I wonder how many people who want action taken on climate change are already complaining about higher energy costs.
Plenty, I imagine, and they'd have a point. If we had installed more renewable capacity, we wouldn't be having to burn so much expensive gas to generate our electricity.
Have leccy prices gone up that much. I know we were suffering in September when the wind wasn't blowing, but isn't the problem that our central heating systems run on gas?
Mine runs on oil. I just received best price info at 60.15 ppl up from 38ppl less that a month ago.... its cheaper for me to buy wood and burn that than oil. Thats how fecking barmy it has become. Oil will only be used vv sparingly.
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The scientists are undoubtedly key as to why the delay came about, but the government bears responsibility for it. The PM was standing right there at the lecturn at the very first press conference, when Whitty in the same room was explaining about herd immunity, even saying at one point that policy was they wanted more people to catch the virus.
It plays into the bigger picture about the PM being a ditherer who won’t make a decision until he absolutely has to, and always bears the imprint of whoever sat on him last.
And yet here we are now, and the policy Whitty espoused is exactly what we are now following. The difference was at the time, we didn't know how deadly it could be, or how fast it could overwhelm the system.
(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 1h The Report: "In the first three months the strategy reflected official scientific advice to the Government which was accepted and implemented". Twitter: "They didn't follow the science!!!!".
I wonder how many people who want action taken on climate change are already complaining about higher energy costs.
Plenty, I imagine, and they'd have a point. If we had installed more renewable capacity, we wouldn't be having to burn so much expensive gas to generate our electricity.
Have leccy prices gone up that much. I know we were suffering in September when the wind wasn't blowing, but isn't the problem that our central heating systems run on gas?
Electric only here and yes, big rises. Assumed they were similar to the gas price rises?
Incidentally, with my day job hat on, it's interesting to see that 93% of voters favour the government acting to nudge diet to reduce meat consumption and subsidise plant-based food. An overwhelming majority also favour tax rises on themselves to address the climate issue. It's quite an impressive set of results:
On a tangent, I saw the BBC Merson Football and Gambling programme and it is a stark reminder/explainer that the brain can be manipulated and even become diseased through advertising. Better control of advertising on unhealthy food and gambling are both long over due.
I am generally in favour of a liberal gambling regime, but getting the regulations right and balanced is key to that being sustainable.
Reckless gambling is encouraged, careful gambling is banned
“Imagine a barman giving a relapsed alcoholic who has fallen off the wagon a free shot of tequila when they order their sixth pint, but refusing to serve a shandy drinker who only uses the pub when a two for one meal deal is on. This is the way bookmakers treat the problem & the careful gambler. One is actively encouraged while the other is refused the time of day... and they've got them the wrong way around.”
Do we know who's paying for Johnson's Spanish holiday yet?
He is staying at the private Villa of Zack Goldsmith, who he made a peer last year. One favour deserves another...
TBF I believe Goldsmith is a genuine friend (doesn’t his half brother employ Carrie?) so it’s not quite as simple as you maliciously pretend
It is far more malicious , you defend your chums as you are in the same crowd, spread the spoils around your small coterie whilst the poor pick up the tab for your stupidity and pocketing of all the cash.
I think my regard for Zac Goldsmith is reasonably well known on this board….
But it is deeply offensive to suggest I am in the same crowd as that bunch of shysters and grifters. I wouldn’t touch them with a 10 foot pole; in fact I actively seek to avoid that type of person and event. Mainly ‘cos they are as boring as fuck with narrow horizons and a limited worldview.
This is utterly bad news, this means the Indian commentary we received at the start of the year during England's tour on India won't be the worst and biased commentary we hear this year.
England fans planning to watch the Ashes on television will have to make do with Australian commentary when the series begins next month.
As Sportsmail revealed in August, BT Sport have bought the live TV rights for the five Tests, but are not planning to send a commentary team to Australia, and will instead rely on a feed provided by host broadcasters Fox and Channel Seven.
Michael Vaughan will be the lone Englishman we hear.
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
Aside from Churchill, I think Boris wants to be most like Father Christmas. He has a weird obsession, for anyone over the age of seven.
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
Not to be forgotten Drakeford did a two week lockdown at the time and it was a disaster
This is utterly bad news, this means the Indian commentary we received at the start of the year during England's tour on India won't be the worst and biased commentary we hear this year.
England fans planning to watch the Ashes on television will have to make do with Australian commentary when the series begins next month.
As Sportsmail revealed in August, BT Sport have bought the live TV rights for the five Tests, but are not planning to send a commentary team to Australia, and will instead rely on a feed provided by host broadcasters Fox and Channel Seven.
Michael Vaughan will be the lone Englishman we hear.
My mum's probate came through this week, 23 months after her death. Mainly due to delays in approval.
Rishi will be getting a chunky windfall from IHT catching up, plus of course increased mortality amongst oldsters.
In due course he will be getting a windfall from a proportion of the 200k (my estimate) properties currently clogged up by Covid rental restrictions where LLs sell-up and get out.
Together that will be a few billion at least. On top of CHT increases.
Congratulations? I think. We are still waiting but only 18 months in.
I wonder how many people who want action taken on climate change are already complaining about higher energy costs.
Plenty, I imagine, and they'd have a point. If we had installed more renewable capacity, we wouldn't be having to burn so much expensive gas to generate our electricity.
And how many would have complained at the costs of installing more renewable energy ?
The scientists are undoubtedly key as to why the delay came about, but the government bears responsibility for it. The PM was standing right there at the lecturn at the very first press conference, when Whitty in the same room was explaining about herd immunity, even saying at one point that policy was they wanted more people to catch the virus.
It plays into the bigger picture about the PM being a ditherer who won’t make a decision until he absolutely has to, and always bears the imprint of whoever sat on him last.
And yet here we are now, and the policy Whitty espoused is exactly what we are now following. The difference was at the time, we didn't know how deadly it could be, or how fast it could overwhelm the system.
TBF there is rather a difference in doing so once most people, and almost all of the most vulnerable, are vaccinated.
Incidentally, with my day job hat on, it's interesting to see that 93% of voters favour the government acting to nudge diet to reduce meat consumption and subsidise plant-based food. An overwhelming majority also favour tax rises on themselves to address the climate issue. It's quite an impressive set of results:
Any politician who thinks that is a sign there will be public support for net zero when reality bites is being very foolish. The current plans will destroy living standards and tear apart the fabric of society. They will be abandoned (in a suitably disguised way) in short order when the **** hits the wind turbine.
Mr. Eagles, largely agree. The Christmas fiasco may also have repercussions this time, with more people going for a big family Christmas, if they can, ironically increasing transmission rates.
The pandemic phase of this is over. Why should we care about "case rates" now when everybody who wants to be is vaccinated.
If anyone unvaccinated gets it that's their choice. If anyone vaccinated gets it we've done what we reasonably can for them.
Because the vaccines lose a bit of effectiveness hence the booster jab.
I see Germany is stopping free lateral flow testing. Times for us to do the same.
Do we know who's paying for Johnson's Spanish holiday yet?
He is staying at the private Villa of Zack Goldsmith, who he made a peer last year. One favour deserves another...
TBF I believe Goldsmith is a genuine friend (doesn’t his half brother employ Carrie?) so it’s not quite as simple as you maliciously pretend
It is far more malicious , you defend your chums as you are in the same crowd, spread the spoils around your small coterie whilst the poor pick up the tab for your stupidity and pocketing of all the cash.
I think my regard for Zac Goldsmith is reasonably well known on this board….
... I actively seek to avoid that type of person and event. Mainly ‘cos they are as boring as fuck with narrow horizons and a limited worldview.
Ok, you've persuaded me...he was perfect for the Lords
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
My mum's probate came through this week, 23 months after her death. Mainly due to delays in approval.
Rishi will be getting a chunky windfall from IHT catching up, plus of course increased mortality amongst oldsters.
In due course he will be getting a windfall from a proportion of the 200k (my estimate) properties currently clogged up by Covid rental restrictions where LLs sell-up and get out.
Together that will be a few billion at least. On top of CHT increases.
Mainly due to delays in approval
Is that basically delays as a result of government ?
This is utterly bad news, this means the Indian commentary we received at the start of the year during England's tour on India won't be the worst and biased commentary we hear this year.
England fans planning to watch the Ashes on television will have to make do with Australian commentary when the series begins next month.
As Sportsmail revealed in August, BT Sport have bought the live TV rights for the five Tests, but are not planning to send a commentary team to Australia, and will instead rely on a feed provided by host broadcasters Fox and Channel Seven.
Michael Vaughan will be the lone Englishman we hear.
Who in their right mind wouldn't mute the telly whilst listening to TMS?
Because the extra hop(s) the satellite signal and streaming takes then TMS can be anywhere from 5 seconds to 90 seconds ahead of the TV pictures.
Always allows me to watch the wickets fall 'live' as I run in from the kitchen/garden etc when i hear it first on TMS...
Mark Waugh is my favourite cricket commentator, so I’m quite pleased. It also gives more of a feeling of adventure when it’s the other teams comms on a winter tour I think.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
Mr. Eagles, largely agree. The Christmas fiasco may also have repercussions this time, with more people going for a big family Christmas, if they can, ironically increasing transmission rates.
The pandemic phase of this is over. Why should we care about "case rates" now when everybody who wants to be is vaccinated.
If anyone unvaccinated gets it that's their choice. If anyone vaccinated gets it we've done what we reasonably can for them.
Because the vaccines lose a bit of effectiveness hence the booster jab.
I see Germany is stopping free lateral flow testing. Times for us to do the same.
All lateral flow testing or just free lateral flow testing? TBH I don't think we'd have sought PCR tests if we hadn't had a supply of free LFT in the house and used them every few days?
And I'm grateful for the good wishes a sympathy. I'm not really looking it; just I need to communicate with someone outside our four walls. Never mind; only 8 days to go the 'helpful' app assures me.
This egregious attempt to let Boris off the hook by lazy appeal to 'hindsighting' needs to be called out and ground down. It's utter nonsense.
A political leader of any calibre ALWAYS keeps abreast of facts with an eye for detail and an attention to their brief. It's their job. They are SUPPOSED to lead.
Can anyone really tell me that Margaret Thatcher or even Tony Blair would have been so shockingly inept as Johnson was in spring 2019? Permitting events like the Cheltenham Festival to continue when Italy had already gone into lockdown has nothing to do with us using hindsighting.
It was, and is, the most shocking example of an inept useless buffoon who never should have been elected Prime Minister and who is totally unfit for the office.
Spot on. What we have learnt is that Johnson is a chancer, a buffoon, a liar, wings it, out of his depth etc.
Have you? I’m genuinely surprised. How come you hadn’t noticed that before? All the evidence has been available for years.
I have brother - known for years. The problem is the deluded right-wing halfwits who live on this blog who continually praise the disingenuous fat fornicator.
On the flip side, the report concludes that the vaccination programme has been one of the most effective initiatives in history. From development to rollout it concludes that the UK’s vaccine response will save millions of lives not just here but across the world.
The scientists are undoubtedly key as to why the delay came about, but the government bears responsibility for it. The PM was standing right there at the lecturn at the very first press conference, when Whitty in the same room was explaining about herd immunity, even saying at one point that policy was they wanted more people to catch the virus.
It plays into the bigger picture about the PM being a ditherer who won’t make a decision until he absolutely has to, and always bears the imprint of whoever sat on him last.
And yet here we are now, and the policy Whitty espoused is exactly what we are now following. The difference was at the time, we didn't know how deadly it could be, or how fast it could overwhelm the system.
TBF there is rather a difference in doing so once most people, and almost all of the most vulnerable, are vaccinated.
Now, it actually makes sense.
Absolutely, but I can see how it could have worked if Covid was just that bit less serious - the idea of allowing the 'healthy' to become immune through infection, while isolating those more at risk. Belatedly it became clear that covid, even the original strain, was too serious for this.
Incidentally, I hope that in the coming inquiry, those questioned stand by this, and not try to disseminate and say it was never the plan, because it almost certainly was.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
Possibly because GP's (generally useless at everything in my experience ) have got involved rather than vaccination centers?
My mother has booked her booster jab but this time it's with the GP rather than the vaccination center. The date they've given her is December 1st! She could have it from 22nd October (six months after her last shot on 22nd April)
The scientists are undoubtedly key as to why the delay came about, but the government bears responsibility for it. The PM was standing right there at the lecturn at the very first press conference, when Whitty in the same room was explaining about herd immunity, even saying at one point that policy was they wanted more people to catch the virus.
It plays into the bigger picture about the PM being a ditherer who won’t make a decision until he absolutely has to, and always bears the imprint of whoever sat on him last.
And yet here we are now, and the policy Whitty espoused is exactly what we are now following. The difference was at the time, we didn't know how deadly it could be, or how fast it could overwhelm the system.
Following herd immunity with vaccines that have a strong effect vs severe disease & death but only partial neutralising efficacy against a known virus is very different to pursuing herd immunity purely via infection in a naive population.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
Possibly because GP's (generally useless at everything in my experience ) have got involved rather than vaccination centers?
My mother has booked her booster jab but this time it's with the GP rather than the vaccination center. The date they've given her is December 1st! She could have from 22nd October (six months after her last shot on 22nd April)
My Dad just walked into the local library, where they were doing the boosters, and they gave him the jab before his 6 month gap
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
Re-reading that is awfully similar to reading Hansard when Brown was PM and Cameron was pinning the blame on him for the financial crash. The crucial difference being that Cameron convinced the public of this blame and Starmer hasn't.
Incidentally, with my day job hat on, it's interesting to see that 93% of voters favour the government acting to nudge diet to reduce meat consumption and subsidise plant-based food. An overwhelming majority also favour tax rises on themselves to address the climate issue. It's quite an impressive set of results:
Of course they do.. if they get a grant oruntil they have to pay it.
I'm really quite surprised that the "intergenerational theft" people are not on this yet.
Free money for ASHPs to the older, the wealthier, and the property owning. Whilst students have to pay back their loans at an interest rate of 6% or so.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
Possibly because GP's (generally useless at everything in my experience ) have got involved rather than vaccination centers?
My mother has booked her booster jab but this time it's with the GP rather than the vaccination center. The date they've given her is December 1st! She could have from 22nd October (six months after her last shot on 22nd April)
My Dad just walked into the local library, where they were doing the boosters, and they gave him the jab before his 6 month gap
Oh lucky him. Well done.
I might see if there's any other way my mother can have her booster before 1st December with the GP
On topic, enormous leeway should be given to the government in March 2020.
Key underlying issues for the period after that are:
Poor quality cabinet ministers in charge combined with overloading work on Hancock vs the rest of the team Too often reactive rather than proactive Chasing headlines such as world class or 100k tests Obsession with Christmas
Vaccines and furlough were good, as was having a less severe and less policed lockdown than many peers, so it is far from all bad, either 5 or 6/10 from me, which is probably higher than this government scores on most non covid stuff.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
Yes, both the volume of vaccinations and the communications around them seem to have slowed to a crawl. In my area, I've no idea where or how vaccinations are available now, nor does anyone I know, and the daily numbers are small - all in sharp contrast to phase 1 of the rollout. I'm due my booster jab (6 months since dose 2), but haven't heard anything yet. It was really easy to book second jabs, but the information on boosters is simply "wait till you hear from someone", which is slightly disconcerting.
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
Absolutely Johnson got it wrong. But so did Drakeford. And you are so wrong about not needing a hard lockdown. Just look at New Zealand and Australia these last few weeks.
I don't have a problem with people calling out the government for not doing enough to stop the spread of the virus and saving lives. I do have a problem with people who pretend that there was a magic solution that did that and meant we didn't have to have a hard lockdown.
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
I don't see how you could not unlock in early December with cases having fallen in November.
The mistake, in retrospect, was having the November lockdown for only four instead of six weeks.
Perhaps they should have brought together a lockdown extension with the vaccination program and foreign travel restrictions into a public grand strategy:
"Now that vaccination has started I'm asking for just a little more sacrifice."
If things had gone well no 10 would be basking in the glory . You can’t have it both ways . The bigger failing IMO is what happened last autumn and in the early part of the winter rather than in March 2020.
Incidentally, with my day job hat on, it's interesting to see that 93% of voters favour the government acting to nudge diet to reduce meat consumption and subsidise plant-based food. An overwhelming majority also favour tax rises on themselves to address the climate issue. It's quite an impressive set of results:
So you think nobody will complain about the current rising energy costs ?
People will always say they approve of whatever the 'good cause' is but then complain about rising costs and taxes and demand subsidies (the extra taxes to fund them being paid by 'people like them').
Well, this is sound ancient wisdom; but the Covid era has proven that people can also be easily nudged and manipulated to a degree far greater than we have ever previously known in a liberal democracy. The government could just proscribe any opposition to green crap as terrorism, look at the MPs, how many would really stand in the way of such an initiative? It sounds impossible but that is what has happened to other extreme political viewpoints. It is all part of the speedy passage from the woke era to the endarkening, as Leon described it yesterday.
Does the green agenda matter in the scheme of things? Probably not. In the scheme of things electric cars are pretty harmless, and significantly improve air pollution. The bike lanes are very welcome. Removing gas may reduce our reliance on Russia. Air source heat pumps, domestic renewables - all nice things. But they are all essentially elite fetishes and will not reverse industrialisation or stop humans from destroying the planet. Such a belief is a progressive delusion.
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
Yep - its a bit of a puzzle, and I'd love to see those in charge grilled about why this is.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
Possibly because GP's (generally useless at everything in my experience ) have got involved rather than vaccination centers?
My mother has booked her booster jab but this time it's with the GP rather than the vaccination center. The date they've given her is December 1st! She could have it from 22nd October (six months after her last shot on 22nd April)
It must vary then, because I asked my GP and they said booster jabs were nothing to do with them. The GP is doling out flu jabs very efficiently, so they're normally on the ball.
Being entirely selfish it will not effect my wife and I
As it happens this policy will, I predict, be dropped by a shameless Johnson days after COP21 ends and the whole circus has moved out of Glasgow.
I thought it was COP26 but I just think it is unworkable
My house is fully insulated but @Gallowgate said that only houses built in the last 20 years would qualify for the degree of insulation required and he is an expert on the subject
I think the distinction is between fully insulated (in the sense of as much insulation as you can sensibly put on an older house), which is less than the amount of insulation you need to allow a heat pump to make your house reliably comfortable.
Design the building right ("Passivhaus") and you can cut the heating requirements by 75% or so, which is handily the sort of carbon dioxide reduction we're looking for.
I don't see why it should be thought of as unworkable.
A ban on new installs of gas boilers from 2035 gives us until about 2045-2050 to replace all of them - which is well over 20 years - since they all have a lifecycle.
The Scottish Government policy announced today (I posted a link earlier) is 5 years earlier:
Their net zero target date is 2045 (vs 2050).
Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2025 for off-gas properties Ban on installing fossil fuel boilers from 2030 for all properties
The suggestion for England is 5 years behind the Scottish proposals. If it all fails @malcolmg and @Theuniondivvie will be donning their knitted popsocks 5 years before @TSE and @Leon .
It's important to ignore the Greens, just as we ignore Extinction Rebellion, as they have marketed their position as essentially broadcasting the fictional claim that "nothing has been done".
A huge amount has been done.
I just can't see how it will work.
Are we really going to force someone to demolish a house just because their boiler has packed in? Because that's effectively what you are doing if you require everyone to use a heat pump in all circumstances.
My 1920s bungalow doesn't have a full cavity, so it would have to go. There's no space to clad it externally.
Or are we going to end up forcing people to go back to direct electrical heating of the kind you still find in places off the gas network?
The government will end up having to make exceptions. Many of them.
That's not right.
It's perfectly possible properly to insulate / improve solid walled houses. I have done a whole series of them myself. It doesn't need a full cavity - which as you say weren't a regular thing until perhaps 1925-1930.
You can internally insulate it (which will take around 3-4" off each external wall done well), or externally insulate it. In either case you can easily take it up to a decent standard (say a C or even a B on the EPC scale). Those approaches are even routinely used under the ECO programme for people who qualify for support, and have been for many years. Perhaps there are slightly more wrinkles and PM needed, but it is a normal thing to do.
Today building without a cavity is also a normal thing to do in many technologies / types of build.
Personally I have done an 1850s cottage, several pre WW1, and a couple more from the 1920s - all solid walled.
Yes there will be exceptions, but a very small proportion.
If you're house is very well insulated (not difficult, just lots) direct electrical heating can be fine and is coming back for new houses. One option is to have essentially Willis Heaters (like immersion heaters) installed directly in the slab, and run them on Economy-7. A quality house will take days to leak the heat out, so that approach can work fine running overnight.
These days many do not bother with heating upstairs, except perhaps an electric towel rail and a fan heater in the cupboard for once a year when a boost is needed or something breaks.
(Though that highlights that for well-insulated, airtight houses, controlled cooling is as important as controlled heating.)
OK. I was exaggerating a little, but still. My house could be done like that but I'd have to rip out the bathroom, half the kitchen, two bay windows and every room would have to be churned up. To remove/replace the radiators the floors would have to be ripped up too. The roof is well insulated but is quite old and will eventually need replacement. In the long term it would make sense just to demolish and rebuild. Indeed, this is what has happened to a number of similar properties (including one two doors down) when they were sold (mainly to add on a dormer, but improving the insulation at the same time).
It makes sense to do this at the time of exchange (ie, someone moves out), but not everyone can just up sticks.
Fine, I could afford it, but it wouldn't be fun. How is the average householder going to react when they have to do this because a £1k boiler has failed?
I'm familiar with Economy-7 storage heaters because I've stayed in lots of houses in remote parts of Scotland that use them. You have to guess at what setting you might need for the following day. Is it not more efficient just to give up on the economy rate and use individual room thermostats? I wonder if overnight electricity will be as cheap in the future anyway if everyone is charging their cars overnight.
The scientists are undoubtedly key as to why the delay came about, but the government bears responsibility for it. The PM was standing right there at the lecturn at the very first press conference, when Whitty in the same room was explaining about herd immunity, even saying at one point that policy was they wanted more people to catch the virus.
It plays into the bigger picture about the PM being a ditherer who won’t make a decision until he absolutely has to, and always bears the imprint of whoever sat on him last.
And yet here we are now, and the policy Whitty espoused is exactly what we are now following. The difference was at the time, we didn't know how deadly it could be, or how fast it could overwhelm the system.
Following herd immunity with vaccines that have a strong effect vs severe disease & death but only partial neutralising efficacy against a known virus is very different to pursuing herd immunity purely via infection in a naive population.
I know, but it is also true that we didn't know in March 2020 that we would even get vaccines.
The scientists are undoubtedly key as to why the delay came about, but the government bears responsibility for it. The PM was standing right there at the lecturn at the very first press conference, when Whitty in the same room was explaining about herd immunity, even saying at one point that policy was they wanted more people to catch the virus.
It plays into the bigger picture about the PM being a ditherer who won’t make a decision until he absolutely has to, and always bears the imprint of whoever sat on him last.
And yet here we are now, and the policy Whitty espoused is exactly what we are now following. The difference was at the time, we didn't know how deadly it could be, or how fast it could overwhelm the system.
TBF there is rather a difference in doing so once most people, and almost all of the most vulnerable, are vaccinated.
Now, it actually makes sense.
Absolutely, but I can see how it could have worked if Covid was just that bit less serious - the idea of allowing the 'healthy' to become immune through infection, while isolating those more at risk. Belatedly it became clear that covid, even the original strain, was too serious for this.
Incidentally, I hope that in the coming inquiry, those questioned stand by this, and not try to disseminate and say it was never the plan, because it almost certainly was.
There's a scenario where we wouldn't have had much choice, where it wasn't possible to vaccinate people. The big dumb spike protein was and is a massive stroke of good fortune. But something with the shapeshifting potential of flu or HIV coupled with the ease of spread and fatality of C-19... oof. It's too early (surely) to write that specific novel, but it's a corker of a story. You're the government, half a million people are going to die on your watch and your only choice is the timeframe. What do you do?
The question that I find harder to understand is why did the tragic last resort seem to be HMG's first response?
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
I don't see how you could not unlock in early December with cases having fallen in November.
The mistake, in retrospect, was having the November lockdown for only four instead of six weeks.
Perhaps they should have brought together a lockdown extension with the vaccination program and foreign travel restrictions into a public grand strategy:
"Now that vaccination has started I'm asking for just a little more sacrifice."
Let's be honest, the government prioritised Christmas shopping and socialising over Christmas itself.
I said on here at the time that it was odd that the vaccine success wasn't met with a change in strategy.
I've said before I can just about forgive the government their initial mistakes because a lot of other countries made them as well but what I cannot forgive is
1) The clusterfuck that was test, trace, and isolate.
2) Failure to spot the signs in September and October which led to a delayed lockdown.
3) The bullshit on having a normal Christmas.
4) The threats of legal action against schools who wanted to close early because of high case numbers.
5) Which led to the farce of schools reopening for one day after Christmas.
In short Boris Johnson was repeatedly behind the curve, not just at the start but all the way through.
Was test, trace and isolate a clusterfuck ?
Yes, it was, since as you point out, many billions were effectively wasted.
The mistake was to go with mass usage of PCR testing, which is a great diagnostic and surveillance tool, but a very poor public health one. It was fairly clear even to reasonably well informed layperson (me), quite early on that rapid flow tests were both much cheaper and their large scale use likely to be far more effective at slowing the spread of infection.
The UK's testing system is among the best in the world. True, but it hasn't helped us much despite that.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
Hasn't responsibility for them shifted to the more complacently lethargic ?
On topic, enormous leeway should be given to the government in March 2020.
Key underlying issues for the period after that are:
Poor quality cabinet ministers in charge combined with overloading work on Hancock vs the rest of the team Too often reactive rather than proactive Chasing headlines such as world class or 100k tests Obsession with Christmas
Vaccines and furlough were good, as was having a less severe and less policed lockdown than many peers, so it is far from all bad, either 5 or 6/10 from me, which is probably higher than this government scores on most non covid stuff.
I agree that Hancock was overloaded with work, but somehow he still managed to fit in other time-consuming extra-curricular activities, if I recall correctly.
This is utterly bad news, this means the Indian commentary we received at the start of the year during England's tour on India won't be the worst and biased commentary we hear this year.
England fans planning to watch the Ashes on television will have to make do with Australian commentary when the series begins next month.
As Sportsmail revealed in August, BT Sport have bought the live TV rights for the five Tests, but are not planning to send a commentary team to Australia, and will instead rely on a feed provided by host broadcasters Fox and Channel Seven.
Michael Vaughan will be the lone Englishman we hear.
Who in their right mind wouldn't mute the telly whilst listening to TMS?
Because the extra hop(s) the satellite signal and streaming takes then TMS can be anywhere from 5 seconds to 90 seconds ahead of the TV pictures.
Always allows me to watch the wickets fall 'live' as I run in from the kitchen/garden etc when i hear it first on TMS...
Mark Waugh is my favourite cricket commentator, so I’m quite pleased. It also gives more of a feeling of adventure when it’s the other teams comms on a winter tour I think.
I am normally a sporting optimist, but we are going to get slaughtered! The team looks seriously bad for Aussie conditions. To be fair the batsmen, or batters for the easily offended, look bad for any Test match conditions.
I'm not happy that the phrasing is entirely about whether our liberties were swept away soon enough. Especially since the NHS didn't collapse which was the excuse to take away our civil liberties.
I haven't read the report yet but the baffling thing watching this from Japan at the time was that the British government spent weeks refusing to do the simple things that Japan had already used to contain the virus without compulsion or any loss of civil liberties. They didn't ask organizers to cancel events, they didn't ask businesses to get people working from home, they didn't ask people to open windows and avoid closed spaces. If they'd done these sensible, moderate things early on it's not obvious that they'd have needed the compulsion at all.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
Possibly because GP's (generally useless at everything in my experience ) have got involved rather than vaccination centers?
My mother has booked her booster jab but this time it's with the GP rather than the vaccination center. The date they've given her is December 1st! She could have from 22nd October (six months after her last shot on 22nd April)
My Dad just walked into the local library, where they were doing the boosters, and they gave him the jab before his 6 month gap
Oh lucky him. Well done.
I might see if there's any other way my mother can have her booster before 1st December with the GP
I've said before I can just about forgive the government their initial mistakes because a lot of other countries made them as well but what I cannot forgive is
1) The clusterfuck that was test, trace, and isolate.
2) Failure to spot the signs in September and October which led to a delayed lockdown.
3) The bullshit on having a normal Christmas.
4) The threats of legal action against schools who wanted to close early because of high case numbers.
5) Which led to the farce of schools reopening for one day after Christmas.
In short Boris Johnson was repeatedly behind the curve, not just at the start but all the way through.
Was test, trace and isolate a clusterfuck ?
Yes, it was, since as you point out, many billions were effectively wasted.
The mistake was to go with mass usage of PCR testing, which is a great diagnostic and surveillance tool, but a very poor public health one. It was fairly clear even to reasonably well informed layperson (me), quite early on that rapid flow tests were both much cheaper and their large scale use likely to be far more effective at slowing the spread of infection.
The UK's testing system is among the best in the world. True, but it hasn't helped us much despite that.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
I am assume that the basis for this is modelling -- that is, it is better to time the boosters so the vaccinations give maximum protection in Winter.
When people argue that, "governments lose elections more than oppositions win them," what they miss is the crucial role an opposition plays in convincing the voters that the government are to blame for the latest calamity.
I think that the public have a settled view on the blame for Covid - other people bending the rules are most to blame. The opposition failed to pin the blame on the government.
My expectation is that, regardless of how difficult economically the next few years are, the opposition will fail again to pin the blame on the government. Partly this is simple lack of political ability, but it's also because there will be so many determined to blame Brexit before they blame the government.
This egregious attempt to let Boris off the hook by lazy appeal to 'hindsighting' needs to be called out and ground down. It's utter nonsense.
A political leader of any calibre ALWAYS keeps abreast of facts with an eye for detail and an attention to their brief. It's their job. They are SUPPOSED to lead.
Can anyone really tell me that Margaret Thatcher or even Tony Blair would have been so shockingly inept as Johnson was in spring 2019? Permitting events like the Cheltenham Festival to continue when Italy had already gone into lockdown has nothing to do with us using hindsighting.
It was, and is, the most shocking example of an inept useless buffoon who never should have been elected Prime Minister and who is totally unfit for the office.
Spot on. What we have learnt is that Johnson is a chancer, a buffoon, a liar, wings it, out of his depth etc.
Have you? I’m genuinely surprised. How come you hadn’t noticed that before? All the evidence has been available for years.
I have brother - known for years. The problem is the deluded right-wing halfwits who live on this blog who continually praise the disingenuous fat fornicator.
On the flip side, the report concludes that the vaccination programme has been one of the most effective initiatives in history. From development to rollout it concludes that the UK’s vaccine response will save millions of lives not just here but across the world.
That was largely because we were lucky enough to have a company with best in the world sequencing technology. Though government deserves some credit for paying for its use.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
Possibly because GP's (generally useless at everything in my experience ) have got involved rather than vaccination centers?
My mother has booked her booster jab but this time it's with the GP rather than the vaccination center. The date they've given her is December 1st! She could have it from 22nd October (six months after her last shot on 22nd April)
It must vary then, because I asked my GP and they said booster jabs were nothing to do with them. The GP is doling out flu jabs very efficiently, so they're normally on the ball.
Same applies here. Apparently the relevant group of practices isn't getting involved.
I can't understand why the roll-out in schools isn't going better, too. We did a similar campaign with meningitis over twenty years ago. Worked like clockwork in our area.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
I am assume that the basis for this is modelling -- that is, it is better to time the boosters so the vaccinations give maximum protection in Winter.
From what I can glean from the immunologists, there's the possibility that with a 3-dose strategy, immunity might well not wane discernibly over a period of several months to a year, anyway (one dose leads to waning relatively quickly; two doses to slower waning and even that would not go down as far; three doses (telling the immune system this is a repeatedly recurring threat) leads to yet slower waning and an even higher plateau level).
Even if they're wrong, it took 6 months+ for us to be sure that waning was happening after two doses, and that would take us to April, anyway.
Beginning this academic year, officials have pledged to instill obedience through mainland-China-style “patriotic education.” Subjects as varied as geography and biology must incorporate material on national security. Kindergartners will learn the offenses under the security law. Teachers accused of sharing subversive ideas can be fired.
Anne Sze, a teaching assistant at a school, learned about those changes in March, during a staff meeting. The principal described how all subjects going forward would include lessons on loving China, Ms. Sze, 46, said.
Until then, Ms. Sze, who had grown disillusioned with the political atmosphere in Hong Kong, had taken preliminary steps toward emigration but had no concrete plans. But after that meeting, she imagined her own sons, 8 and 11, going through similar “brainwashing,” as she called it.
She and her husband hurriedly applied for special visas that Britain is offering to Hong Kongers in response to the security law. In August, they left.
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
I don't see how you could not unlock in early December with cases having fallen in November.
The mistake, in retrospect, was having the November lockdown for only four instead of six weeks.
Perhaps they should have brought together a lockdown extension with the vaccination program and foreign travel restrictions into a public grand strategy:
"Now that vaccination has started I'm asking for just a little more sacrifice."
Let's be honest, the government prioritised Christmas shopping and socialising over Christmas itself.
I said on here at the time that it was odd that the vaccine success wasn't met with a change in strategy.
The media reporting of Christmas was bizarre.
Everyone I knew was planning on having a quiet week off work whereas to the media Christmas involved a continuous stream of dinner parties for a different dozen people each day.
With so many vacancies what's the reason that virtually anyone on UC couldn't get a much better job?
Childcare? Skills? Unemployable?
We need to be much more innovative in supporting people into work here.
It's far far better for you and everyone else if you work.
It's normal in career progression to get cumulative steps of slightly better pay rather than much better in a single step.
For those working on UC anyone who gets a better pay rise they know they'll have to work harder but the reality is that the state will effectively tax them 75% of every extra penny they earn.
If you were facing a real tax rate of 75% would that incentivise you to look for a slightly better paid job?
No, and it needs sorting.
Nevertheless, if that £20 extra a week was critical to me and I could get, say, £50 a week more net by working then I'd do it.
Absolutely. I wholeheartedly agree that's what should happen.
But £50 a week more net by working means £200 more gross. That's £5.33 per hour extra (at 37.5h per week full time work). For someone on minimum wage that's a more than 50% pay rise.
The system is stacked against them doing as we both want.
This egregious attempt to let Boris off the hook by lazy appeal to 'hindsighting' needs to be called out and ground down. It's utter nonsense.
I presume your criticism extends to Sturgeon & Drakeford who implemented virtually identical policies?
Or just to Johnson?
I had it at about evens on which poster would whatabout Sturgeon and Drakeford first. Actually not true, I had Big G as marginal favourite, so I’ll have to strike that down as a loss in the wee betting record my head.
French finance minister Bruno Le Maire: "The United States wants to confront China. The European Union wants to engage China."....
...Quite striking that Le Maire thinks to have a mandate to speak on behalf of the EU -- as if there were a consensus in the EU to join Paris on such a path.
This is utterly bad news, this means the Indian commentary we received at the start of the year during England's tour on India won't be the worst and biased commentary we hear this year.
England fans planning to watch the Ashes on television will have to make do with Australian commentary when the series begins next month.
As Sportsmail revealed in August, BT Sport have bought the live TV rights for the five Tests, but are not planning to send a commentary team to Australia, and will instead rely on a feed provided by host broadcasters Fox and Channel Seven.
Michael Vaughan will be the lone Englishman we hear.
Who in their right mind wouldn't mute the telly whilst listening to TMS?
Because the extra hop(s) the satellite signal and streaming takes then TMS can be anywhere from 5 seconds to 90 seconds ahead of the TV pictures.
Always allows me to watch the wickets fall 'live' as I run in from the kitchen/garden etc when i hear it first on TMS...
Mark Waugh is my favourite cricket commentator, so I’m quite pleased. It also gives more of a feeling of adventure when it’s the other teams comms on a winter tour I think.
I am normally a sporting optimist, but we are going to get slaughtered! The team looks seriously bad for Aussie conditions. To be fair the batsmen, or batters for the easily offended, look bad for any Test match conditions.
Just hope they give Lawrence a fair go. England has sometimes taken players on tours and ruined their careers by just using them as drinks waiters. Essex Ashley Cowan is an example.
This egregious attempt to let Boris off the hook by lazy appeal to 'hindsighting' needs to be called out and ground down. It's utter nonsense.
I presume your criticism extends to Sturgeon & Drakeford who implemented virtually identical policies?
Or just to Johnson?
I had it at about evens on which poster would whatabout Sturgeon and Drakeford first. Actually not true, I had Big G as marginal favourite, so I’ll have to strike that down as a loss in the wee betting record my head.
With so many vacancies what's the reason that virtually anyone on UC couldn't get a much better job?
Childcare? Skills? Unemployable?
We need to be much more innovative in supporting people into work here.
It's far far better for you and everyone else if you work.
It's normal in career progression to get cumulative steps of slightly better pay rather than much better in a single step.
For those working on UC anyone who gets a better pay rise they know they'll have to work harder but the reality is that the state will effectively tax them 75% of every extra penny they earn.
If you were facing a real tax rate of 75% would that incentivise you to look for a slightly better paid job?
No, and it needs sorting.
Nevertheless, if that £20 extra a week was critical to me and I could get, say, £50 a week more net by working then I'd do it.
Absolutely. I wholeheartedly agree that's what should happen.
But £50 a week more net by working means £200 more gross. That's £5.33 per hour extra (at 37.5h per week full time work). For someone on minimum wage that's a more than 50% pay rise.
The system is stacked against them doing as we both want.
A lot of the cases I have seen in papers recently it has been childcare arrangements that have been the barrier.
This egregious attempt to let Boris off the hook by lazy appeal to 'hindsighting' needs to be called out and ground down. It's utter nonsense.
I presume your criticism extends to Sturgeon & Drakeford who implemented virtually identical policies?
Or just to Johnson?
I had it at about evens on which poster would whatabout Sturgeon and Drakeford first. Actually not true, I had Big G as marginal favourite, so I’ll have to strike that down as a loss in the wee betting record my head.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
I am assume that the basis for this is modelling -- that is, it is better to time the boosters so the vaccinations give maximum protection in Winter.
Not sure how they model it without data on the persistent effects of a second booster shot. And it's October already.
This is utterly bad news, this means the Indian commentary we received at the start of the year during England's tour on India won't be the worst and biased commentary we hear this year.
England fans planning to watch the Ashes on television will have to make do with Australian commentary when the series begins next month.
As Sportsmail revealed in August, BT Sport have bought the live TV rights for the five Tests, but are not planning to send a commentary team to Australia, and will instead rely on a feed provided by host broadcasters Fox and Channel Seven.
Michael Vaughan will be the lone Englishman we hear.
Who in their right mind wouldn't mute the telly whilst listening to TMS?
Because the extra hop(s) the satellite signal and streaming takes then TMS can be anywhere from 5 seconds to 90 seconds ahead of the TV pictures.
Always allows me to watch the wickets fall 'live' as I run in from the kitchen/garden etc when i hear it first on TMS...
Mark Waugh is my favourite cricket commentator, so I’m quite pleased. It also gives more of a feeling of adventure when it’s the other teams comms on a winter tour I think.
I am normally a sporting optimist, but we are going to get slaughtered! The team looks seriously bad for Aussie conditions. To be fair the batsmen, or batters for the easily offended, look bad for any Test match conditions.
Just hope they give Lawrence a fair go. England has sometimes taken players on tours and ruined their careers by just using them as drinks waiters. Essex Ashley Cowan is an example.
I remember watching him as a lad and wondering why he didn't get much of a go for England. Stuart Law was another mystery (although, when he was playing, Australia at least had an embarrassment of riches).
How are you and your wife doing, OKC? Hope you're both recovering well.
This egregious attempt to let Boris off the hook by lazy appeal to 'hindsighting' needs to be called out and ground down. It's utter nonsense.
I presume your criticism extends to Sturgeon & Drakeford who implemented virtually identical policies?
Or just to Johnson?
I had it at about evens on which poster would whatabout Sturgeon and Drakeford first. Actually not true, I had Big G as marginal favourite, so I’ll have to strike that down as a loss in the wee betting record my head.
It does not alter the fact though
Divvie should be employed by the RAF to chuck out chaff.....
There is never anything to see in Scotland, he reckons.
When people argue that, "governments lose elections more than oppositions win them," what they miss is the crucial role an opposition plays in convincing the voters that the government are to blame for the latest calamity.
I think that the public have a settled view on the blame for Covid - other people bending the rules are most to blame. The opposition failed to pin the blame on the government.
My expectation is that, regardless of how difficult economically the next few years are, the opposition will fail again to pin the blame on the government. Partly this is simple lack of political ability, but it's also because there will be so many determined to blame Brexit before they blame the government.
Now is surely the time perhaps for the Opposition to draw attention to the (then) Secretary of State of Health’s early response to news of the pandemic. On Jan 23rd 2020, soon after WHO raised concerns about a novel coronavirus, Matt Hancock said in a statement to the Commons: "THE PUBLIC CAN BE ASSURED THAT THE WHOLE OF THE UK IS ALWAYS WELL-PREPARED FOR THESE TYPES OF OUTBREAKS AND WILL REMAIN VIGILANT." This was a lie given that there were no stocks of gowns, visors, swabs in the government's pandemic stockpile when he spoke. And a vigilant Secretary of State would have concerned himself with exactly what "type of outbreak" there was.
When people argue that, "governments lose elections more than oppositions win them," what they miss is the crucial role an opposition plays in convincing the voters that the government are to blame for the latest calamity.
I think that the public have a settled view on the blame for Covid - other people bending the rules are most to blame. The opposition failed to pin the blame on the government.
My expectation is that, regardless of how difficult economically the next few years are, the opposition will fail again to pin the blame on the government. Partly this is simple lack of political ability, but it's also because there will be so many determined to blame Brexit before they blame the government.
But wouldn't those people blame the government for Brexit?
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
This was the alpha variant though. I think tiers worked, to an extent, in allowing society to open up with some cases, until alpha came along.
They really did.
You could watch the progress of the Kentish variant across the South Coast. Dorset didn't really have much of a first wave, or a second one - but the Alpha variant changed that.
One annoying error that seems to be occurring right now is the slow booster rollout and teen vaccinations.
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
I am assume that the basis for this is modelling -- that is, it is better to time the boosters so the vaccinations give maximum protection in Winter.
From what I can glean from the immunologists, there's the possibility that with a 3-dose strategy, immunity might well not wane discernibly over a period of several months to a year, anyway (one dose leads to waning relatively quickly; two doses to slower waning and even that would not go down as far; three doses (telling the immune system this is a repeatedly recurring threat) leads to yet slower waning and an even higher plateau level).
Even if they're wrong, it took 6 months+ for us to be sure that waning was happening after two doses, and that would take us to April, anyway.
The initial antibody levels from the third dose look pretty spectacular, so that guess might be correct.
I am glad we have collectively decided that locking down as soon as someone sneezes in far-east Asia, given how early we would have to have acted to make the virus magically go away, is a sustainable way to run society. I predict this will have no negative consequences whatsoever …..
Central Europe offers a counterfactual. They locked down before seeding and fared better than western Europe at first, but their winter was even nastier than ours and their overall death rate is similar/worse. Did the UK suffer materially worse outcomes for dithering longer?
Obviously the events of March 2020 were awful in western Europe, but if the question is purely "did locking down a couple of weeks too late make a difference in the long term", I can't see how. Immunity doesn't appear magically out of thin air with no vaccine guaranteed
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
I believe there were even distinguished PBers berating Sturgeon for not opening up Edinburgh’s bars and restaurants for Crimbo the way gracious King Boris was south of the border. Mea culpas came there none, neither from BJ or his acolytes.
Yup. March 2020 was a tragedy, and one that ought to haunt all those involved. Different decisions would have kept more people alive and reduced the length of the Spring/early Summer lockdown. Even postponing infections until a time when treatments were better worked out would have been worth doing.
But the haunting ought to be tempered by the question of whether we would have done any better. I'm reminded of the story of FM Montgomery having a troubled night on his deathbed, as he struggled with the idea of having to explain to God why he had killed all those men at El Alamein.
But the clustershambles that was Christmas 2020... that's a different matter. And on that one, Starmer did push for more restrictions earlier. And he was right to do so. Lives would have been saved and we wouldn't have needed such a long post-Christmas lockdown.
And BoJo mocked him has some combination of Scrooge and the Grinch for his pains.
That's bollocks about Starmer. He wanted a one week firebreak. What was required was hard lockdown from October (government went November, just about okay) through to May.
The bit I'm thinking of is the unlocking in early December and the flailing around before and after Christmas. Avoid that spike and you don't need a hard lockdown, because you're only seeking to keep cases roughly flat rather than driving them down.
Shame on you. Fancy providing evidence of what somebody (Starmer in this case) actually said, rather than on hearsay evidence, rumour, innuendo etc. That's a real threat to the traditions of PB.
I'm not happy that the phrasing is entirely about whether our liberties were swept away soon enough. Especially since the NHS didn't collapse which was the excuse to take away our civil liberties.
I haven't read the report yet but the baffling thing watching this from Japan at the time was that the British government spent weeks refusing to do the simple things that Japan had already used to contain the virus without compulsion or any loss of civil liberties. They didn't ask organizers to cancel events, they didn't ask businesses to get people working from home, they didn't ask people to open windows and avoid closed spaces. If they'd done these sensible, moderate things early on it's not obvious that they'd have needed the compulsion at all.
The Tories - and the PB Tories - tend not to like examples from outside the U.K.
We’re different, apparently.
Hunt was a notable exception, he called it right over and over again.
When people argue that, "governments lose elections more than oppositions win them," what they miss is the crucial role an opposition plays in convincing the voters that the government are to blame for the latest calamity.
I think that the public have a settled view on the blame for Covid - other people bending the rules are most to blame. The opposition failed to pin the blame on the government.
My expectation is that, regardless of how difficult economically the next few years are, the opposition will fail again to pin the blame on the government. Partly this is simple lack of political ability, but it's also because there will be so many determined to blame Brexit before they blame the government.
Now is surely the time perhaps for the Opposition to draw attention to the (then) Secretary of State of Health’s early response to news of the pandemic. On Jan 23rd 2020, soon after WHO raised concerns about a novel coronavirus, Matt Hancock said in a statement to the Commons: "THE PUBLIC CAN BE ASSURED THAT THE WHOLE OF THE UK IS ALWAYS WELL-PREPARED FOR THESE TYPES OF OUTBREAKS AND WILL REMAIN VIGILANT." This was a lie given that there were no stocks of gowns, visors, swabs in the government's pandemic stockpile when he spoke. And a vigilant Secretary of State would have concerned himself with exactly what "type of outbreak" there was.
I am a floating voter who detests this government. But if Labour focused on what the government did or did not do in the first quarter of 2020, it would get me making defences of the government.
By all means go after the care home failures in the second quarter, the money spent on testing without addressing the isolate, the casual corruption, the mixed messaging or the Christmas fiasco and it will re-enforce the governments incompetence and disregard for truth and probity.
But criticism of what happened in January-March is unfair. What is Hancock supposed to have said and done? Should he have done the same for SARS, MERS, EBOLA, swine flu etc as well? If not how would he know covid would be the one to go global rather than the others? If so, you are talking about massive disruption every few years, for events that only tend to spiral out of control once a century.
Congratulations to David Card who won the Nobel Prize for Economics the other day.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
I'm not happy that the phrasing is entirely about whether our liberties were swept away soon enough. Especially since the NHS didn't collapse which was the excuse to take away our civil liberties.
I haven't read the report yet but the baffling thing watching this from Japan at the time was that the British government spent weeks refusing to do the simple things that Japan had already used to contain the virus without compulsion or any loss of civil liberties. They didn't ask organizers to cancel events, they didn't ask businesses to get people working from home, they didn't ask people to open windows and avoid closed spaces. If they'd done these sensible, moderate things early on it's not obvious that they'd have needed the compulsion at all.
The Tories - and the PB Tories - tend not to like examples from outside the U.K.
We’re different, apparently.
Hunt was a notable exception, he called it right over and over again.
That is unfair, they love a bit of NZ/Aus comparison.
One of the common themes of COVID around the world is that people change their behaviour when things get really bad.
That never happened here. The changes to behaviour only ever came after the government changed the rules.
Now, that's a small positive, but I wonder to what extent behaviour didn't change because the bad stuff was well hidden from us?
I'm not sure about that. I kept a record. On March 8 2020 I went to the pub, but was nervous about doing so. I didn't go again until after lockdown had ended - I normally go 2-3 times a week. The pubs were closed by the government on March 21, I think. Most people I knew were similar - they started changing their behaviour from the beginning of March, three weeks before the government changed the rules.
I'm not happy that the phrasing is entirely about whether our liberties were swept away soon enough. Especially since the NHS didn't collapse which was the excuse to take away our civil liberties.
I haven't read the report yet but the baffling thing watching this from Japan at the time was that the British government spent weeks refusing to do the simple things that Japan had already used to contain the virus without compulsion or any loss of civil liberties. They didn't ask organizers to cancel events, they didn't ask businesses to get people working from home, they didn't ask people to open windows and avoid closed spaces. If they'd done these sensible, moderate things early on it's not obvious that they'd have needed the compulsion at all.
The Tories - and the PB Tories - tend not to like examples from outside the U.K.
We’re different, apparently.
Hunt was a notable exception, he called it right over and over again.
As set out in the Report (but which was already evident from SAGE), the UK relied on its flu pandemic policy which assumed that any sufficiently transmissible virus would become endemic within the population and efforts to prevent or reduce transmission would not materially assist.
This was a fundamentally wrong assumption and quite frankly we should be pleased that the government abandoned that view when it did. For every argument that it should have come a week earlier, which it should, it could have easily been a week later.
I am glad we have collectively decided that locking down as soon as someone sneezes in far-east Asia, given how early we would have to have acted to make the virus magically go away, is a sustainable way to run society. I predict this will have no negative consequences whatsoever …..
Central Europe offers a counterfactual. They locked down before seeding and fared better than western Europe at first, but their winter was even nastier than ours and their overall death rate is similar/worse. Did the UK suffer materially worse outcomes for dithering longer?
Obviously the events of March 2020 were awful in western Europe, but if the question is purely "did locking down a couple of weeks too late make a difference in the long term", I can't see how. Immunity doesn't appear magically out of thin air with no vaccine guaranteed
One of the common themes of COVID around the world is that people change their behaviour when things get really bad.
That never happened here. The changes to behaviour only ever came after the government changed the rules.
Now, that's a small positive, but I wonder to what extent behaviour didn't change because the bad stuff was well hidden from us?
I'm not sure about that. I kept a record. On March 8 2020 I went to the pub, but was nervous about doing so. I didn't go again until after lockdown had ended - I normally go 2-3 times a week. The pubs were closed by the government on March 21, I think. Most people I knew were similar - they started changing their behaviour from the beginning of March, three weeks before the government changed the rules.
On average, in terms of things like average number of contacts, people's behaviour is known to be still quite different from pre-COVID-19.
With so many vacancies what's the reason that virtually anyone on UC couldn't get a much better job?
Childcare? Skills? Unemployable?
We need to be much more innovative in supporting people into work here.
It's far far better for you and everyone else if you work.
It's normal in career progression to get cumulative steps of slightly better pay rather than much better in a single step.
For those working on UC anyone who gets a better pay rise they know they'll have to work harder but the reality is that the state will effectively tax them 75% of every extra penny they earn.
If you were facing a real tax rate of 75% would that incentivise you to look for a slightly better paid job?
No, and it needs sorting.
Nevertheless, if that £20 extra a week was critical to me and I could get, say, £50 a week more net by working then I'd do it.
Absolutely. I wholeheartedly agree that's what should happen.
But £50 a week more net by working means £200 more gross. That's £5.33 per hour extra (at 37.5h per week full time work). For someone on minimum wage that's a more than 50% pay rise.
The system is stacked against them doing as we both want.
A lot of the cases I have seen in papers recently it has been childcare arrangements that have been the barrier.
That wouldn't surprise me at all. And that would come ON TOP or the tax barrier I already mentioned.
Any childcare costs that the employee has to shoulder personally come out of the 25% of their gross wages that they're actually able to keep themselves.
Is there any wonder that some people think why bother?
It's a horrible attitude, but its also a tragically logical one. The system is broken and needs fixing. I will vote for any party that fixes it, as opposed to just raising or lowering benefits.
I'm not happy that the phrasing is entirely about whether our liberties were swept away soon enough. Especially since the NHS didn't collapse which was the excuse to take away our civil liberties.
I haven't read the report yet but the baffling thing watching this from Japan at the time was that the British government spent weeks refusing to do the simple things that Japan had already used to contain the virus without compulsion or any loss of civil liberties. They didn't ask organizers to cancel events, they didn't ask businesses to get people working from home, they didn't ask people to open windows and avoid closed spaces. If they'd done these sensible, moderate things early on it's not obvious that they'd have needed the compulsion at all.
The Tories - and the PB Tories - tend not to like examples from outside the U.K.
We’re different, apparently.
Hunt was a notable exception, he called it right over and over again.
As set out in the Report (but which was already evident from SAGE), the UK relied on its flu pandemic policy which assumed that any sufficiently transmissible virus would become endemic within the population and efforts to prevent or reduce transmission would not materially assist.
This was a fundamentally wrong assumption and quite frankly we should be pleased that the government abandoned that view when it did. For every argument that it should have come a week earlier, which it should, it could have easily been a week later.
This is utterly bad news, this means the Indian commentary we received at the start of the year during England's tour on India won't be the worst and biased commentary we hear this year.
England fans planning to watch the Ashes on television will have to make do with Australian commentary when the series begins next month.
As Sportsmail revealed in August, BT Sport have bought the live TV rights for the five Tests, but are not planning to send a commentary team to Australia, and will instead rely on a feed provided by host broadcasters Fox and Channel Seven.
Michael Vaughan will be the lone Englishman we hear.
Who in their right mind wouldn't mute the telly whilst listening to TMS?
Because the extra hop(s) the satellite signal and streaming takes then TMS can be anywhere from 5 seconds to 90 seconds ahead of the TV pictures.
Always allows me to watch the wickets fall 'live' as I run in from the kitchen/garden etc when i hear it first on TMS...
Mark Waugh is my favourite cricket commentator, so I’m quite pleased. It also gives more of a feeling of adventure when it’s the other teams comms on a winter tour I think.
I am normally a sporting optimist, but we are going to get slaughtered! The team looks seriously bad for Aussie conditions. To be fair the batsmen, or batters for the easily offended, look bad for any Test match conditions.
Just hope they give Lawrence a fair go. England has sometimes taken players on tours and ruined their careers by just using them as drinks waiters. Essex Ashley Cowan is an example.
Not even a hint of a bit of Essex bias there, OKC! I'll bet you want Alistair Cook to come out of retirement too.
One of the common themes of COVID around the world is that people change their behaviour when things get really bad.
That never happened here. The changes to behaviour only ever came after the government changed the rules.
Now, that's a small positive, but I wonder to what extent behaviour didn't change because the bad stuff was well hidden from us?
I'm not sure about that. I kept a record. On March 8 2020 I went to the pub, but was nervous about doing so. I didn't go again until after lockdown had ended - I normally go 2-3 times a week. The pubs were closed by the government on March 21, I think. Most people I knew were similar - they started changing their behaviour from the beginning of March, three weeks before the government changed the rules.
Yeah, but Cheltenham.
I was anxious twice during COVID. Once at the start when my employer insisted on us being in the office (good luck getting me back, now) and the run up to Christmas. My mum was determined that we should have a "proper" Christmas. It took a lot of convincing her and other people I knew that it was a bad idea.
If things had gone well no 10 would be basking in the glory . You can’t have it both ways . The bigger failing IMO is what happened last autumn and in the early part of the winter rather than in March 2020.
There were big mistakes at the start, as winter turned to spring in 2020, decisive action then, lockdown and a grip on testing inc around care homes, would have saved tens of thousands of lives, probably also a great deal of money, this is clear to everybody now and was clear to many at the time; then there were more big mistakes in the summer of that year, the nonsense of 'eat out to help out', a mood of 'phew it's over' complacency rife and encouraged, and this was followed by perhaps the biggest and least forgivable mistakes of all in the autumn and winter, the PM dithering, giving house & head space to Covid deniers, again no grip, that's a theme here, culminating in the omnishambles of Christmas, full steam ahead and on, off, sort of on, ok if you must, the schools told to open then closed again in a blind panic a couple of days later, a vicious 2nd wave of the disease given a flying start for no better reason than Johnson's desire to play politics with a situation he still, after almost a year in the thick of it, failed to comprehend beyond the level of bright enough and quite interested layman.
When people argue that, "governments lose elections more than oppositions win them," what they miss is the crucial role an opposition plays in convincing the voters that the government are to blame for the latest calamity.
I think that the public have a settled view on the blame for Covid - other people bending the rules are most to blame. The opposition failed to pin the blame on the government.
My expectation is that, regardless of how difficult economically the next few years are, the opposition will fail again to pin the blame on the government. Partly this is simple lack of political ability, but it's also because there will be so many determined to blame Brexit before they blame the government.
But wouldn't those people blame the government for Brexit?
Yes, but by concentrating their fire on Brexit they will fail to convince anyone else. Convincing other people is a much overlooked part of politics.
This is utterly bad news, this means the Indian commentary we received at the start of the year during England's tour on India won't be the worst and biased commentary we hear this year.
England fans planning to watch the Ashes on television will have to make do with Australian commentary when the series begins next month.
As Sportsmail revealed in August, BT Sport have bought the live TV rights for the five Tests, but are not planning to send a commentary team to Australia, and will instead rely on a feed provided by host broadcasters Fox and Channel Seven.
Michael Vaughan will be the lone Englishman we hear.
Who in their right mind wouldn't mute the telly whilst listening to TMS?
Because the extra hop(s) the satellite signal and streaming takes then TMS can be anywhere from 5 seconds to 90 seconds ahead of the TV pictures.
Always allows me to watch the wickets fall 'live' as I run in from the kitchen/garden etc when i hear it first on TMS...
Mark Waugh is my favourite cricket commentator, so I’m quite pleased. It also gives more of a feeling of adventure when it’s the other teams comms on a winter tour I think.
I am normally a sporting optimist, but we are going to get slaughtered! The team looks seriously bad for Aussie conditions. To be fair the batsmen, or batters for the easily offended, look bad for any Test match conditions.
Just hope they give Lawrence a fair go. England has sometimes taken players on tours and ruined their careers by just using them as drinks waiters. Essex Ashley Cowan is an example.
I remember watching him as a lad and wondering why he didn't get much of a go for England. Stuart Law was another mystery (although, when he was playing, Australia at least had an embarrassment of riches).
How are you and your wife doing, OKC? Hope you're both recovering well.
Cowan was always a bit of a lad for the high-life though; didn't train as much as might or probably should have. Which was the chicken and which was the egg of course could be another matter. Bit of encouragement and all that.
Thank you Mr S; I'm not doing too badly, although a bit spaced out. Mrs C is 'coughing well' and a bit more spaced out. Another day or two are needed at least. Test and trace wants us locked for another 8 days, so that should be more than enough.
I'm not happy that the phrasing is entirely about whether our liberties were swept away soon enough. Especially since the NHS didn't collapse which was the excuse to take away our civil liberties.
I haven't read the report yet but the baffling thing watching this from Japan at the time was that the British government spent weeks refusing to do the simple things that Japan had already used to contain the virus without compulsion or any loss of civil liberties. They didn't ask organizers to cancel events, they didn't ask businesses to get people working from home, they didn't ask people to open windows and avoid closed spaces. If they'd done these sensible, moderate things early on it's not obvious that they'd have needed the compulsion at all.
The Tories - and the PB Tories - tend not to like examples from outside the U.K.
We’re different, apparently.
Hunt was a notable exception, he called it right over and over again.
We seemed to start from the basis that Covid was caught via surface contact rather than through the air.
That probably stems from the idea (which was scientific fact until last year) that large molecules couldn't be transmitted through the air because they were simply too heavy.
This is utterly bad news, this means the Indian commentary we received at the start of the year during England's tour on India won't be the worst and biased commentary we hear this year.
England fans planning to watch the Ashes on television will have to make do with Australian commentary when the series begins next month.
As Sportsmail revealed in August, BT Sport have bought the live TV rights for the five Tests, but are not planning to send a commentary team to Australia, and will instead rely on a feed provided by host broadcasters Fox and Channel Seven.
Michael Vaughan will be the lone Englishman we hear.
Who in their right mind wouldn't mute the telly whilst listening to TMS?
Because the extra hop(s) the satellite signal and streaming takes then TMS can be anywhere from 5 seconds to 90 seconds ahead of the TV pictures.
Always allows me to watch the wickets fall 'live' as I run in from the kitchen/garden etc when i hear it first on TMS...
Mark Waugh is my favourite cricket commentator, so I’m quite pleased. It also gives more of a feeling of adventure when it’s the other teams comms on a winter tour I think.
I am normally a sporting optimist, but we are going to get slaughtered! The team looks seriously bad for Aussie conditions. To be fair the batsmen, or batters for the easily offended, look bad for any Test match conditions.
The loss of Stokes is a big blow.
I don't have BT Sport but could have been tempted to buy it for a month or two for the tour, despite the timezone difference. The lack of a commentary team is just another reason not to bother.
Hopefully BT don't make any money from this tour and it ends up back on Sky next time. This fragmentation of sport (while still having each event monopoly subscribed) really is one of the worst things to happen as a consumer.
Comments
@DPJHodges
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1h
The Report: "In the first three months the strategy reflected official scientific advice to the Government which was accepted and implemented". Twitter: "They didn't follow the science!!!!".
“Imagine a barman giving a relapsed alcoholic who has fallen off the wagon a free shot of tequila when they order their sixth pint, but refusing to serve a shandy drinker who only uses the pub when a two for one meal deal is on. This is the way bookmakers treat the problem & the careful gambler. One is actively encouraged while the other is refused the time of day... and they've got them the wrong way around.”
http://aboutasfarasdelgados.blogspot.com/2014/08/you-dont-have-to-be-hypocritical-coward.html
But it is deeply offensive to suggest I am in the same crowd as that bunch of shysters and grifters. I wouldn’t touch them with a 10 foot pole; in fact I actively seek to avoid that type of person and event. Mainly ‘cos they are as boring as fuck with narrow horizons and a limited worldview.
I would have been astounded is mistakes hadn't been made.
Now, it actually makes sense.
Here's the exchange I was thinking of;
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2020-12-16/debates/E24005A4-10B2-437F-AAB0-E6B864F23FE5/Engagements
Johnson got it wrong, didn't he?
Is that basically delays as a result of government ?
We were really good at this in the first half of the year. But these vaccinations are going on far far slower than the original rollout, and it doesn't seem to be supply constrained.
And I'm grateful for the good wishes a sympathy. I'm not really looking it; just I need to communicate with someone outside our four walls. Never mind; only 8 days to go the 'helpful' app assures me.
UK completes over one million SARS-CoV-2 whole genome sequences
The UK has now uploaded over one million genome sequences to the international GISAID database, accounting for nearly a quarter of all sequences published globally to date.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-completes-over-one-million-sars-cov-2-whole-genome-sequences
Incidentally, I hope that in the coming inquiry, those questioned stand by this, and not try to disseminate and say it was never the plan, because it almost certainly was.
My mother has booked her booster jab but this time it's with the GP rather than the vaccination center. The date they've given her is December 1st! She could have it from 22nd October (six months after her last shot on 22nd April)
Free money for ASHPs to the older, the wealthier, and the property owning. Whilst students have to pay back their loans at an interest rate of 6% or so.
I might see if there's any other way my mother can have her booster before 1st December with the GP
Key underlying issues for the period after that are:
Poor quality cabinet ministers in charge combined with overloading work on Hancock vs the rest of the team
Too often reactive rather than proactive
Chasing headlines such as world class or 100k tests
Obsession with Christmas
Vaccines and furlough were good, as was having a less severe and less policed lockdown than many peers, so it is far from all bad, either 5 or 6/10 from me, which is probably higher than this government scores on most non covid stuff.
I don't have a problem with people calling out the government for not doing enough to stop the spread of the virus and saving lives. I do have a problem with people who pretend that there was a magic solution that did that and meant we didn't have to have a hard lockdown.
The mistake, in retrospect, was having the November lockdown for only four instead of six weeks.
Perhaps they should have brought together a lockdown extension with the vaccination program and foreign travel restrictions into a public grand strategy:
"Now that vaccination has started I'm asking for just a little more sacrifice."
Does the green agenda matter in the scheme of things? Probably not. In the scheme of things electric cars are pretty harmless, and significantly improve air pollution. The bike lanes are very welcome. Removing gas may reduce our reliance on Russia. Air source heat pumps, domestic renewables - all nice things. But they are all essentially elite fetishes and will not reverse industrialisation or stop humans from destroying the planet. Such a belief is a progressive delusion.
It makes sense to do this at the time of exchange (ie, someone moves out), but not everyone can just up sticks.
Fine, I could afford it, but it wouldn't be fun. How is the average householder going to react when they have to do this because a £1k boiler has failed?
I'm familiar with Economy-7 storage heaters because I've stayed in lots of houses in remote parts of Scotland that use them. You have to guess at what setting you might need for the following day. Is it not more efficient just to give up on the economy rate and use individual room thermostats? I wonder if overnight electricity will be as cheap in the future anyway if everyone is charging their cars overnight.
The question that I find harder to understand is why did the tragic last resort seem to be HMG's first response?
I said on here at the time that it was odd that the vaccine success wasn't met with a change in strategy.
The mistake was to go with mass usage of PCR testing, which is a great diagnostic and surveillance tool, but a very poor public health one.
It was fairly clear even to reasonably well informed layperson (me), quite early on that rapid flow tests were both much cheaper and their large scale use likely to be far more effective at slowing the spread of infection.
The UK's testing system is among the best in the world.
True, but it hasn't helped us much despite that.
The sequencing efforts, though, were and are the best in the world. Largely thanks to Oxford Nanopore:
https://nanoporetech.com/covid-19/community-timeline
Or something like that.
I think that the public have a settled view on the blame for Covid - other people bending the rules are most to blame. The opposition failed to pin the blame on the government.
My expectation is that, regardless of how difficult economically the next few years are, the opposition will fail again to pin the blame on the government. Partly this is simple lack of political ability, but it's also because there will be so many determined to blame Brexit before they blame the government.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott bans any COVID-19 vaccine mandates — including for private employers
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/10/11/texas-greg-abbott-covid-19-vaccine-mandate/
On average, more than 270 people in Texas died from COVID-19 every day in the last month
https://apps.texastribune.org/features/2020/texas-coronavirus-cases-map/?_ga=2.160360244.860000269.1634028024-1050871891.1633936712
I can't understand why the roll-out in schools isn't going better, too. We did a similar campaign with meningitis over twenty years ago. Worked like clockwork in our area.
Even if they're wrong, it took 6 months+ for us to be sure that waning was happening after two doses, and that would take us to April, anyway.
Everyone I knew was planning on having a quiet week off work whereas to the media Christmas involved a continuous stream of dinner parties for a different dozen people each day.
But £50 a week more net by working means £200 more gross. That's £5.33 per hour extra (at 37.5h per week full time work). For someone on minimum wage that's a more than 50% pay rise.
The system is stacked against them doing as we both want.
Actually not true, I had Big G as marginal favourite, so I’ll have to strike that down as a loss in the wee betting record my head.
...Quite striking that Le Maire thinks to have a mandate to speak on behalf of the EU -- as if there were a consensus in the EU to join Paris on such a path.
https://twitter.com/ulrichspeck/status/1447791101620989952?s=20
The immune response to a third Pfizer shot is (at least initially) very strong indeed:
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1447711106424664066
I will not believe someone is a genuine friend of BJ unless it comes out that he’s offered to get journalists beaten up on their behalf.
How are you and your wife doing, OKC? Hope you're both recovering well.
There is never anything to see in Scotland, he reckons.
Unless you actually bother to look.
That never happened here. The changes to behaviour only ever came after the government changed the rules.
Now, that's a small positive, but I wonder to what extent behaviour didn't change because the bad stuff was well hidden from us?
Was it ?
I definitely remember pre vaccine covid being something I went out of my way to avoid.
You could watch the progress of the Kentish variant across the South Coast. Dorset didn't really have much of a first wave, or a second one - but the Alpha variant changed that.
Central Europe offers a counterfactual. They locked down before seeding and fared better than western Europe at first, but their winter was even nastier than ours and their overall death rate is similar/worse. Did the UK suffer materially worse outcomes for dithering longer?
Obviously the events of March 2020 were awful in western Europe, but if the question is purely "did locking down a couple of weeks too late make a difference in the long term", I can't see how. Immunity doesn't appear magically out of thin air with no vaccine guaranteed
https://mobile.twitter.com/RufusSG/status/1447845648867504128
We’re different, apparently.
Hunt was a notable exception, he called it right over and over again.
By all means go after the care home failures in the second quarter, the money spent on testing without addressing the isolate, the casual corruption, the mixed messaging or the Christmas fiasco and it will re-enforce the governments incompetence and disregard for truth and probity.
But criticism of what happened in January-March is unfair. What is Hancock supposed to have said and done? Should he have done the same for SARS, MERS, EBOLA, swine flu etc as well? If not how would he know covid would be the one to go global rather than the others? If so, you are talking about massive disruption every few years, for events that only tend to spiral out of control once a century.
His work demonstrated that immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor do they lead to lower wages. This includes “low skilled” immigrants.
Please don’t tell the PB Tories, their heads might explode.
To me a lot of oldies seemed to be on a suicide mission.
This was a fundamentally wrong assumption and quite frankly we should be pleased that the government abandoned that view when it did. For every argument that it should have come a week earlier, which it should, it could have easily been a week later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvk8Bo71Zew
He fucked up in September.
He fucked up in December.
It really is that simple.
That other governments also fucked up, doesn’t make it better.
Boris’s poor judgement and indecision led to tens of thousands of unnecessary hospitalisations and deaths.
Any childcare costs that the employee has to shoulder personally come out of the 25% of their gross wages that they're actually able to keep themselves.
Is there any wonder that some people think why bother?
It's a horrible attitude, but its also a tragically logical one. The system is broken and needs fixing. I will vote for any party that fixes it, as opposed to just raising or lowering benefits.
What about in September and December.
I was anxious twice during COVID. Once at the start when my employer insisted on us being in the office (good luck getting me back, now) and the run up to Christmas. My mum was determined that we should have a "proper" Christmas. It took a lot of convincing her and other people I knew that it was a bad idea.
Thank you Mr S; I'm not doing too badly, although a bit spaced out. Mrs C is 'coughing well' and a bit more spaced out. Another day or two are needed at least. Test and trace wants us locked for another 8 days, so that should be more than enough.
That probably stems from the idea (which was scientific fact until last year) that large molecules couldn't be transmitted through the air because they were simply too heavy.
Edit - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/04/health/239-experts-with-one-big-claim-the-coronavirus-is-airborne.html New York times article from July last year.
I don't have BT Sport but could have been tempted to buy it for a month or two for the tour, despite the timezone difference. The lack of a commentary team is just another reason not to bother.
Hopefully BT don't make any money from this tour and it ends up back on Sky next time. This fragmentation of sport (while still having each event monopoly subscribed) really is one of the worst things to happen as a consumer.