty International says this:
Neither the 1951 Refugee Convention nor EU law requires a refugee to claim asylum in one country rather than another.
There is no rule requiring refugees to claim in the first safe country in which they arrive.
Anyone fancy adjudicating? Fight? Best of three?
@Sandpit I've looked at this in detail - there is nothing that says you need to claim asylum in the first safe country you arrive at. Which is why Turkey, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria etc make themselves as unwelcoming as possible to ensure they continue the journey.
Hmm, I thought I’d looked at it too, but it does seem that UK a case law disagrees, and says that it’s possible to claim asylum providing you’ve not tried to claim asylum elsewhere.
The obligation is on the first safe country they reach to hear their claim, but there’s no obligation to claim asylum in that first safe country.
The EU sought to impose that obligation upon refugees by the Dublin III regulations but it was always questionable whether this agreement between states could derogate from the rights of refugees under the UN Convention. The scope of Dublin III and its practical impact is also something that is frequently exaggerated. This came from a briefing note provided to the House of Commons last year:
"The UK received 2,236 requests from EU member states to accept transfers of individuals to the UK, and 714 transfers took place. The majority of these (496) were from Greece. • The UK made 3,259 transfer requests to EU member states, and 263 transfers took place. 40% (104) went to Germany and 20% (53) went to France."
So, in that period, Dublin allowed us to transfer back 263 potential asylum seekers, a frankly trivial number. Dublin III did give rights to prioritise the unification of families and as can be seen rather more people came to the UK on that basis.
The real problem here is that the UN Convention for Refugees is not fit for purpose in a highly unstable and mobile world. It was written to reflect the problems Jews had fleeing the Nazis and a desire that that should not happen again. The modern reality is that there are hundreds of millions, probably billions of people living in absolute shit holes and many who may be particularly at risk because they throw gays off high buildings, for example. We have in theory signed up to give these people refuge but no government really wants to honour that obligation and I strongly suspect that most of the residents of these islands don't either.
Edit, the period in question was 2019.
It is very sad how hardened people have become to human suffering. As long as it isn't them they largely no longer care. Our "lets send them to Madagascar like the Jews" idea is about as reactionary as it gets - lets not fix the problem, lets just send it elsewhere. The problem elsewhere is why Europe has a refugee crisis!
As other threads have commented, the UK has a growing structural problem where there is a growing percentage of pensioners needing to be kept by a shrinking number of workers. We need migration more than ever but a lengthy campaign by the right has hardened people's attitudes.
The next one will be Hong Kong. We absolutely have obligations to the people there and have given 5.4m people the right to a visa to live and work in the UK. Even though the Home Office only forecast 300k in the next few years (and we know how accurate their past forecasts have been...) they will be coming at a time when people are acutely hardened to non-Brits coming here - even though they have been invited!
If we are going to be heartless to asylum seekers from elsewhere in the world are we really going to be welcoming to the BNOs and their dependants as they settle here?
Rightly or wrongly, people's views towards accepting immigration of various types is highly related to what each group brings to the table. People didn't like Polish immigration because of the scale, but it faded away pretty quickly given how well they fitted into British culture, while also having very high work ethics. Meanwhile Somali immigration is relatively small but still causes complaints because of a perceived lack of contribution outside of one marathon runner. That is probably related to Poles having an unemployment rate under 5% and Somalis having one over 40%.
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
A pedant notes, in relation to @londonpubman 's comment, that the UK is not really a small country in population terms - according to worldometers, we're the 21st largest of 200-odd. Granted we're a long way behind the top 6 or 7, but we're also a long way ahead of an awful lot of countries.
Surprisingly (well, to a lot of people), we're now nearly half as big as Russia in population terms.
While I'm about it, I will take the opportunity to remind people that Great Britain is not 'a small island'; it is in fact a very large and very populous island, ranking 8th by area and 3rd by population in the world.
On that bombshell, I'm often surprised at how big (physically) Ireland is.
As other threads have commented, the UK has a growing structural problem where there is a growing percentage of pensioners needing to be kept by a shrinking number of workers. We need migration more than ever but a lengthy campaign by the right has hardened people's attitudes.
The government has solved that problem by giving asylum to 6 million people fleeing the EU's poor economy and giving asylum to 3 million Hong Kongers fleeing China.
That's 9 million people - that's plenty to arrive in a very short time.
If we weren't taking anyone at all, you might have a point. But we're at the stage where we've taken too many.
You can't just increase the population by 10% every decade - you get into problems with congestion, air quality, people getting stressed by being packed in like rats. And eventually you get a water problem. If you double the number of people living in a square mile, you don't double the rainfall falling on that square mile. With climate change coming up, people need to spread out around the world a bit instead of all trying to squash onto a small island.
Interestingly, at the peak of mass immigration (so far), we were taking in *less* people than were theoretically required to stop the population imbalance leading to pension issues etc.
Almost no one in this debate has talked about a desired population level for the country, with a desired demographic structure.
I don't know what that makes me, but that would be my starting point - then from that, immigration rates, infrastructure etc....
Because, with an aging population, what’s ‘desired’ by the politicians is completely unacceptable to the public.
Remember Blair’s comments on expecting 10,000 immigrants from Poland?
The idea that you can run a country on the basis of "we Proper People own parliament and the courts, by the time the reality hits, there will be nothing they can do", falls down on one small problem. The Head Count have votes.
And unlike Ancient Rome, the system isn't structured carefully to make their votes worthless.
Yes, they have the power through the ballot box, it's the essential point of democracy, and at present politicians of the right are getting rewarded for hardball postures on immigration. I like to imagine this switching around. A mass mood change such that the common people of England - red wall, blue wall, wall to wall - rise up as one and simply demand openness and generosity towards refugees and migrants. Then woe betide any grimbo politician or commentator caught giving the wrong impression of the country by jabbering on about there being "no room" and "charity begins at home".
The problem started with lies about the desired outcome. Then trying to claim that there were absolutely no downsides to the policy. Then trying to paint anyone who had the slightest objection to the policy as racists. Then trying to claim there is no alternative.
There was no attempt to create a policy, with structure, remediation of issues and justification.
Until this is done, you won't get the reversal you desire.
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
The unnamed civil servant from Germany's health ministry must be pretty high up the list, claiming almost zero efficacy amongst the old, when the reality was oh so much different.
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Did we not discuss this recently on a thread by @Cyclefree ? The position, AIUI, is that the draft legislation removed the criteria that the offence of assisting illegal immigration had to be "for profit". The context was that there was apparently a practice of prosecuting those who steered the boat if they got a discount in their fare for doing so. The purpose of that nonsense is presumably to make it easier to deport the steerers.
The question is what does this have to do with the RNLI? I think their concern is that if they pick people up in distress in the channel and bring them ashore they could now be caught by the legislation. The government is clear that this is rescue work, not "assisting illegal immigration". This is so obviously so that I am frankly a bit suspicious that the person or persons raising the alarm has another agenda.
On a separate point I agree with those criticising @Cocky_cockney for copying and pasting the latest Heath drivel in its entirety. Mike has had letters from lawyers about this before and has been clear that we should not do it. It really should be removed.
We did indeed.
The intention may not be to criminalise the RNLI or anyone else performing rescue work. But the draft legislation - as currently drafted - does have that consequence. If the government wanted it could easily and quickly amend the draft Bill. It hasn't.
The Bill has a specific exemption for charities which exist to assist refugees. So the government has clearly at some level realised what the Bill will do and has thought about exemptions. But it has not included the RNLI within those exemptions.
Where is the bill in the drafting process?
If it’s out for comment it makes sense you’d make all the changes in one go rather than pull it for 1 change and then have to start the process again
Given that the government has already thought about exemptions it is a little odd that they did not already include the RNLI in the existing exemption clause. Either they did not realise it was caught or they deliberately excluded it.
The trouble is that if they exempt the RNLI and the Coastguard they need to exempt every other vessel which might come across people in a dinghy as well, not least because the Law of the Sea would probably override this legislation if it were ever challenged.
It is also worth noting that the bill is not restricted to what one does at sea.
I never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence
And don't assume the two qualities are mutually exclusive.
To me the whole thing appears to come down to really really thoughtless drafting. Believe me I’ve done enough of that to know what it looks like.
And I’ve read enough thoughtless drafting by lawyers to know what it looks like..,
😁
But there was some thought behind it because they did draft an exemption - but only for refugee charities. So I don't buy the thoughtless drafting claim. They knew what they were doing and because the relevant clauses are so complicated and unclear they probably hoped that the consequences would not become clear either.
If anything this is an example of Whack-A-Mole legislation.
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
A pedant notes, in relation to @londonpubman 's comment, that the UK is not really a small country in population terms - according to worldometers, we're the 21st largest of 200-odd. Granted we're a long way behind the top 6 or 7, but we're also a long way ahead of an awful lot of countries.
Surprisingly (well, to a lot of people), we're now nearly half as big as Russia in population terms.
While I'm about it, I will take the opportunity to remind people that Great Britain is not 'a small island'; it is in fact a very large and very populous island, ranking 8th by area and 3rd by population in the world.
On that bombshell, I'm often surprised at how big (physically) Ireland is.
Often? I now have a mental image of you having a big globe in your living room which you nonchalantly spin a few times a day, each time - when your eye alights on the emerald isle - saying "F-me, that's bigger than I thought"
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
A pedant notes, in relation to @londonpubman 's comment, that the UK is not really a small country in population terms - according to worldometers, we're the 21st largest of 200-odd. Granted we're a long way behind the top 6 or 7, but we're also a long way ahead of an awful lot of countries.
Surprisingly (well, to a lot of people), we're now nearly half as big as Russia in population terms.
While I'm about it, I will take the opportunity to remind people that Great Britain is not 'a small island'; it is in fact a very large and very populous island, ranking 8th by area and 3rd by population in the world.
On that bombshell, I'm often surprised at how big (physically) Ireland is.
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
The unnamed civil servant from Germany's health ministry must be pretty high up the list, claiming almost zero efficacy amongst the old, when the reality was oh so much different.
If he/she existed. In the old days, if someone leaked bullshit like that, the journalist they fed false information to would denounce them publically.
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
A pedant notes, in relation to @londonpubman 's comment, that the UK is not really a small country in population terms - according to worldometers, we're the 21st largest of 200-odd. Granted we're a long way behind the top 6 or 7, but we're also a long way ahead of an awful lot of countries.
Surprisingly (well, to a lot of people), we're now nearly half as big as Russia in population terms.
While I'm about it, I will take the opportunity to remind people that Great Britain is not 'a small island'; it is in fact a very large and very populous island, ranking 8th by area and 3rd by population in the world.
On that bombshell, I'm often surprised at how big (physically) Ireland is.
Often? I now have a mental image of you having a big globe in your living room which you nonchalantly spin a few times a day, each time - when your eye alights on the emerald isle - saying "F-me, that's bigger than I thought"
I have a 5ft by 8ft map of the world displayed in my living room, and am often surprised by things on it.
But I'm mostly annoyed as South Sudan became a country like 2 months after I bought it, so it was immediately out of date.
At the risk of falling into a logical black hole I've just invented a word. It is "categorismus" to describe the process of making something seem real by putting a name to it.
Eg. “the British Isles”.
“Scotland”
Yes Jim, we feel the love.
What I do find amusing about your love-in for Jim Murphy is that you keep reposting this photo of him in the referendum campaign suggesting that he was a negative influence.
And yet No won...
It illustrates one of the key fallacies of the BetterTogether platform: that Unionists love Scotland. As so often illustrated on these threads, Unionists often despise Scotland and do everything within their power to denigrate the country.
Stuart, you really need to learn to differentiate between that embarrassing shambles that calls itself the Scottish government and the country. However much the SNP wish it were otherwise their administration is not the country and laughing at or despairing of their idiocy is not in any way denigrating the latter.
What is exasperating about all the devolved administrations is just how bad they are. You have effectively three fiefdoms of one-party states, where realistically only one party can win power no matter how awful they are or what they do - and they are awful and do many bad things - where the opposition is just as bad, and where the real underlying problems we were assured devolution would deal with are not only not dealt with but in many cases made worse.
All so Tony Blair could win a few seats he was going to win anyway.
It’s very depressing, and to be honest while Blair will forever be tainted by Iraq his actions on devolution were a far worse mistake. Not merely the effects, but the hubris. Remember his ‘parish council’ remark?
How is N Ireland a “one-party state”? It’s not even close.
And the Welsh and Scottish legislatures are finely balanced.
It is only Westminster where one party has a large majority, on a minority of the votes.
Ummmm - so you haven’t noticed the recent pattern of governments and elections? OK, I realise that it may be difficult to see them from rural Sweden, but roughly:
Whoever you vote for in Northern Ireland, you will end up with a coalition of the DUP and Sinn Fein
Whoever you vote for in Scotland, the SNP will be in government in some form, because there’s no other way to make the numbers work
Whoever you vote for in Wales, Labour will always be in government in some form as there’s no other way to make the numbers work.
Now if that’s not a one-party state de facto if not de jure, you need to adjust your definition of the phrase ‘multi party state.’
And it’s bad for everything. Wales must be the most corrupt polity in Europe. Sturgeon’s government is full of timeservers and liars. As for Northern Ireland - well, the words ‘Arlene Foster’ (even though she’s now gone) sum the situation up neatly.
Of course, you may not care about that, but as it happens, I do.
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
How could we forget? The 'Remember the Lusitania' du jour.
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Was there any retraction of that in the end?
No. Absolutely scandalously - no
What Handelsblatt did was - first - double down, and say Yes this is definitely true, causing incredible distress and alarm around the world - and boosting anti vaxxery everywhere
Then when they realised it was an absolute lie - not just an error, a lie - they slowly over time stealth-edited the article so it looked less and less outrageous.
No apologies, let alone resignations. It is one of the great journalistic crimes of our time. Many will have died as a result
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
A pedant notes, in relation to @londonpubman 's comment, that the UK is not really a small country in population terms - according to worldometers, we're the 21st largest of 200-odd. Granted we're a long way behind the top 6 or 7, but we're also a long way ahead of an awful lot of countries.
Surprisingly (well, to a lot of people), we're now nearly half as big as Russia in population terms.
While I'm about it, I will take the opportunity to remind people that Great Britain is not 'a small island'; it is in fact a very large and very populous island, ranking 8th by area and 3rd by population in the world.
On that bombshell, I'm often surprised at how big (physically) Ireland is.
Often? I now have a mental image of you having a big globe in your living room which you nonchalantly spin a few times a day, each time - when your eye alights on the emerald isle - saying "F-me, that's bigger than I thought"
Intrigued by suggestions that RNLI crew put their lives at risk… my impression had been that, like the emergency services, improvements in operating procedure, training, equipment and risk management generally since the Penlee disaster in 1981 mean that lifeboatmen lives are not put at risk… for example, my understanding is that if it is judged that conditions are too dangerous for the lifeboat type and experience of crew available then a rescue will not be attempted… happy to be corrected if my understanding is wrong…
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
How does funding a bunch of elite fannies bring happiness to anyone but them. Spend the money on poor sods and make them happy.
Intrigued by suggestions that RNLI crew put their lives at risk… my impression had been that, like the emergency services, improvements in operating procedure, training, equipment and risk management generally since the Penlee disaster in 1981 mean that lifeboatmen lives are not put at risk… for example, my understanding is that if it is judged that conditions are too dangerous for the lifeboat type and experience of crew available then a rescue will not be attempted… happy to be corrected if my understanding is wrong…
I suggest you try going out on a fucking small boat* in a fucking big storm.
Or just a medium sized boat in good weather.
The sea kills really easily. And it is only safe(ish) when you remember that and prepare accordingly.
It is merely a matter of time before another lifeboat crew is lost. The improvements in equipment and training have made that less probable. But it will happen.
EDIT
* All boats are small, when a storm comes. There's a video out there of someone driving a 250K super tanker through a storm. The bridge on those things is an office building. A wave comes over the bow and takes out the bridge windows - at one stage the whole ship is a submarine. Another wave like that, and they would have been dead. All of them
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
A pedant notes, in relation to @londonpubman 's comment, that the UK is not really a small country in population terms - according to worldometers, we're the 21st largest of 200-odd. Granted we're a long way behind the top 6 or 7, but we're also a long way ahead of an awful lot of countries.
Surprisingly (well, to a lot of people), we're now nearly half as big as Russia in population terms.
While I'm about it, I will take the opportunity to remind people that Great Britain is not 'a small island'; it is in fact a very large and very populous island, ranking 8th by area and 3rd by population in the world.
On that bombshell, I'm often surprised at how big (physically) Ireland is.
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
How does funding a bunch of elite fannies bring happiness to anyone but them. Spend the money on poor sods and make them happy.
Plenty of poor sods find happiness through national sport. Some millions on that probably gets you a good return vs a lot of government spending.
No it doesn't make sense, but when has sport ever done so?
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
How does funding a bunch of elite fannies bring happiness to anyone but them. Spend the money on poor sods and make them happy.
Yet the affection of the "poor sods" for Premier League football suggests that they, the "poor sods" don't agree with you, entirely, on how spending money makes them happy.
Intrigued by suggestions that RNLI crew put their lives at risk… my impression had been that, like the emergency services, improvements in operating procedure, training, equipment and risk management generally since the Penlee disaster in 1981 mean that lifeboatmen lives are not put at risk… for example, my understanding is that if it is judged that conditions are too dangerous for the lifeboat type and experience of crew available then a rescue will not be attempted… happy to be corrected if my understanding is wrong…
I suggest you try going out on a fucking small boat* in a fucking big storm.
Or just a medium sized boat in good weather.
The sea kills really easily. And it is only safe(ish) when you remember that and prepare accordingly.
It is merely a matter of time before another lifeboat crew is lost. The improvements in equipment and training have made that less probable. But it will happen.
EDIT
* All boats are small, when a storm comes. There's a video out there of someone driving a 250K super tanker through a storm. The bridge on those things is an office building. A wave comes over the bow and takes out the bridge windows - at one stage the whole ship is a submarine. Another wave like that, and they would have been dead. All of them
I thought work at sea eg fishermen was now essentially the most dangerous jobs there are, in the West anyway
Intrigued by suggestions that RNLI crew put their lives at risk… my impression had been that, like the emergency services, improvements in operating procedure, training, equipment and risk management generally since the Penlee disaster in 1981 mean that lifeboatmen lives are not put at risk… for example, my understanding is that if it is judged that conditions are too dangerous for the lifeboat type and experience of crew available then a rescue will not be attempted… happy to be corrected if my understanding is wrong…
I suggest you try going out on a fucking small boat* in a fucking big storm.
Or just a medium sized boat in good weather.
The sea kills really easily. And it is only safe(ish) when you remember that and prepare accordingly.
It is merely a matter of time before another lifeboat crew is lost. The improvements in equipment and training have made that less probable. But it will happen.
EDIT
* All boats are small, when a storm comes. There's a video out there of someone driving a 250K super tanker through a storm. The bridge on those things is an office building. A wave comes over the bow and takes out the bridge windows - at one stage the whole ship is a submarine. Another wave like that, and they would have been dead. All of them
I thought work at sea eg fishermen was now essentially the most dangerous jobs there are, in the West anyway
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
How does funding a bunch of elite fannies bring happiness to anyone but them. Spend the money on poor sods and make them happy.
Plenty of poor sods find happiness through national sport. Some millions on that probably gets you a good return vs a lot of government spending.
No it doesn't make sense, but when has sport ever done so?
There’s also very little direct government spending on elite sport. The vast majority of the funding is from the Lottery, one of few things for which we should be eternally grateful to Sir John Major.
Intrigued by suggestions that RNLI crew put their lives at risk… my impression had been that, like the emergency services, improvements in operating procedure, training, equipment and risk management generally since the Penlee disaster in 1981 mean that lifeboatmen lives are not put at risk… for example, my understanding is that if it is judged that conditions are too dangerous for the lifeboat type and experience of crew available then a rescue will not be attempted… happy to be corrected if my understanding is wrong…
Your impression is correct. Being a lifeboatman, these days, is notably safe
There are 150,000 members of the RNLI
Since Penlee in 1981 not one has died. Zero.
There are about 12,000 fishermen in the UK. In an average year between 5-10 will die, making fishing about five billion times as dangerous as being a lifeboatman, when no one dies at all.
You have more chance of dying as a window cleaner than you do as a lifeboatman. Seriously
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
Intrigued by suggestions that RNLI crew put their lives at risk… my impression had been that, like the emergency services, improvements in operating procedure, training, equipment and risk management generally since the Penlee disaster in 1981 mean that lifeboatmen lives are not put at risk… for example, my understanding is that if it is judged that conditions are too dangerous for the lifeboat type and experience of crew available then a rescue will not be attempted… happy to be corrected if my understanding is wrong…
I suggest you try going out on a fucking small boat* in a fucking big storm.
Or just a medium sized boat in good weather.
The sea kills really easily. And it is only safe(ish) when you remember that and prepare accordingly.
It is merely a matter of time before another lifeboat crew is lost. The improvements in equipment and training have made that less probable. But it will happen.
EDIT
* All boats are small, when a storm comes. There's a video out there of someone driving a 250K super tanker through a storm. The bridge on those things is an office building. A wave comes over the bow and takes out the bridge windows - at one stage the whole ship is a submarine. Another wave like that, and they would have been dead. All of them
I thought work at sea eg fishermen was now essentially the most dangerous jobs there are, in the West anyway
Yes, but from falling overboard rather than trawlers sinking, at least in the U.K., regulations have been tightened since a spate of such deaths in the North East… construction and agriculture are, I believe, the other two industries with most fatalities in the U.K. …
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
There have been various explanations for this putrid lie, none of them reflects well on Handelsblatt or "the senior German Health Minister"
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
How does funding a bunch of elite fannies bring happiness to anyone but them. Spend the money on poor sods and make them happy.
Plenty of poor sods find happiness through national sport. Some millions on that probably gets you a good return vs a lot of government spending.
No it doesn't make sense, but when has sport ever done so?
There’s also very little direct government spending on elite sport. The vast majority of the funding is from the Lottery, one of few things for which we should be eternally grateful to Sir John Major.
Even that is not vast - the yearly salary of many a Premier League footballer would be larger than the amount of money spent on funding an Olympic cycle for a quite a few sports.
Major's contribution was to force through that the funding should not be absorbed back into the taxation pile.
Instead, it was distributed at grass roots levels, in many cases. Though this is being eroded, sadly....
For example, support for disabled activities in local sports clubs. Which created masses of canoeing and rowing for the disabled, in a few short years. And riding for the disabled, as mentioned the other day.
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
No, 8% was the percentage of trial participants who were over 65. It wasn't technically correct in any way; just wrong.
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
Intrigued by suggestions that RNLI crew put their lives at risk… my impression had been that, like the emergency services, improvements in operating procedure, training, equipment and risk management generally since the Penlee disaster in 1981 mean that lifeboatmen lives are not put at risk… for example, my understanding is that if it is judged that conditions are too dangerous for the lifeboat type and experience of crew available then a rescue will not be attempted… happy to be corrected if my understanding is wrong…
Your impression is correct. Being a lifeboatman, these days, is notably safe
There are 150,000 members of the RNLI
Since Penlee in 1981 not one has died. Zero.
There are about 12,000 fishermen in the UK. In an average year between 5-10 will die, making fishing about five billion times as dangerous as being a lifeboatman, when no one dies at all.
You have more chance of dying as a window cleaner than you do as a lifeboatman. Seriously
They don't even attempt the seriously dangerous stuff in the first place.
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
A pedant notes, in relation to @londonpubman 's comment, that the UK is not really a small country in population terms - according to worldometers, we're the 21st largest of 200-odd. Granted we're a long way behind the top 6 or 7, but we're also a long way ahead of an awful lot of countries.
Surprisingly (well, to a lot of people), we're now nearly half as big as Russia in population terms.
While I'm about it, I will take the opportunity to remind people that Great Britain is not 'a small island'; it is in fact a very large and very populous island, ranking 8th by area and 3rd by population in the world.
On that bombshell, I'm often surprised at how big (physically) Ireland is.
Similar to Scotland both in size and population.
The island of Ireland has about 1.5m more of a population than Scotland. Still around 2m fewer than before the potato famine, mind.
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
A pedant notes, in relation to @londonpubman 's comment, that the UK is not really a small country in population terms - according to worldometers, we're the 21st largest of 200-odd. Granted we're a long way behind the top 6 or 7, but we're also a long way ahead of an awful lot of countries.
Surprisingly (well, to a lot of people), we're now nearly half as big as Russia in population terms.
While I'm about it, I will take the opportunity to remind people that Great Britain is not 'a small island'; it is in fact a very large and very populous island, ranking 8th by area and 3rd by population in the world.
On that bombshell, I'm often surprised at how big (physically) Ireland is.
Similar to Scotland both in size and population.
The island of Ireland has about 1.5m more of a population than Scotland. Still around 2m fewer than before the potato famine, mind.
The "Famine" is slightly misnamed if you look at history. There were actually plenty of potatoes that escaped the blight, it's just that they became more expensive and got sent abroad to richer markets
So it should really be called "the Potato Price Blip", or just "The Blip", and then I think a lot of the bitterness, still sadly prevalent, in Anglo-Irish history, could be removed. We all need to move on
Comments
The biggest threat to the people-traffickers is borders slamming shut in the western world. They can't lobby governments directly, but if I was running them, I'd do the next best thing, which is to set up a charity and a social media campaign to do the lobbying for me. All cloaked in humanitarianism. You put out lots of press releases and tweets, you always feature children in your pictures. Get a lot of retweets from the naive. You reach out to some celebs who have got a new album out and want to be in the headlines and think going woke will help. Get them to go to a camp in Calais and film them in tears.
You might even decide not to rely on coastguards picking up boats, but instead start your own NGOs to do so. Is it an accident that brand new NGOs with names like "Sea-Eye" and "Sea-Watch" were suddenly founded in 2015 and had boats patrolling the Med? And they weren't just randomly patrolling a vast sea, they were going to pick-up points, which means they were co-operating with the people smugglers.
When the Italian govt criticised them, they got pushback from naive people saying, "But these are charities". As though being a charity automatically means you are pure. But anyone can set up a charity, it's the least regulated sector.
And then there are the other parts of the operation - someone is supplying and procuring dinghies, they don't just appear out of thin air. If you stopped that part of the operation, you'd halt the sailings. And so on.
But my guess is that these businesses are being run as professionally as Facebook is, with control of all parts of the operation, including lobbying to try to prevent laws from being passed that might hinder them.
" 'ad that Habyarimana in the back, once. Proper 'gent 'e was. Tipped proper. Not like the current...."
My grandmother did escape to here from Vienna before the war, but it wasn't made easy, and lots of her friends and family weren't so lucky. The self-congratulatory tone used in relation to things like the Kindertransport really anger me when compared with how those efforts were treated at the time, or similar efforts treated now.
And this then relates back to the International Aid budget, and our foreign policy more generally. If various places weren't shit holes, or we didn't help people bomb them to smithereens, perhaps there would be fewer people desperate to escape from them?
As to the boats - well, you are running a legit RIB dealership. A nicely dressed chap turns up and orders some boats. Pays well. Keeps coming back. Then he sends some friends round - they are ordering as well. You have a nice business going. More money for your daughters braces. Plus you've expanded the business now. Taken on another employee. If you look too closely... and it's not as if it is drugs. Just selling a good product for a good price. Of course when you see an upturned boat on the news, you may need a couple of shots to help with the sleep........
The tip offs happened, of course.
Which then brings you to the moral question. You have been told that x number of refugees will be pretty much dumped in the ocean at point y. What do you do?
That's 9 million people - that's plenty to arrive in a very short time.
If we weren't taking anyone at all, you might have a point. But we're at the stage where we've taken too many.
You can't just increase the population by 10% every decade - you get into problems with congestion, air quality, people getting stressed by being packed in like rats. And eventually you get a water problem. If you double the number of people living in a square mile, you don't double the rainfall falling on that square mile. With climate change coming up, people need to spread out around the world a bit instead of all trying to squash onto a small island.
Yet we had the best first few days in the modern era:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/olympics/2021/07/27/tokyo-gold-rush-sees-team-gb-enjoy-best-start-olympics-modern/
When I take my mother-in-laws blood pressure, I do it live, on camera, so the doctor can see I am not stuffing it up.
Edit, the period in question was 2019.
It is very sad how hardened people have become to human suffering.
That's basically the story of humanity until very recently isnt it? It's good that that now surprises us, as the capacity to muddle along, compartmentalize and ignore during horrible, horrible times is a very human thing.
Quite. When have people not been hardened to human suffering?
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
I see that the Aussies are currently above the Russians. Good on them.
Almost no one in this debate has talked about a desired population level for the country, with a desired demographic structure.
I don't know what that makes me, but that would be my starting point - then from that, immigration rates, infrastructure etc....
Remember Blair’s comments on expecting 10,000 immigrants from Poland?
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia?
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
We saw this with the Ethiopian famine in ?1984? Thirty years earlier, a brave reporter might have written a dispatch for a newspaper, or even the radio. Some might have read it and thought, "How horrible" and given some money to Oxfam. The TV broadcasts made it much more immediate.
The problem is that there is so much suffering, and the solutions are non-trivial. Do I try to help Syrian refugees or someone starving in Africa? Do I campaign for the Urghurs, Rohingya or Palestinians?
And unlike Ancient Rome, the system isn't structured carefully to make their votes worthless.
Or… he might have been a little drunk that night.
😁
… It came as Scottish Lib Dem leadership candidate Alex Cole-Hamilton signalled he would be willing to enter a future Holyrood coalition with Labour.
… [Andrew Liddle] suggested a “non-aggression pact” might “serve both parties well”. Liddle concluded: “The inescapable fact is this: we have done it before, and it worked. So why not do it again?"
Launching his Lib Dem leadership bid in an Edinburgh cafe yesterday, Cole-Hamilton reached out to Sarwar: “If we are to see a change in Government from the SNP, who have stagnated for 14 years in power, then we need to seek out a progressive alternative. And that might be a coalition with Labour.”
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/ex-scottish-labour-spin-doctor-24637243.amp
The Olympics are fun and all that, but Jesus. what price are they going to pay?
They could end up with a truly hideous outbreak of a variant that can only be controlled by universal vaccination (they have months to go to get there) or quarantine so fierce it makes Wuhan in Feb 2020 look like a universal holiday
Therefore we win, hooray!
I think we have to be clear that economic migrants that we have not chosen or authorised to be here will be returned and then actually do it. That means being fairly hard nosed about where the line is between a refugee and an economic migrant. It also means investing seriously in both the immigration system and, even more importantly, its enforcement which is a bit of a joke at the moment. The fact that their country is poor and run by a bunch of religious nutters is unlikely to be enough to qualify for "refugee" status. This is broadly where we are right now and I acknowledge that it is not working.
I think that this is one of the most difficult challenges that governments face and the current explosion in population in Africa means it is going to dominate the next few decades.
https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1420706432274534401
'Luxury' race will be among most expensive on earth
… Highland Kings Ultra, a four-day camping race covering 120 miles on the west coast of Scotland, costs £15,499 per person to enter.
… The only running race known to BBC Scotland which costs more than the Highland Kings Ultra is the World Marathon Challenge, which involves seven marathons on seven continents. The entry is between 39,900 Euros (£34,112) and 42,000 Euros (£35,908), and includes accommodation and business flights between each country
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-57975285.amp
You up for it Charles? It’ll assist your name-dropping no end.
https://twitter.com/StephenMcDonell/status/1420549738865348610
It was only once the Foreign Office grew a pair and started boarding their ships to search for slaves it became more difficult
Brisbane being the capital of RL and all.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
And the Welsh and Scottish legislatures are finely balanced.
It is only Westminster where one party has a large majority, on a minority of the votes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Gong_practitioners_in_China
Oh. You meant something else?
Funny old world.
lol
Isn't that like starting a letter
"My Dearest Nazis"
https://coconuts.co/jakarta/food-drink/swab-solutely-bananas-fritters-wrapped-in-covid-19-test-result-terrifies-indonesians/
We're also about the fifth biggest economy in the world, depending on how these things are measured. On which basis, you'd expect us to come about fifth in the medals table.
Surprisingly (well, to a lot of people), we're now nearly half as big as Russia in population terms.
While I'm about it, I will take the opportunity to remind people that Great Britain is not 'a small island'; it is in fact a very large and very populous island, ranking 8th by area and 3rd by population in the world.
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups.
What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca?
"Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
There was no attempt to create a policy, with structure, remediation of issues and justification.
Until this is done, you won't get the reversal you desire.
https://www.politico.eu/article/how-astrazeneca-threw-away-its-shot/
The new one adds the research demonstrating that the blood clot panic was misplaced and adds reaction from the UK to the behaviour of some in the EU.
If anything this is an example of Whack-A-Mole legislation.
This thread is quite interesting on this. https://twitter.com/chaipatel0/status/1413966625888509958?s=21.
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
But I'm mostly annoyed as South Sudan became a country like 2 months after I bought it, so it was immediately out of date.
Whoever you vote for in Northern Ireland, you will end up with a coalition of the DUP and Sinn Fein
Whoever you vote for in Scotland, the SNP will be in government in some form, because there’s no other way to make the numbers work
Whoever you vote for in Wales, Labour will always be in government in some form as there’s no other way to make the numbers work.
Now if that’s not a one-party state de facto if not de jure, you need to adjust your definition of the phrase ‘multi party state.’
And it’s bad for everything. Wales must be the most corrupt polity in Europe. Sturgeon’s government is full of timeservers and liars. As for Northern Ireland - well, the words ‘Arlene Foster’ (even though she’s now gone) sum the situation up neatly.
Of course, you may not care about that, but as it happens, I do.
What Handelsblatt did was - first - double down, and say Yes this is definitely true, causing incredible distress and alarm around the world - and boosting anti vaxxery everywhere
Then when they realised it was an absolute lie - not just an error, a lie - they slowly over time stealth-edited the article so it looked less and less outrageous.
No apologies, let alone resignations. It is one of the great journalistic crimes of our time. Many will have died as a result
Or just a medium sized boat in good weather.
The sea kills really easily. And it is only safe(ish) when you remember that and prepare accordingly.
It is merely a matter of time before another lifeboat crew is lost. The improvements in equipment and training have made that less probable. But it will happen.
EDIT
* All boats are small, when a storm comes. There's a video out there of someone driving a 250K super tanker through a storm. The bridge on those things is an office building. A wave comes over the bow and takes out the bridge windows - at one stage the whole ship is a submarine. Another wave like that, and they would have been dead. All of them
No it doesn't make sense, but when has sport ever done so?
There are 150,000 members of the RNLI
Since Penlee in 1981 not one has died. Zero.
There are about 12,000 fishermen in the UK. In an average year between 5-10 will die, making fishing about five billion times as dangerous as being a lifeboatman, when no one dies at all.
You have more chance of dying as a window cleaner than you do as a lifeboatman. Seriously
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n414
Major's contribution was to force through that the funding should not be absorbed back into the taxation pile.
Instead, it was distributed at grass roots levels, in many cases. Though this is being eroded, sadly....
For example, support for disabled activities in local sports clubs. Which created masses of canoeing and rowing for the disabled, in a few short years. And riding for the disabled, as mentioned the other day.
https://www.babcockinternational.com/case-study/og-search-and-rescue-in-the-north-sea/
Still around 2m fewer than before the potato famine, mind.
So it should really be called "the Potato Price Blip", or just "The Blip", and then I think a lot of the bitterness, still sadly prevalent, in Anglo-Irish history, could be removed. We all need to move on