If immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor lead to lower wages even when including “low skilled” immigrants, why don't we remove all immigration controls?
Surely we'd be the richest country in the world
It's not really meant to be a political point, nor is it replicable, but isn't that pretty much the experience of the USA?
Didn't work out too well for the "native workers" though, did it?
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
In SCotland they have said if you are under 80 do not pester your GP, think rest will be done in centres
I would suggest that the front pages are really terrible for SAGE whose advice the government largely followed in the opning months of the pandemic.
Why did a competent government not challenge SAGE and query why other countries were acting far more quickly ?
There was no single science to follow, those made choices about which model they wanted, ignoring the evidence flowing in from abroad.
I think you are getting close to the source of the problem.
There was a much wider range of scientific advice available, but the mechanism by which scientists communicate to the Government (a committee of ~ 30 of the great and good, like the President of the Royal Society) looks like it was fit for purpose in the Victorian era.
While I agree there was a range of opinions, not all those opinions were represented on SAGE.
SAGE took a vary narrow view in the early days of the pandemic. The scientists on SAGE really needed challenging by **other** scientists. (Gov't ministers do not have the expertise to do this).
Still, I expect everyone on SAGE will be given an OBE in the time-honoured British way of covering up.
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.)
How do you install a heat pump in a terraced house?
Air source heat pump to the front or rear of the property.
Have you seen all the equipment required to make an ASHP work, you need a plant room in your house.
We're not at the "novel technology" stage any longer. We are into many solutions for different circumstances, most of which have been in use for some time, and broadening the installed and usage and knowledgeable workforce base.
Who would be a scientist, eh? Job description presumably didn't include bearing the brunt of blame for sincerely arrived at views and advice. In the middle of a black swan event.
Agree with the spirit of what you said, but Covid was no black swan.
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.
Things did go well.
We got through a global pandemic without the NHS collapsing, got a vaccine, had a vaccine rollout.
Job done. The vaccine is the element the government is most responsible for and they did it.
We can't and shouldn't prevent everyone from ever dying. What we can and have done is ensure the NHS is there for those who get sick and a vaccine is there for anyone who isn't a brainwashed idiot.
The government have made plenty of mistakes. They locked down too long and too hard, not too late or too softly.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
Who would be a scientist, eh? Job description presumably didn't include bearing the brunt of blame for sincerely arrived at views and advice. In the middle of a black swan event.
Well .... an interesting question is why the scientifically advanced countries did so badly?
New Zealand or Norway or Finland do not have the wealth of scientific or epidemiological expertise available to the UK, US, France or Germany.
Can't prove this at all, but my first guess would be that in countries like the UK and the US we are so used to high tech saving us that we flounder when the relevant tech doesn't (yet) exist. Coupled with a cultural sniffiness about lower tech solutions, even if they're pretty good and available. Echoes of Jenny Harries's dismissal of testing back at the start. (Not intending to pick on JH as an individual, but as an exemplar of a wider attitude.)
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
This is exactly the point I was making earlier. The game changer was vaccines. Until then the only thing to manage in deaths was the timing and the peaks. We did that.
There is a Govt slide from early March that shows what they feared would happen if they locked down too soon and too hard.
It looks uncannily like what actually happened.
That said, Christmas was a disaster. I remember being out for a walk with a mate in early Dec and cases were rising again, in spite of the last days of the November lock down.
And the less about the Nightingale hospitals the better. It seemed like they had a plan based on something sensible and then didn't use them. If it was staffing, then they would/should have known in advance.
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.
It has long been known. Just that it is quite inconvenient to the send 'em home brigade.
As a non economist, neutral on the question, the question I would ask the economics community is whether this demonstration is universally acclaimed as true by all expert opinion or whether there are any other opinions or analyses around to compare it with.
That's how enquiry and research works normally.
Absolutely it does.
There is plenty of research, take your pick. It has been observed for example that the biggest displacement/replacement is immigrant => immigrant ie immigrants displace other immigrants in the workforce and that there is a small negative effect on the lowest paid, again usually immigrants.
But yes absolutely - the more research the better.
I'm not sure that negative effect is that small when other factors are taken into account.
Remember the original research was done in America where minimum wages are so low that most people are paid more than that.
The problem with economics is that multiple factors are always in work, regardless of the methods used to separate them.
But also if immigration doesn't significantly reduce wages, why has the lack of immigration resulted in them increasing rapidly?
As you say ceteris is never paribus so it is difficult to tell. As @rcs1000 noted yesterday a post-Covid bounce might well account for much of the current rise.
But with a minor effect as @MaxPB pointed out about possible lower per capita consumption from lower paid workers, evened out by the likely demand multiplier it is, at least at the macro level, and accepting the "it's not my GDP" premise, likely the case that immigration doesn't significantly lower wages and conversely lower immigration doesn't significantly increase them.
I think it does level out on the macro level, but it also creates winners and losers. The winners are people like us in higher wage brackets who benefit from lower priced services and the losers (and their research also identifies this) are people in lower wage brackets who have their wage growth stunted. The overall picture is of higher GDP, but increasing inequality with the rich benefitting from most of the increase.
Simply put, unrestricted immigration is an unregulated free market. I think everyone agrees that unregulated free markets create problems, to deny that is to deny basic fact. Having an unlimited pool of labour supply distorted the market in favour of middle and higher income people at the expense of lower income people. Again, we can see that effect with the top decile having a significantly higher proportion of overall earnings than they had 20 years ago.
Once again, I'm not and have never disputed that immigration increases aggregate GDP. Importing working people will tend to do that. My issue is that by doing so we've created an unequal society. It's rich people pulling the ladder up, and it's never going to be something I'm in favour of, everyone deserves their chance.
A less researched issue lies within a welfare state, the aggregate GDP increase may not actually be large enough to absorb the cost increase of having low wage immigrants within a universal welfare state. Even without COVID the UK was heading to highest level of taxation during peace time and this is a direct result of the quality of GDP being imported. A £15-20k worker is highly likely to be a net recipient of welfare (in work tax credits, NHS, education for their kids, housing benefit against about £2-4k in tax generated) in the UK which means the welfare burden is increased by each low wage worker imported.
I'm yet to be convinced that the deleterious effects of low wage migration for low wage Brits is outweighed by the net increase in aggregate GDP. In fact I'd say that most of the data supports my view that creating winners at the top does nothing to help the losers at the bottom, the money doesn't trickle down fast enough.
My issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
I would suggest that the front pages are really terrible for SAGE whose advice the government largely followed in the opning months of the pandemic.
Why did a competent government not challenge SAGE and query why other countries were acting far more quickly ?
There was no single science to follow, those made choices about which model they wanted, ignoring the evidence flowing in from abroad.
Far more quickly?
Italy - obviously hit first outside China - 9 March Spain - 14 March Canada - 17 March France - 17 March Swiss - 17 March California - 19 March Germany - 22 March New York - 22 March UK - 23 March Australia - 23 March NZ - 23 March
And on the 17 March the government advised against all unnecessary contact, at which point over half the country went into a defacto lockdown, even if many carried on as normal for a few days more.
Who would be a scientist, eh? Job description presumably didn't include bearing the brunt of blame for sincerely arrived at views and advice. In the middle of a black swan event.
Well .... an interesting question is why the scientifically advanced countries did so badly?
New Zealand or Norway or Finland do not have the wealth of scientific or epidemiological expertise available to the UK, US, France or Germany.
Can't prove this at all, but my first guess would be that in countries like the UK and the US we are so used to high tech saving us that we flounder when the relevant tech doesn't (yet) exist. Coupled with a cultural sniffiness about lower tech solutions, even if they're pretty good and available. Echoes of Jenny Harries's dismissal of testing back at the start. (Not intending to pick on JH as an individual, but as an exemplar of a wider attitude.)
In retrospect, the correct course of action was to panic and shut everything down.
Not to listen to J. Random Scientist who had a model predicting the course of the pandemic ...
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.
It has long been known. Just that it is quite inconvenient to the send 'em home brigade.
As a non economist, neutral on the question, the question I would ask the economics community is whether this demonstration is universally acclaimed as true by all expert opinion or whether there are any other opinions or analyses around to compare it with.
That's how enquiry and research works normally.
Absolutely it does.
There is plenty of research, take your pick. It has been observed for example that the biggest displacement/replacement is immigrant => immigrant ie immigrants displace other immigrants in the workforce and that there is a small negative effect on the lowest paid, again usually immigrants.
But yes absolutely - the more research the better.
I'm not sure that negative effect is that small when other factors are taken into account.
Remember the original research was done in America where minimum wages are so low that most people are paid more than that.
The problem with economics is that multiple factors are always in work, regardless of the methods used to separate them.
But also if immigration doesn't significantly reduce wages, why has the lack of immigration resulted in them increasing rapidly?
As you say ceteris is never paribus so it is difficult to tell. As @rcs1000 noted yesterday a post-Covid bounce might well account for much of the current rise.
But with a minor effect as @MaxPB pointed out about possible lower per capita consumption from lower paid workers, evened out by the likely demand multiplier it is, at least at the macro level, and accepting the "it's not my GDP" premise, likely the case that immigration doesn't significantly lower wages and conversely lower immigration doesn't significantly increase them.
I think it does level out on the macro level, but it also creates winners and losers. The winners are people like us in higher wage brackets who benefit from lower priced services and the losers (and their research also identifies this) are people in lower wage brackets who have their wage growth stunted. The overall picture is of higher GDP, but increasing inequality with the rich benefitting from most of the increase.
Simply put, unrestricted immigration is an unregulated free market. I think everyone agrees that unregulated free markets create problems, to deny that is to deny basic fact. Having an unlimited pool of labour supply distorted the market in favour of middle and higher income people at the expense of lower income people. Again, we can see that effect with the top decile having a significantly higher proportion of overall earnings than they had 20 years ago.
Once again, I'm not and have never disputed that immigration increases aggregate GDP. Importing working people will tend to do that. My issue is that by doing so we've created an unequal society. It's rich people pulling the ladder up, and it's never going to be something I'm in favour of, everyone deserves their chance.
A less researched issue lies within a welfare state, the aggregate GDP increase may not actually be large enough to absorb the cost increase of having low wage immigrants within a universal welfare state. Even without COVID the UK was heading to highest level of taxation during peace time and this is a direct result of the quality of GDP being imported. A £15-20k worker is highly likely to be a net recipient of welfare (in work tax credits, NHS, education for their kids, housing benefit against about £2-4k in tax generated) in the UK which means the welfare burden is increased by each low wage worker imported.
I'm yet to be convinced that the deleterious effects of low wage migration for low wage Brits is outweighed by the net increase in aggregate GDP. In fact I'd say that most of the data supports my view that creating winners at the top does nothing to help the losers at the bottom, the money doesn't trickle down fast enough.
My issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
Utter tosh, I’m afraid.
There were plenty calling for an earlier lockdown, including Keir and indeed - according to his later testimony - Dominic Cummings.
Although I suppose you’d assign DC to the lying category.
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.)
How do you install a heat pump in a terraced house?
I'm not sure how the British usually do it but you can install a heat pump anywhere you can get a pipe to an outer wall or roof and mount a box on the outside.
Yep, I don't really get the question. Terraced/semi/detached doesn't necessarily make that much differene for air source. What you need is good insulation and (ideally) building (or at least gutting) the house at the same time as then you just install the right pipes/radiators/underfloor heating etc.
For ground source, you obviously need a big outside space or deep hole.
I don't really see heat pump being a great retro-fit in many cases.
In principle I don't see why you can't put one anywhere you put one of those hanging air conditioning units.
But there are far better "horses for courses" available, and some homework is required. Just as for a gas boiler.
Gas boiler - Do need weather-compensating controls? what about exhaust heat recovery? how low a temperature does it need to modulate to? do I need a buffer tank to stop the underfloor heating short-cycling? Am I better with a non-combi and a solar pv hot water system, or should I use an inline heat battery such as a Sunamp?
ASHP - Do I need one that cools as well? What sort of hot water setup? Indoor or outdoor kit? Split or integrated? Do I combine it with the ventilation? What about legionella cycles? Do I need larger radiators?
Ministers at Holyrood have been warned that they risk the effectiveness of a public health campaign if they urge “anyone with a cervix” to take a smear test rather than refer directly to women.
In a press release issued yesterday to promote smear tests, the Scottish government pushed “people” to go for a check-up, with the message that “two people” die from cervical cancer each day.
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.)
How do you install a heat pump in a terraced house?
Air source heat pump to the front or rear of the property.
Have you seen all the equipment required to make an ASHP work, you need a plant room in your house.
We're not at the "novel technology" stage any longer. We are into many solutions for different circumstances, most of which have been in use for some time, and broadening the installed and usage and knowledgeable workforce base.
Those ones really do not work, we have installed a few ASHP now and the amount of equipment and pipework is significant.
The users have not been happy with the end result, firstly the equipment taking up so much space and the key fact ASHP only provide low background heat, they will never warm a radiator to anything more than lukewarm.
We are not aware of any advance in the ASHP technology that in anyway matches the convinience of a standard boiler.
Also we can supply and fit a decent boiler for around £1200-£1500. An ASHP cost 10 times that.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
Utter tosh, I’m afraid.
There were plenty calling for an earlier lockdown, including Keir and indeed - according to his later testimony - Dominic Cummings.
Although I suppose you’d assign DC to the lying category.
Sorry - the point about the vaccines is not 'utter tosh', plus there is a need to balance economy and health, and peoples mental health. You asked for someone to make the case - I did. There are people calling for restrictions now, doesn't make them 'right'.
If immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor lead to lower wages even when including “low skilled” immigrants, why don't we remove all immigration controls?
Surely we'd be the richest country in the world
Because outside the EU there are some extremely troubled places where literally millions of people want to flee to safety. Such huge sudden changes are not desirable, and would have a detrimental effect on other countries doing their duty and accepting refugees.
Free movement is a concept that makes sense when there's a rational choice available. For example, there's no country in Central or Western Europe where you can't get a decent standard of living. Not many of us would choose to go and live in Syria.
Further, free movement of labour is part of a free market. Free movement of goods, capital, and people ought to come hand in hand. Giving other countries the freedom to sell into our market creates jobs in those countries and reduces the outward migration pressure over time. That enriches their markets and gives us richer export markets. Trade is a virtuous circle, and free movement of people is part of trade. But it needs to come about incrementally to prevent system shocks.
An excellent post, getting to the heart of the matter. Whether free movement of people properly belongs to the whole membership of single market in goods and services or properly belongs to the sovereignty of a nation state is exactly the question which divides.
Both views are entirely rational, centrist and moderate. I think the nation state is the natural unit, supporters of the EU think the larger unit is.
For good political and humanist reasons I don't think people can automatically be placed alongside goods and services as interchangeable assets. Similarly I believe a Tanzanian or Korean should have the same opportunity to live in the UK, Ecuador or Belgium as a German or Estonian should have. Which is why I voted for Brexit.
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.
It has long been known. Just that it is quite inconvenient to the send 'em home brigade.
As a non economist, neutral on the question, the question I would ask the economics community is whether this demonstration is universally acclaimed as true by all expert opinion or whether there are any other opinions or analyses around to compare it with.
That's how enquiry and research works normally.
Absolutely it does.
There is plenty of research, take your pick. It has been observed for example that the biggest displacement/replacement is immigrant => immigrant ie immigrants displace other immigrants in the workforce and that there is a small negative effect on the lowest paid, again usually immigrants.
But yes absolutely - the more research the better.
I'm not sure that negative effect is that small when other factors are taken into account.
Remember the original research was done in America where minimum wages are so low that most people are paid more than that.
The problem with economics is that multiple factors are always in work, regardless of the methods used to separate them.
But also if immigration doesn't significantly reduce wages, why has the lack of immigration resulted in them increasing rapidly?
As you say ceteris is never paribus so it is difficult to tell. As @rcs1000 noted yesterday a post-Covid bounce might well account for much of the current rise.
But with a minor effect as @MaxPB pointed out about possible lower per capita consumption from lower paid workers, evened out by the likely demand multiplier it is, at least at the macro level, and accepting the "it's not my GDP" premise, likely the case that immigration doesn't significantly lower wages and conversely lower immigration doesn't significantly increase them.
I think it does level out on the macro level, but it also creates winners and losers. The winners are people like us in higher wage brackets who benefit from lower priced services and the losers (and their research also identifies this) are people in lower wage brackets who have their wage growth stunted. The overall picture is of higher GDP, but increasing inequality with the rich benefitting from most of the increase.
Simply put, unrestricted immigration is an unregulated free market. I think everyone agrees that unregulated free markets create problems, to deny that is to deny basic fact. Having an unlimited pool of labour supply distorted the market in favour of middle and higher income people at the expense of lower income people. Again, we can see that effect with the top decile having a significantly higher proportion of overall earnings than they had 20 years ago.
Once again, I'm not and have never disputed that immigration increases aggregate GDP. Importing working people will tend to do that. My issue is that by doing so we've created an unequal society. It's rich people pulling the ladder up, and it's never going to be something I'm in favour of, everyone deserves their chance.
A less researched issue lies within a welfare state, the aggregate GDP increase may not actually be large enough to absorb the cost increase of having low wage immigrants within a universal welfare state. Even without COVID the UK was heading to highest level of taxation during peace time and this is a direct result of the quality of GDP being imported. A £15-20k worker is highly likely to be a net recipient of welfare (in work tax credits, NHS, education for their kids, housing benefit against about £2-4k in tax generated) in the UK which means the welfare burden is increased by each low wage worker imported.
I'm yet to be convinced that the deleterious effects of low wage migration for low wage Brits is outweighed by the net increase in aggregate GDP. In fact I'd say that most of the data supports my view that creating winners at the top does nothing to help the losers at the bottom, the money doesn't trickle down fast enough.
My issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
Not necessarily, the gains made at the top are usually larger than the losses at the bottom.
Unlimited immigration creates an inequality issue, not a GDP issue. In a welfare state it also creates a tax issue.
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.
Who would be a scientist, eh? Job description presumably didn't include bearing the brunt of blame for sincerely arrived at views and advice. In the middle of a black swan event.
Well .... an interesting question is why the scientifically advanced countries did so badly?
New Zealand or Norway or Finland do not have the wealth of scientific or epidemiological expertise available to the UK, US, France or Germany.
Can't prove this at all, but my first guess would be that in countries like the UK and the US we are so used to high tech saving us that we flounder when the relevant tech doesn't (yet) exist. Coupled with a cultural sniffiness about lower tech solutions, even if they're pretty good and available. Echoes of Jenny Harries's dismissal of testing back at the start. (Not intending to pick on JH as an individual, but as an exemplar of a wider attitude.)
See also the Lateral Flows, where most of the complaints about them are dictionary definitions of perfect* being the enemy of good.
*also, taking PCRs as perfect is an interesting line to take, in itself.
I'd also suggest that big, densely populated countries that are well-connected, both intra- and inter-nationally, will end up faring poorer when people start to try to compare apples with apples.
What was the total number of international passengers into New Zealand in total in 2019? Go on, guess. Give you a second or two.
Well, 3.88 million is the total number of overseas visitors. It's not perfect but it's a good proxy.
That's slightly less than total passengers into Leeds-Bradford for the same year.
If immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor lead to lower wages even when including “low skilled” immigrants, why don't we remove all immigration controls?
Surely we'd be the richest country in the world
The logic of that of course is that every country would be the richest country in the world. Which, along with your reasoning, is why there might just be some tiny qualifications to make before putting global FOM into practice.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
Utter tosh, I’m afraid.
There were plenty calling for an earlier lockdown, including Keir and indeed - according to his later testimony - Dominic Cummings.
Although I suppose you’d assign DC to the lying category.
Sorry - the point about the vaccines is not 'utter tosh', plus there is a need to balance economy and health, and peoples mental health. You asked for someone to make the case - I did. There are people calling for restrictions now, doesn't make them 'right'.
One of the questions is when it became clear to those with eyes to see that there would be a safe, effective vaccine that could be produced by the billion in 2021.
It wasn't as late as December 2020, and it wasn't as early as March 2020 (though I've got vague memories of some of the vaccine people being pretty confident pretty early on).
Anyone got a better feel for when the "if" of vaccination became "when"?
If immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor lead to lower wages even when including “low skilled” immigrants, why don't we remove all immigration controls?
Surely we'd be the richest country in the world
Because outside the EU there are some extremely troubled places where literally millions of people want to flee to safety. Such huge sudden changes are not desirable, and would have a detrimental effect on other countries doing their duty and accepting refugees.
Free movement is a concept that makes sense when there's a rational choice available. For example, there's no country in Central or Western Europe where you can't get a decent standard of living. Not many of us would choose to go and live in Syria.
Further, free movement of labour is part of a free market. Free movement of goods, capital, and people ought to come hand in hand. Giving other countries the freedom to sell into our market creates jobs in those countries and reduces the outward migration pressure over time. That enriches their markets and gives us richer export markets. Trade is a virtuous circle, and free movement of people is part of trade. But it needs to come about incrementally to prevent system shocks.
Did these chaps make this clear in their Nobel Prize winning work, that they were only talking about immigration from inside a free market?
And as to your last line; does that mean that, for the sake of an example, the UK being the only country to fully open its borders to the newly joined EU states, could have caused some non-good immigration?
If immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor lead to lower wages even when including “low skilled” immigrants, why don't we remove all immigration controls?
Surely we'd be the richest country in the world
Because outside the EU there are some extremely troubled places where literally millions of people want to flee to safety. Such huge sudden changes are not desirable, and would have a detrimental effect on other countries doing their duty and accepting refugees.
Free movement is a concept that makes sense when there's a rational choice available. For example, there's no country in Central or Western Europe where you can't get a decent standard of living. Not many of us would choose to go and live in Syria.
Further, free movement of labour is part of a free market. Free movement of goods, capital, and people ought to come hand in hand. Giving other countries the freedom to sell into our market creates jobs in those countries and reduces the outward migration pressure over time. That enriches their markets and gives us richer export markets. Trade is a virtuous circle, and free movement of people is part of trade. But it needs to come about incrementally to prevent system shocks.
An excellent post, getting to the heart of the matter. Whether free movement of people properly belongs to the whole membership of single market in goods and services or properly belongs to the sovereignty of a nation state is exactly the question which divides.
Both views are entirely rational, centrist and moderate. I think the nation state is the natural unit, supporters of the EU think the larger unit is.
For good political and humanist reasons I don't think people can automatically be placed alongside goods and services as interchangeable assets. Similarly I believe a Tanzanian or Korean should have the same opportunity to live in the UK, Ecuador or Belgium as a German or Estonian should have. Which is why I voted for Brexit.
I dispute the concept of there being a "natural" unit. The size and composition of effective political units has changed greatly over time. Technological innovations swell and shrink the size of stable states. For example good roads make long-distance communication and movement of military units efficient, enabling larger states. The castle made controlling larger territories trickier. Then artillery made the castle less effective in turn, enabling larger states again. Similarly political and economic innovations changed the equilibrium. And those equilibria are also affected by geography, language, climate and so on.
None of that makes it easy to decide where the equilibrium should be, but I'd gently guide people away from thinking in terms of what worked in 500AD, 1000AD, or 1500AD being natural for other times.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
Utter tosh, I’m afraid.
There were plenty calling for an earlier lockdown, including Keir and indeed - according to his later testimony - Dominic Cummings.
Although I suppose you’d assign DC to the lying category.
Sorry - the point about the vaccines is not 'utter tosh', plus there is a need to balance economy and health, and peoples mental health. You asked for someone to make the case - I did. There are people calling for restrictions now, doesn't make them 'right'.
One of the questions is when it became clear to those with eyes to see that there would be a safe, effective vaccine that could be produced by the billion in 2021.
It wasn't as late as December 2020, and it wasn't as early as March 2020 (though I've got vague memories of some of the vaccine people being pretty confident pretty early on).
Anyone got a better feel for when the "if" of vaccination became "when"?
Its possible people within the research teams new, but double blinding should mean only on unblinding of data was the success fully evident. The published version to the press was Nov 2020. We have come a long way since then, something which feels like some take for granted. It has been an astonishing achievement. Criticise the scientists advising the government(s) by all means, and behavioural scientists most of all, but science itself has played a blinder with vaccines.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
You can make arguments about balance for the later parts but the first few weeks were pure incompetence with no redeeming features, because the failure to do cheap things early meant you had to do expensive things later.
A close parallel would be: Your house was on fire, and you had a fire extinguisher, but yoy didn't use it for fear of damaging the carpet. Then once the fire had spread to the bedroom you called the fire brigade and the carpet got wrecked anyhow, plus most of the house burned down.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
Surely it's about your degree of confidence that a vaccine is coming. If that is Low you're faced with living for a long time with the virus in epidemic mode - so you need a sustainable regime that balances a fair amount of immunity-building infection with a level of economic and personal freedom that is tolerable. But if your confidence on vaccines is High the calculus changes. Now, since you're likely to soon acquire this gamechanging tool, it makes less sense to manage things as above and more sense to try and minimize the damage in the interim. I'm not sure we quite got this right.
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.
If we want to have an eye on the longer-term, I do wonder if we need a complete overhaul of our childcare policy:
- Our fertility rate is well below the replacement and has been falling again in recent years
- The demographic challenge is likely to get worse, as we have chosen for the moment to reduce immigration from previous highs, which previously mitigated the increased dependency ratio by bringing in a lot of 20 to 30 year-olds
- For single parents or where the lower-earner is on a modest income, childcare costs (for young children in particular) can have a really detrimental impact on the family's finances, and therefore reduce the likelihood of having children / both parents going back to work
It strikes me as an area where free or heavily subsidised childcare could have a positive overall impact on the economy in terms of both workforce participation longer-term demographic trends.
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.)
How do you install a heat pump in a terraced house?
Air source heat pump to the front or rear of the property.
Have you seen all the equipment required to make an ASHP work, you need a plant room in your house.
There will be a big selling scandal brewing I suspect but the killer aspect is noise. Can you imagine trying to sleep at night in a street where every house has a heat pump?
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
Utter tosh, I’m afraid.
There were plenty calling for an earlier lockdown, including Keir and indeed - according to his later testimony - Dominic Cummings.
Although I suppose you’d assign DC to the lying category.
Sorry - the point about the vaccines is not 'utter tosh', plus there is a need to balance economy and health, and peoples mental health. You asked for someone to make the case - I did. There are people calling for restrictions now, doesn't make them 'right'.
One of the questions is when it became clear to those with eyes to see that there would be a safe, effective vaccine that could be produced by the billion in 2021.
It wasn't as late as December 2020, and it wasn't as early as March 2020 (though I've got vague memories of some of the vaccine people being pretty confident pretty early on).
Anyone got a better feel for when the "if" of vaccination became "when"?
Approvals started in late September/early October but, even then, there were doubts about how the production and supply chains would cope and also the logistics of getting jabs in arms. First jab was 8th December.
I see Superman's son is bisexual. Where will it all end?
Reminds me of this discussion.
It’s impossible! Lois Lane could never have Superman’s baby. Do you think her fallopian tubes could handle his sperm? I guarantee you that when he cums during sex, he probably blows a load like a shotgun blast… right through her back! And if by chance Lois does get pregnant, what about her womb? Do you think it’s strong enough to carry his child?...
...He’s an alien, for Christ sake. His Kryptonian biological makeup is enhanced by Earth’s yellow sun. If Lois gets a tan, the kid could kick right through her stomach. Only someone like Wonder Woman has a strong enough uterus to carry his kid. The only way Superman could bang regular chicks is if he does it with a kryptonite condom, but that would probably kill him!
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.
That’s simplistic. Sanger deserves more credit than Nanopore IMHO
If immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor lead to lower wages even when including “low skilled” immigrants, why don't we remove all immigration controls?
Surely we'd be the richest country in the world
Because outside the EU there are some extremely troubled places where literally millions of people want to flee to safety. Such huge sudden changes are not desirable, and would have a detrimental effect on other countries doing their duty and accepting refugees.
Free movement is a concept that makes sense when there's a rational choice available. For example, there's no country in Central or Western Europe where you can't get a decent standard of living. Not many of us would choose to go and live in Syria.
Further, free movement of labour is part of a free market. Free movement of goods, capital, and people ought to come hand in hand. Giving other countries the freedom to sell into our market creates jobs in those countries and reduces the outward migration pressure over time. That enriches their markets and gives us richer export markets. Trade is a virtuous circle, and free movement of people is part of trade. But it needs to come about incrementally to prevent system shocks.
An excellent post, getting to the heart of the matter. Whether free movement of people properly belongs to the whole membership of single market in goods and services or properly belongs to the sovereignty of a nation state is exactly the question which divides.
Both views are entirely rational, centrist and moderate. I think the nation state is the natural unit, supporters of the EU think the larger unit is.
For good political and humanist reasons I don't think people can automatically be placed alongside goods and services as interchangeable assets. Similarly I believe a Tanzanian or Korean should have the same opportunity to live in the UK, Ecuador or Belgium as a German or Estonian should have. Which is why I voted for Brexit.
I dispute the concept of there being a "natural" unit. The size and composition of effective political units has changed greatly over time. Technological innovations swell and shrink the size of stable states. For example good roads make long-distance communication and movement of military units efficient, enabling larger states. The castle made controlling larger territories trickier. Then artillery made the castle less effective in turn, enabling larger states again. Similarly political and economic innovations changed the equilibrium. And those equilibria are also affected by geography, language, climate and so on.
None of that makes it easy to decide where the equilibrium should be, but I'd gently guide people away from thinking in terms of what worked in 500AD, 1000AD, or 1500AD being natural for other times.
Completely agree with you on your meaning of 'natural' - a word which has a number of meanings. I don't think it alters the substance of what I was saying. For natural read 'the unit that is on balance right at this time in human history'
I see Superman's son is bisexual. Where will it all end?
Reminds me of this discussion.
It’s impossible! Lois Lane could never have Superman’s baby. Do you think her fallopian tubes could handle his sperm? I guarantee you that when he cums during sex, he probably blows a load like a shotgun blast… right through her back! And if by chance Lois does get pregnant, what about her womb? Do you think it’s strong enough to carry his child?...
...He’s an alien, for Christ sake. His Kryptonian biological makeup is enhanced by Earth’s yellow sun. If Lois gets a tan, the kid could kick right through her stomach. Only someone like Wonder Woman has a strong enough uterus to carry his kid. The only way Superman could bang regular chicks is if he does it with a kryptonite condom, but that would probably kill him!
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
Utter tosh, I’m afraid.
There were plenty calling for an earlier lockdown, including Keir and indeed - according to his later testimony - Dominic Cummings.
Although I suppose you’d assign DC to the lying category.
Sorry - the point about the vaccines is not 'utter tosh', plus there is a need to balance economy and health, and peoples mental health. You asked for someone to make the case - I did. There are people calling for restrictions now, doesn't make them 'right'.
One of the questions is when it became clear to those with eyes to see that there would be a safe, effective vaccine that could be produced by the billion in 2021.
It wasn't as late as December 2020, and it wasn't as early as March 2020 (though I've got vague memories of some of the vaccine people being pretty confident pretty early on).
Anyone got a better feel for when the "if" of vaccination became "when"?
That's an important question, but it's not simply vaccines or nothing. We've also had several improvements in treatment that reduce fatality - reduction in use of mechanical ventilation, dexamethasone, Merck's new anti-viral.
Even if we'd never developed a vaccine, improvements in treatment would mean that delaying cases would save a large proportion of deaths.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
Utter tosh, I’m afraid.
There were plenty calling for an earlier lockdown, including Keir and indeed - according to his later testimony - Dominic Cummings.
Although I suppose you’d assign DC to the lying category.
Sorry - the point about the vaccines is not 'utter tosh', plus there is a need to balance economy and health, and peoples mental health. You asked for someone to make the case - I did. There are people calling for restrictions now, doesn't make them 'right'.
One of the questions is when it became clear to those with eyes to see that there would be a safe, effective vaccine that could be produced by the billion in 2021.
It wasn't as late as December 2020, and it wasn't as early as March 2020 (though I've got vague memories of some of the vaccine people being pretty confident pretty early on).
Anyone got a better feel for when the "if" of vaccination became "when"?
Its possible people within the research teams new, but double blinding should mean only on unblinding of data was the success fully evident. The published version to the press was Nov 2020. We have come a long way since then, something which feels like some take for granted. It has been an astonishing achievement. Criticise the scientists advising the government(s) by all means, and behavioural scientists most of all, but science itself has played a blinder with vaccines.
Absolutely agree. The scientists have worked wonders.
And the protocols of medical testing rightly stop you using a product until you're sure and no peeking.
But there's also a kind of scientific sixth sense that can tell the difference between "this problem can't be solved" and "we're going to crack this one pretty soon". Although it wouldn't have been right to use vaccines before all the numbers were in, the timeframe of how long we were likely to have to sit it out would have been moderately clear before December. From a decision-making point of view, that's the when I'm wondering about.
(And given that the vaccination campaign started in late December, the decisions about Christmas were a bit like celebrating VE day in July 1944.)
Who would be a scientist, eh? Job description presumably didn't include bearing the brunt of blame for sincerely arrived at views and advice. In the middle of a black swan event.
Well .... an interesting question is why the scientifically advanced countries did so badly?
New Zealand or Norway or Finland do not have the wealth of scientific or epidemiological expertise available to the UK, US, France or Germany.
Can't prove this at all, but my first guess would be that in countries like the UK and the US we are so used to high tech saving us that we flounder when the relevant tech doesn't (yet) exist. Coupled with a cultural sniffiness about lower tech solutions, even if they're pretty good and available. Echoes of Jenny Harries's dismissal of testing back at the start. (Not intending to pick on JH as an individual, but as an exemplar of a wider attitude.)
In retrospect, the correct course of action was to panic and shut everything down.
(Snip)
Yes, in this case. But imagine the harm that would have been done if we'd locked down in response to SARS in 2002-3, or MERS in 2013 (4 cases in the UK; 3 fatal). Not only did it thankfully prove unnecessary then, it would have made people much less likely to lock down in response to Covid-19.
Lockdowns are immensely harmful. This time they proved a necessary evil, but an unnecessary lockdown would be hideous. This is the thin line that governments need to tread.
I see Superman's son is bisexual. Where will it all end?
Reminds me of this discussion.
It’s impossible! Lois Lane could never have Superman’s baby. Do you think her fallopian tubes could handle his sperm? I guarantee you that when he cums during sex, he probably blows a load like a shotgun blast… right through her back! And if by chance Lois does get pregnant, what about her womb? Do you think it’s strong enough to carry his child?...
...He’s an alien, for Christ sake. His Kryptonian biological makeup is enhanced by Earth’s yellow sun. If Lois gets a tan, the kid could kick right through her stomach. Only someone like Wonder Woman has a strong enough uterus to carry his kid. The only way Superman could bang regular chicks is if he does it with a kryptonite condom, but that would probably kill him!
That period did bugger us. We did get an early start on vaccines, and then ramped up in the new year when we could, but January was so terrible a month that even blunting or delaying things just a little bit would have had massive positive effects.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
Surely it's about your degree of confidence that a vaccine is coming. If that is Low you're faced with living for a long time with the virus in epidemic mode - so you need a sustainable regime that balances a fair amount of immunity-building infection with a level of economic and personal freedom that is tolerable. But if your confidence on vaccines is High the calculus changes. Now, since you're likely to soon acquire this gamechanging tool, it makes less sense to manage things as above and more sense to try and minimize the damage in the interim. I'm not sure we quite got this right.
I think once we had the vaccine, we should have had a hard lockdown and raced through the most vulnerable.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
Surely it's about your degree of confidence that a vaccine is coming. If that is Low you're faced with living for a long time with the virus in epidemic mode - so you need a sustainable regime that balances a fair amount of immunity-building infection with a level of economic and personal freedom that is tolerable. But if your confidence on vaccines is High the calculus changes. Now, since you're likely to soon acquire this gamechanging tool, it makes less sense to manage things as above and more sense to try and minimize the damage in the interim. I'm not sure we quite got this right.
Some serious scientists thought we wouldn't get a vaccine at all. Some thought we would but it would be only 50 % effective. We didn't know for sure until November 2020.
I see Superman's son is bisexual. Where will it all end?
Reminds me of this discussion.
It’s impossible! Lois Lane could never have Superman’s baby. Do you think her fallopian tubes could handle his sperm? I guarantee you that when he cums during sex, he probably blows a load like a shotgun blast… right through her back! And if by chance Lois does get pregnant, what about her womb? Do you think it’s strong enough to carry his child?...
I seem to recall there was a deleted scene from Hancock that touched on that very point, punching holes in a trailer.
Another rules update which means vaccine mandates for people working in care homes settles this for yes.
This is bad form, I think - last one on vaccine passports was arguable, but this is hard to put in the original definition of restrictions on social contact, imho.
I'm green either way on this market (traded out some of my no position after the last clarification) but biased towards no.
Edit: for example, it was made clear that the TfL mask mandate did not settle this market for yes - seems inconsistent with respect to vaccine mandates for care home staff?
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
Surely it's about your degree of confidence that a vaccine is coming. If that is Low you're faced with living for a long time with the virus in epidemic mode - so you need a sustainable regime that balances a fair amount of immunity-building infection with a level of economic and personal freedom that is tolerable. But if your confidence on vaccines is High the calculus changes. Now, since you're likely to soon acquire this gamechanging tool, it makes less sense to manage things as above and more sense to try and minimize the damage in the interim. I'm not sure we quite got this right.
I think once we had the vaccine, we should have had a hard lockdown and raced through the most vulnerable.
We've managed to have a lot more people die after the announcement of a working vaccine than before. That is understandable for a country like New Zealand, that successfully kept the virus out at first, but it feels like an enormous failure for Britain and similar countries.
Boris Johnson’s £12 billion levy will not be enough to fund the NHS and further tax increases are needed, according to a think tank.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies said the sum would only be sufficient for the short term and would not address the deepening health and social care crisis.
It said that the health and social care levy of 1.25 per cent on top national insurance may need to increase to 3.15 per cent from 2025 to generate an additional £19 billion. This would add £960 to the tax bill a worker earning £40,000
If immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor lead to lower wages even when including “low skilled” immigrants, why don't we remove all immigration controls?
Surely we'd be the richest country in the world
Because outside the EU there are some extremely troubled places where literally millions of people want to flee to safety. Such huge sudden changes are not desirable, and would have a detrimental effect on other countries doing their duty and accepting refugees.
Free movement is a concept that makes sense when there's a rational choice available. For example, there's no country in Central or Western Europe where you can't get a decent standard of living. Not many of us would choose to go and live in Syria.
Further, free movement of labour is part of a free market. Free movement of goods, capital, and people ought to come hand in hand. Giving other countries the freedom to sell into our market creates jobs in those countries and reduces the outward migration pressure over time. That enriches their markets and gives us richer export markets. Trade is a virtuous circle, and free movement of people is part of trade. But it needs to come about incrementally to prevent system shocks.
An excellent post, getting to the heart of the matter. Whether free movement of people properly belongs to the whole membership of single market in goods and services or properly belongs to the sovereignty of a nation state is exactly the question which divides.
Both views are entirely rational, centrist and moderate. I think the nation state is the natural unit, supporters of the EU think the larger unit is.
For good political and humanist reasons I don't think people can automatically be placed alongside goods and services as interchangeable assets. Similarly I believe a Tanzanian or Korean should have the same opportunity to live in the UK, Ecuador or Belgium as a German or Estonian should have. Which is why I voted for Brexit.
I dispute the concept of there being a "natural" unit. The size and composition of effective political units has changed greatly over time. Technological innovations swell and shrink the size of stable states. For example good roads make long-distance communication and movement of military units efficient, enabling larger states. The castle made controlling larger territories trickier. Then artillery made the castle less effective in turn, enabling larger states again. Similarly political and economic innovations changed the equilibrium. And those equilibria are also affected by geography, language, climate and so on.
None of that makes it easy to decide where the equilibrium should be, but I'd gently guide people away from thinking in terms of what worked in 500AD, 1000AD, or 1500AD being natural for other times.
But the mere existence of the status quo for centuries bends the "natural" unit towards itself. It cements a primary language, it builds up a body of law, it creates a unique political culture, it creates more of a common identity. If the component parts are too different than all that bending isn't enough to get over the original difference, as the Habsburgs and Ottomans found, but the bending happens nevertheless.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
Surely it's about your degree of confidence that a vaccine is coming. If that is Low you're faced with living for a long time with the virus in epidemic mode - so you need a sustainable regime that balances a fair amount of immunity-building infection with a level of economic and personal freedom that is tolerable. But if your confidence on vaccines is High the calculus changes. Now, since you're likely to soon acquire this gamechanging tool, it makes less sense to manage things as above and more sense to try and minimize the damage in the interim. I'm not sure we quite got this right.
Some serious scientists thought we wouldn't get a vaccine at all. Some thought we would but it would be only 50 % effective. We didn't know for sure until November 2020.
You don't have to wait until you're 100% sure to do X to save 10s of thousands of lives.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
Surely it's about your degree of confidence that a vaccine is coming. If that is Low you're faced with living for a long time with the virus in epidemic mode - so you need a sustainable regime that balances a fair amount of immunity-building infection with a level of economic and personal freedom that is tolerable. But if your confidence on vaccines is High the calculus changes. Now, since you're likely to soon acquire this gamechanging tool, it makes less sense to manage things as above and more sense to try and minimize the damage in the interim. I'm not sure we quite got this right.
I think once we had the vaccine, we should have had a hard lockdown and raced through the most vulnerable.
We've managed to have a lot more people die after the announcement of a working vaccine than before. That is understandable for a country like New Zealand, that successfully kept the virus out at first, but it feels like an enormous failure for Britain and similar countries.
Yep - I tend to agree. It's like dying on Nov 10th 1918. Unpalatable as it was, we should have locked down hard to get cases down over christmas and get us through to vaccinating the most vulnerable at least once.
(((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!!!!".
This is where their biggest defence will come. And in some instances it is not wholly unreasonable - and it is part of why they have been so reluctant to move away from advice, even when advice might clash, because while you will get criticised for making the wrong choice, it's easier to defend your decision if an august body advised you to. Hence why some people, a bit unfairly, suggested the advisers were really in charge.
In all the discussions of immigration, population ageing needs to be front and centre. Looking at the UK labour market data, since the Brexit referendum our population aged 16-49 has gone down by about 500,000 people. Our population aged 50+ has gone up by 1.3 million, including 700,000 over 65. So the fact is, we *are* going to have continued immigration, in sizeable numbers. And in so-called low skill occupations, too. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just deluding themselves. I liked three things about using the EU single market for providing that immigration. First, it was reciprocal, so we got something in return. Second, freedom of movement gave people rights and freedoms. It treated people as citizens, not simply commodities, tied to a specific employer or job. Third, the system was simple, lowering the burden of red tape for both employers and employees. My guess is that we will end up with continued immigration, because of the demand for workers created by our ageing society, but with no reciprocity, loads more red tape, and with workers treated as simply labour inputs, not citizens with rights.
It’s impossible! Lois Lane could never have Superman’s baby. Do you think her fallopian tubes could handle his sperm? I guarantee you that when he cums during sex, he probably blows a load like a shotgun blast… right through her back! And if by chance Lois does get pregnant, what about her womb? Do you think it’s strong enough to carry his child?...
...He’s an alien, for Christ sake. His Kryptonian biological makeup is enhanced by Earth’s yellow sun. If Lois gets a tan, the kid could kick right through her stomach. Only someone like Wonder Woman has a strong enough uterus to carry his kid. The only way Superman could bang regular chicks is if he does it with a kryptonite condom, but that would probably kill him!
Given which, we'd better pray his son is a confirmed bottom.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
Surely it's about your degree of confidence that a vaccine is coming. If that is Low you're faced with living for a long time with the virus in epidemic mode - so you need a sustainable regime that balances a fair amount of immunity-building infection with a level of economic and personal freedom that is tolerable. But if your confidence on vaccines is High the calculus changes. Now, since you're likely to soon acquire this gamechanging tool, it makes less sense to manage things as above and more sense to try and minimize the damage in the interim. I'm not sure we quite got this right.
Some serious scientists thought we wouldn't get a vaccine at all. Some thought we would but it would be only 50 % effective. We didn't know for sure until November 2020.
You don't have to wait until you're 100% sure to do X to save 10s of thousands of lives.
Indeed, that was very much the approach taken with some of our rollout, with 12 week gap etc.
What on earth is going on with England's (presumably mainly teenage) vaccination rollout. Scotland had almost as many 1st doses yesterday !
There's an idiotic limitation of no walk in centre appointments for under 16s, they have to get it at school which is significantly slowing them down as teams need to go to each school individually rather than have parents go to the local vaccine centre on the weekend or after school. They still make these schoolboy errors this far into the programme, it's a shocking indictment of how Whitehall thinks.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
September and November was a failure to properly learn the lessons from March.
To my eternal frustration nobody stood up and said, our failures from March were based on planning failures. Instead we got "follow the science" over and over.
Low and behold Twitter's making the same mistake over again. I can only hope the new national pandemic people aren't listening.
And in summer 2020 we repeated the mistakes of March - allowing covid to be imported again from Benidorm while the media were obsessing about Bournemouth beach.
Is it just me or are there some straws in the wind that suggest that there are a lot of people who intend to try giving Israel the full South Africa treatment?
That's the treatment where the opposition to regime X never allows anyone else to draw attention relevantly to the evils of anyone else, or to any virtues in regime X, and where it is an unforgiveable sin to think differently. One to watch.
(((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!!!!".
This is where their biggest defence will come. And in some instances it is not wholly unreasonable - and it is part of why they have been so reluctant to move away from advice, even when advice might clash, because while you will get criticised for making the wrong choice, it's easier to defend your decision if an august body advised you to. Hence why some people, a bit unfairly, suggested the advisers were really in charge.
And they clearly do have a defence on this. They largely followed the advice. I think they are far more culpable with the autumn/winter and how that was handled. More dither than decision.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
Utter tosh, I’m afraid.
There were plenty calling for an earlier lockdown, including Keir and indeed - according to his later testimony - Dominic Cummings.
Although I suppose you’d assign DC to the lying category.
Sorry - the point about the vaccines is not 'utter tosh', plus there is a need to balance economy and health, and peoples mental health. You asked for someone to make the case - I did. There are people calling for restrictions now, doesn't make them 'right'.
One of the questions is when it became clear to those with eyes to see that there would be a safe, effective vaccine that could be produced by the billion in 2021.
It wasn't as late as December 2020, and it wasn't as early as March 2020 (though I've got vague memories of some of the vaccine people being pretty confident pretty early on).
Anyone got a better feel for when the "if" of vaccination became "when"?
Yes, this is imo a key question. If you are confident (albeit not sure) the vaccine for a disease is coming soon, surely your priority should be to minimize deaths & serious illness from the disease as you wait for it. Unless such an approach involves unacceptable other costs this has to be what you do. My recollection fwiw is that by early summer of 2020 it was known here on this forum that vaccines were working and would be rolled out by end of the year at latest, so I presume the decision makers were aware well before then.
I see Superman's son is bisexual. Where will it all end?
Boring. The original LGBT letters are so vanilla thesedays.
Haven’t Canada added a few more these days ?
It was around 3-4 years ago I felt like an extended initialism including IQA started getting more traction, and + then got in there, but yes they have extended it more.
I'm all for inclusivity but I feel like it is not beyond the wit of man (or anyone else for that matter) to come up with an umbrella term that is acceptable and pronouncable. If you have to speak out each letter, you really cannot go much beyond 4-5 or it becomes unwieldy to say.
In all the discussions of immigration, population ageing needs to be front and centre. Looking at the UK labour market data, since the Brexit referendum our population aged 16-49 has gone down by about 500,000 people. Our population aged 50+ has gone up by 1.3 million, including 700,000 over 65. So the fact is, we *are* going to have continued immigration, in sizeable numbers. And in so-called low skill occupations, too. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just deluding themselves. I liked three things about using the EU single market for providing that immigration. First, it was reciprocal, so we got something in return. Second, freedom of movement gave people rights and freedoms. It treated people as citizens, not simply commodities, tied to a specific employer or job. Third, the system was simple, lowering the burden of red tape for both employers and employees. My guess is that we will end up with continued immigration, because of the demand for workers created by our ageing society, but with no reciprocity, loads more red tape, and with workers treated as simply labour inputs, not citizens with rights.
And it had no numerical control, which meant that it biased the system against people from anywhere else, eg the whole of Africa. This was the fatal flaw, both politically and from a humane viewpoint.
What on earth is going on with England's (presumably mainly teenage) vaccination rollout. Scotland had almost as many 1st doses yesterday !
There's an idiotic limitation of no walk in centre appointments for under 16s, they have to get it at school which is significantly slowing them down as teams need to go to each school individually rather than have parents go to the local vaccine centre on the weekend or after school. They still make these schoolboy errors this far into the programme, it's a shocking indictment of how Whitehall thinks.
The thing is that doing jabs in schools ought to be easy and efficient. You know where the kids are, you have 6 hours a day, 5 days a week to do them and the only place they can hide is behind the bike sheds. It ought to be way better than relying on walk-ins. That's why other schoolchild vaccinations are done in school.
But for some reason, it's not happening and I haven't had any indication on when Schoolchild in Romford is getting their jab.
Someone needs to be saying "Action This Day" in a booming voice (Geoffrey Cox, maybe?) until action is enacted. Yeah, right.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
You can make arguments about balance for the later parts but the first few weeks were pure incompetence with no redeeming features, because the failure to do cheap things early meant you had to do expensive things later.
A close parallel would be: Your house was on fire, and you had a fire extinguisher, but yoy didn't use it for fear of damaging the carpet. Then once the fire had spread to the bedroom you called the fire brigade and the carpet got wrecked anyhow, plus most of the house burned down.
We talk about lockdowns so casually now its difficult to remember how extreme it was at the time.
Given that cumulative reported deaths only reach three figures on 18/03/21 I doubt the public would have been ready for more restrictions earlier which were in any case already being introduced a week before the first lockdown.
In all the discussions of immigration, population ageing needs to be front and centre. Looking at the UK labour market data, since the Brexit referendum our population aged 16-49 has gone down by about 500,000 people. Our population aged 50+ has gone up by 1.3 million, including 700,000 over 65. So the fact is, we *are* going to have continued immigration, in sizeable numbers. And in so-called low skill occupations, too. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just deluding themselves. I liked three things about using the EU single market for providing that immigration. First, it was reciprocal, so we got something in return. Second, freedom of movement gave people rights and freedoms. It treated people as citizens, not simply commodities, tied to a specific employer or job. Third, the system was simple, lowering the burden of red tape for both employers and employees. My guess is that we will end up with continued immigration, because of the demand for workers created by our ageing society, but with no reciprocity, loads more red tape, and with workers treated as simply labour inputs, not citizens with rights.
And it had no numerical control, which meant that it biased the system against people from anywhere else, eg the whole of Africa. This was the fatal flaw, both politically and from a humane viewpoint.
That is true. I'm sure that some of the 17.4mn were motivated by a desire to raise immigration from Africa but I struggle to believe it was the majority view.
Is it just me or are there some straws in the wind that suggest that there are a lot of people who intend to try giving Israel the full South Africa treatment?
That's the treatment where the opposition to regime X never allows anyone else to draw attention relevantly to the evils of anyone else, or to any virtues in regime X, and where it is an unforgiveable sin to think differently. One to watch.
What's interesting about that is that it's a boycott of the Hebrew speaking world. Fair enough, but it's partly because that is so closely aligned with Israel that I am supportive of the state even if I wish they weren't quite so brutal about making their point.
What on earth is going on with England's (presumably mainly teenage) vaccination rollout. Scotland had almost as many 1st doses yesterday !
There's an idiotic limitation of no walk in centre appointments for under 16s, they have to get it at school which is significantly slowing them down as teams need to go to each school individually rather than have parents go to the local vaccine centre on the weekend or after school. They still make these schoolboy errors this far into the programme, it's a shocking indictment of how Whitehall thinks.
But its part of a 'world beating plan' which follows the science and the gentleman in Whitehall knows best.
I was fairly bullish about vaccines from (I guess) mid-April 2020 onwards. There were scores (*) of projects going on to develop a vaccine around the world, using three or four different approaches. Given that several vaccines against SARS and MERS had already completed phase-I trials (with others recruiting (1), I was confident we'd get at least one vaccine. In the end we were spoiled, with several vaccines being produced.
Sadly, what took time was the testing, production and distribution of the vaccines. This was all massively accelerated, but occurred just two or three months too late to tackle the worst of the Delta strain at the beginning of 2021.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
You can make arguments about balance for the later parts but the first few weeks were pure incompetence with no redeeming features, because the failure to do cheap things early meant you had to do expensive things later.
A close parallel would be: Your house was on fire, and you had a fire extinguisher, but yoy didn't use it for fear of damaging the carpet. Then once the fire had spread to the bedroom you called the fire brigade and the carpet got wrecked anyhow, plus most of the house burned down.
We talk about lockdowns so casually now its difficult to remember how extreme it was at the time.
Given that cumulative reported deaths only reach three figures on 18/03/21 I doubt the public would have been ready for more restrictions earlier which were in any case already being introduced a week before the first lockdown.
The lockdown was the fire brigade. The fire extinguisher was asking people to work from home where practical, cancel events, open windows. It was just bizarre watching the British not doing this stuff for weeks on end.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
You can make arguments about balance for the later parts but the first few weeks were pure incompetence with no redeeming features, because the failure to do cheap things early meant you had to do expensive things later.
A close parallel would be: Your house was on fire, and you had a fire extinguisher, but yoy didn't use it for fear of damaging the carpet. Then once the fire had spread to the bedroom you called the fire brigade and the carpet got wrecked anyhow, plus most of the house burned down.
We talk about lockdowns so casually now its difficult to remember how extreme it was at the time.
Given that cumulative reported deaths only reach three figures on 18/03/21 I doubt the public would have been ready for more restrictions earlier which were in any case already being introduced a week before the first lockdown.
The lockdown was the fire brigade. The fire extinguisher was asking people to work from home where practical, cancel events, open windows. It was just bizarre watching the British not doing this stuff for weeks on end.
But those things did happen - people were told to work from home, events were cancelled, pubs shut - in the ten days before lockdown.
I don't know about the windows though - not emphasising ventilation has been one of the strange mistakes.
In all the discussions of immigration, population ageing needs to be front and centre. Looking at the UK labour market data, since the Brexit referendum our population aged 16-49 has gone down by about 500,000 people. Our population aged 50+ has gone up by 1.3 million, including 700,000 over 65. So the fact is, we *are* going to have continued immigration, in sizeable numbers. And in so-called low skill occupations, too. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just deluding themselves. I liked three things about using the EU single market for providing that immigration. First, it was reciprocal, so we got something in return. Second, freedom of movement gave people rights and freedoms. It treated people as citizens, not simply commodities, tied to a specific employer or job. Third, the system was simple, lowering the burden of red tape for both employers and employees. My guess is that we will end up with continued immigration, because of the demand for workers created by our ageing society, but with no reciprocity, loads more red tape, and with workers treated as simply labour inputs, not citizens with rights.
And it had no numerical control, which meant that it biased the system against people from anywhere else, eg the whole of Africa. This was the fatal flaw, both politically and from a humane viewpoint.
That is true. I'm sure that some of the 17.4mn were motivated by a desire to raise immigration from Africa but I struggle to believe it was the majority view.
I know where there's a steady stream of fit, enthusiastic Africans who would love to work in the UK that can be tapped in to if those idealistic Brexiteers are up for it? They'll even make their way to the UK under their own steam (or outboard motor more likely).
Who would be a scientist, eh? Job description presumably didn't include bearing the brunt of blame for sincerely arrived at views and advice. In the middle of a black swan event.
Well .... an interesting question is why the scientifically advanced countries did so badly?
New Zealand or Norway or Finland do not have the wealth of scientific or epidemiological expertise available to the UK, US, France or Germany.
Can't prove this at all, but my first guess would be that in countries like the UK and the US we are so used to high tech saving us that we flounder when the relevant tech doesn't (yet) exist. Coupled with a cultural sniffiness about lower tech solutions, even if they're pretty good and available. Echoes of Jenny Harries's dismissal of testing back at the start. (Not intending to pick on JH as an individual, but as an exemplar of a wider attitude.)
In retrospect, the correct course of action was to panic and shut everything down.
(Snip)
Yes, in this case. But imagine the harm that would have been done if we'd locked down in response to SARS in 2002-3, or MERS in 2013 (4 cases in the UK; 3 fatal). Not only did it thankfully prove unnecessary then, it would have made people much less likely to lock down in response to Covid-19.
Lockdowns are immensely harmful. This time they proved a necessary evil, but an unnecessary lockdown would be hideous. This is the thin line that governments need to tread.
Oh, absolutely.
The correct course of action turned out to be blind panic and shut down everything.
But, there was no way of knowing that at the time
And, as @Stuartinromford has alluded, the critical question to answer at the beginning of the pandemic was: when will a cheap & effective vaccine become available?
That turned out to be a much shorter time interval than I would have guessed.
Probably, very few scientists could really have known the answer to that question at outset.
Why are the journalists screaming for an apology? Now they're complaining the government followed the science when they shouldn't have done. As always, you have the thick poshos leading the complaints. Science doesn't guarantee 100% accuracy but you've more chance than listening to the likes of Professor Peston and his moronic crew. Economists' record as soothsayers is slightly worse than random guessing. I think BoJo got lucky with his choice of Vaccination Czar and that was key. Overall, I'd stick to my mark of seven out of ten for him. The care homes saga was forseeable and you didn't need an 'O' level in an ology to forsee it otherwise it could have been eight.
Journalists somewhere between one and two out of ten. Do I hear an apology from them?
I know, let's go with social media and see who shouts loudest.
I suspect the journos know they had a bad war, their ignorance revealed. They see this as some revenge for being side-lined. Next time, they hope the plebs will restore them to their rightful position. And demote scientists to their proper staion. On tap, but not on top.
I was fairly bullish about vaccines from (I guess) mid-April 2020 onwards. There were scores (*) of projects going on to develop a vaccine around the world, using three or four different approaches. Given that several vaccines against SARS and MERS had already completed phase-I trials (with others recruiting (1), I was confident we'd get at least one vaccine. In the end we were spoiled, with several vaccines being produced.
Sadly, what took time was the testing, production and distribution of the vaccines. This was all massively accelerated, but occurred just two or three months too late to tackle the worst of the Delta strain at the beginning of 2021.
If immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor lead to lower wages even when including “low skilled” immigrants, why don't we remove all immigration controls?
Surely we'd be the richest country in the world
Because outside the EU there are some extremely troubled places where literally millions of people want to flee to safety. Such huge sudden changes are not desirable, and would have a detrimental effect on other countries doing their duty and accepting refugees.
Free movement is a concept that makes sense when there's a rational choice available. For example, there's no country in Central or Western Europe where you can't get a decent standard of living. Not many of us would choose to go and live in Syria.
Further, free movement of labour is part of a free market. Free movement of goods, capital, and people ought to come hand in hand. Giving other countries the freedom to sell into our market creates jobs in those countries and reduces the outward migration pressure over time. That enriches their markets and gives us richer export markets. Trade is a virtuous circle, and free movement of people is part of trade. But it needs to come about incrementally to prevent system shocks.
An excellent post, getting to the heart of the matter. Whether free movement of people properly belongs to the whole membership of single market in goods and services or properly belongs to the sovereignty of a nation state is exactly the question which divides.
Both views are entirely rational, centrist and moderate. I think the nation state is the natural unit, supporters of the EU think the larger unit is.
For good political and humanist reasons I don't think people can automatically be placed alongside goods and services as interchangeable assets. Similarly I believe a Tanzanian or Korean should have the same opportunity to live in the UK, Ecuador or Belgium as a German or Estonian should have. Which is why I voted for Brexit.
I dispute the concept of there being a "natural" unit. The size and composition of effective political units has changed greatly over time. Technological innovations swell and shrink the size of stable states. For example good roads make long-distance communication and movement of military units efficient, enabling larger states. The castle made controlling larger territories trickier. Then artillery made the castle less effective in turn, enabling larger states again. Similarly political and economic innovations changed the equilibrium. And those equilibria are also affected by geography, language, climate and so on.
None of that makes it easy to decide where the equilibrium should be, but I'd gently guide people away from thinking in terms of what worked in 500AD, 1000AD, or 1500AD being natural for other times.
But the mere existence of the status quo for centuries bends the "natural" unit towards itself. It cements a primary language, it builds up a body of law, it creates a unique political culture, it creates more of a common identity. If the component parts are too different than all that bending isn't enough to get over the original difference, as the Habsburgs and Ottomans found, but the bending happens nevertheless.
The status quo has not existed for that long. If you think about the territorial extent of the country ruled from London, there have been multiple significant changes over the last few hundred year, including the addition and subtraction of (parts of) Ireland, and the addition of Scotland. If you think in terms of the nature of the state since the birth of the modern era, that too has changed radically. From a kingly absolutism, to a kind of oligarchy, to a colonial power, to a nation-state, to a member of the EEC/EU, and then back again to a nation-state. In fact, the nation-state bit in between colonial centre and EEC accession is basically a generation long.
The month before lockdown was a strange old time all round. It dawned on folk at different speeds. I remember being distinctly irritated my religious service being cancelled on March 15. Six days before we'd had c 20 people crammed into a room singing away with no ventilation, with no qualms whatever. A week after that it was pretty obvious what was to come. Someone will write a classic play or movie about that couple of weeks.
5mins16secs in – "Love these chaps who interfere and know damn all about it." What's his username on pb? (And Lord Charles' microphone is a nice touch.)
What on earth is going on with England's (presumably mainly teenage) vaccination rollout. Scotland had almost as many 1st doses yesterday !
There's an idiotic limitation of no walk in centre appointments for under 16s, they have to get it at school which is significantly slowing them down as teams need to go to each school individually rather than have parents go to the local vaccine centre on the weekend or after school. They still make these schoolboy errors this far into the programme, it's a shocking indictment of how Whitehall thinks.
The thing is that doing jabs in schools ought to be easy and efficient. You know where the kids are, you have 6 hours a day, 5 days a week to do them and the only place they can hide is behind the bike sheds. It ought to be way better than relying on walk-ins. That's why other schoolchild vaccinations are done in school.
But for some reason, it's not happening and I haven't had any indication on when Schoolchild in Romford is getting their jab.
Someone needs to be saying "Action This Day" in a booming voice (Geoffrey Cox, maybe?) until action is enacted. Yeah, right.
My sense of it is that schools are making life difficult because they don't want to attract the attentions of their local loony bin anti-vaxxers that the government hasn't acted on to prevent them from harassing teachers, headteachers and kids.
Even then, the walk in option should be made available, they're sitting around doing nothing at the moment anyway.
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.
Ok. What about in September and December.
I'll discuss September when you've understood March.
I’ve understood March. It was a fuck up.
More excusable perhaps because SAGE was wrong. Even though many on PB (including me) had already taken matters into our own hands.
Ready to discuss September yet?
Thought not.
I will. The key inflection point in the pandemic was the day that the first vaccine showed that we had a new way out. Until then, everything was about balance. Keeping lockdown forever has costs, every bit as allowing covid to spread. I believe that the tiers approach was working to an extent. Shops were open, you could go out and live. But then alpha hit and it all went to shit. Fine. But in September, you couldn't know for certain that by December we would be jabbing with a powerful vaccine. Anyone who says otherwise is using hindsight or lying, or both. I vividly remember the news when it broke. the relief among the scientists interviewed was palpable.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
You can make arguments about balance for the later parts but the first few weeks were pure incompetence with no redeeming features, because the failure to do cheap things early meant you had to do expensive things later.
A close parallel would be: Your house was on fire, and you had a fire extinguisher, but yoy didn't use it for fear of damaging the carpet. Then once the fire had spread to the bedroom you called the fire brigade and the carpet got wrecked anyhow, plus most of the house burned down.
We talk about lockdowns so casually now its difficult to remember how extreme it was at the time.
Given that cumulative reported deaths only reach three figures on 18/03/21 I doubt the public would have been ready for more restrictions earlier which were in any case already being introduced a week before the first lockdown.
The lockdown was the fire brigade. The fire extinguisher was asking people to work from home where practical, cancel events, open windows. It was just bizarre watching the British not doing this stuff for weeks on end.
But those things did happen - people were told to work from home, events were cancelled, pubs shut - in the ten days before lockdown.
I don't know about the windows though - not emphasising ventilation has been one of the strange mistakes.
Absolutely re ventilation. A crucial preventive factor.
Who would be a scientist, eh? Job description presumably didn't include bearing the brunt of blame for sincerely arrived at views and advice. In the middle of a black swan event.
Agree with the spirit of what you said, but Covid was no black swan.
Was actually going to add that. Even Jeremy Hunt said he had been on EU or global pandemic prep seminars.
If immigrants don’t take jobs away from native workers, nor lead to lower wages even when including “low skilled” immigrants, why don't we remove all immigration controls?
Surely we'd be the richest country in the world
Because outside the EU there are some extremely troubled places where literally millions of people want to flee to safety. Such huge sudden changes are not desirable, and would have a detrimental effect on other countries doing their duty and accepting refugees.
Free movement is a concept that makes sense when there's a rational choice available. For example, there's no country in Central or Western Europe where you can't get a decent standard of living. Not many of us would choose to go and live in Syria.
Further, free movement of labour is part of a free market. Free movement of goods, capital, and people ought to come hand in hand. Giving other countries the freedom to sell into our market creates jobs in those countries and reduces the outward migration pressure over time. That enriches their markets and gives us richer export markets. Trade is a virtuous circle, and free movement of people is part of trade. But it needs to come about incrementally to prevent system shocks.
An excellent post, getting to the heart of the matter. Whether free movement of people properly belongs to the whole membership of single market in goods and services or properly belongs to the sovereignty of a nation state is exactly the question which divides.
Both views are entirely rational, centrist and moderate. I think the nation state is the natural unit, supporters of the EU think the larger unit is.
For good political and humanist reasons I don't think people can automatically be placed alongside goods and services as interchangeable assets. Similarly I believe a Tanzanian or Korean should have the same opportunity to live in the UK, Ecuador or Belgium as a German or Estonian should have. Which is why I voted for Brexit.
I dispute the concept of there being a "natural" unit. The size and composition of effective political units has changed greatly over time. Technological innovations swell and shrink the size of stable states. For example good roads make long-distance communication and movement of military units efficient, enabling larger states. The castle made controlling larger territories trickier. Then artillery made the castle less effective in turn, enabling larger states again. Similarly political and economic innovations changed the equilibrium. And those equilibria are also affected by geography, language, climate and so on.
None of that makes it easy to decide where the equilibrium should be, but I'd gently guide people away from thinking in terms of what worked in 500AD, 1000AD, or 1500AD being natural for other times.
But the mere existence of the status quo for centuries bends the "natural" unit towards itself. It cements a primary language, it builds up a body of law, it creates a unique political culture, it creates more of a common identity. If the component parts are too different than all that bending isn't enough to get over the original difference, as the Habsburgs and Ottomans found, but the bending happens nevertheless.
The status quo has not existed for that long. If you think about the territorial extent of the country ruled from London, there have been multiple significant changes over the last few hundred year, including the addition and subtraction of (parts of) Ireland, and the addition of Scotland. If you think in terms of the nature of the state since the birth of the modern era, that too has changed radically. From a kingly absolutism, to a kind of oligarchy, to a colonial power, to a nation-state, to a member of the EEC/EU, and then back again to a nation-state. In fact, the nation-state bit in between colonial centre and EEC accession is basically a generation long.
And just look how often that Royalty has been reinvented, often to things which would cause instant revolution, counter-revolution, establishment of a republic, exile and/or execution not so long before.
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.
It has long been known. Just that it is quite inconvenient to the send 'em home brigade.
As a non economist, neutral on the question, the question I would ask the economics community is whether this demonstration is universally acclaimed as true by all expert opinion or whether there are any other opinions or analyses around to compare it with.
That's how enquiry and research works normally.
Absolutely it does.
There is plenty of research, take your pick. It has been observed for example that the biggest displacement/replacement is immigrant => immigrant ie immigrants displace other immigrants in the workforce and that there is a small negative effect on the lowest paid, again usually immigrants.
But yes absolutely - the more research the better.
I'm not sure that negative effect is that small when other factors are taken into account.
Remember the original research was done in America where minimum wages are so low that most people are paid more than that.
The problem with economics is that multiple factors are always in work, regardless of the methods used to separate them.
But also if immigration doesn't significantly reduce wages, why has the lack of immigration resulted in them increasing rapidly?
As you say ceteris is never paribus so it is difficult to tell. As @rcs1000 noted yesterday a post-Covid bounce might well account for much of the current rise.
But with a minor effect as @MaxPB pointed out about possible lower per capita consumption from lower paid workers, evened out by the likely demand multiplier it is, at least at the macro level, and accepting the "it's not my GDP" premise, likely the case that immigration doesn't significantly lower wages and conversely lower immigration doesn't significantly increase them.
I think it does level out on the macro level, but it also creates winners and losers. The winners are people like us in higher wage brackets who benefit from lower priced services and the losers (and their research also identifies this) are people in lower wage brackets who have their wage growth stunted. The overall picture is of higher GDP, but increasing inequality with the rich benefitting from most of the increase.
Simply put, unrestricted immigration is an unregulated free market. I think everyone agrees that unregulated free markets create problems, to deny that is to deny basic fact. Having an unlimited pool of labour supply distorted the market in favour of middle and higher income people at the expense of lower income people. Again, we can see that effect with the top decile having a significantly higher proportion of overall earnings than they had 20 years ago.
Once again, I'm not and have never disputed that immigration increases aggregate GDP. Importing working people will tend to do that. My issue is that by doing so we've created an unequal society. It's rich people pulling the ladder up, and it's never going to be something I'm in favour of, everyone deserves their chance.
A less researched issue lies within a welfare state, the aggregate GDP increase may not actually be large enough to absorb the cost increase of having low wage immigrants within a universal welfare state. Even without COVID the UK was heading to highest level of taxation during peace time and this is a direct result of the quality of GDP being imported. A £15-20k worker is highly likely to be a net recipient of welfare (in work tax credits, NHS, education for their kids, housing benefit against about £2-4k in tax generated) in the UK which means the welfare burden is increased by each low wage worker imported.
I'm yet to be convinced that the deleterious effects of low wage migration for low wage Brits is outweighed by the net increase in aggregate GDP. In fact I'd say that most of the data supports my view that creating winners at the top does nothing to help the losers at the bottom, the money doesn't trickle down fast enough.
My issue with your argument above is that it only looks at the aggregate GDP model. Look at a GDP per capita model and importing low skilled labour would reduces it.
Indeed. One other issue that we have with misapplied "analysis" is that it shows that immigration is good overall without breaking down the issue of how or why it is good. Since there is nobody sane proposing no immigration, just a debate about how it gets controlled.
Importing higher skills absolutely is good* but then people extrapolate from that "if a little is good, more must be better." Getting some dentists, doctors and other qualified people coming boosts our skills and our economy but that doesn't mean that supplementing them with getting hand car wash workers does the same.
Almost every country around the globe has immigrants arriving who have been filtered via some form of points-based system to ensure the people arriving are those who are wanted. Countries cherrypick from potential applicants who they want to receive. So of course once filtered the migrants who arrive tend to be disproportionately beneficial. That's not necessarily the same if those who are arriving are utterly unfiltered and are coming to work in a hand car wash while claiming housing allowance and universal credit.
Plus given that practically speaking we can only handle a certain proportion of migration per annum, the looser we are with migration for unskilled hand car wash employees the tighter we have to be on the other end of the spectrum for skilled worker. We face an Opportunity Cost of missing out on more skilled migrants.
Drinking water is good for you. There is plenty of scientific evidence showing the benefits of hydration. If you take that evidence, go on a boat and into the ocean and drink a few litres of unfiltered ocean water on the basis of "the evidence says water is good for you" then that's not good for you. You have to be careful in how you apply your evidence.
* Though not a reason or excuse not to invest in skills ourselves.
"Probably, very few scientists could really have known the answer to that question at outset."
They didn't 'know' for sure, but various political actions eg "Go away and we'll underwrite it' helped a lot. At one stage we had over a hundred vaccines in trials, and after twenty years in the pharmaceutical industry, I was fairly confident throughout - once the political will as there. I predicted it would be over by Christmas.
OK, I meant Christmas 2020, but by then, the worst was over. To the several people I said that too, I don't mind apologising.
Comments
There was a much wider range of scientific advice available, but the mechanism by which scientists communicate to the Government (a committee of ~ 30 of the great and good, like the President of the Royal Society) looks like it was fit for purpose in the Victorian era.
While I agree there was a range of opinions, not all those opinions were represented on SAGE.
SAGE took a vary narrow view in the early days of the pandemic. The scientists on SAGE really needed challenging by **other** scientists. (Gov't ministers do not have the expertise to do this).
Still, I expect everyone on SAGE will be given an OBE in the time-honoured British way of covering up.
Here is an example of a heat pump that goes inside your house (example, not recommendation):
https://groundsun.co.uk/small-home-and-apartment-heat-pumps/
And here is a thread on the Self-Build / Renovate forum where I am a mod from 18 months ago discussing it:
https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/topic/13557-any-experience-of-the-gs200-small-ashp/
We're not at the "novel technology" stage any longer. We are into many solutions for different circumstances, most of which have been in use for some time, and broadening the installed and usage and knowledgeable workforce base.
So yes, go back in time and do things differently, but please base criticisms on the facts at the time.
It looks uncannily like what actually happened.
That said, Christmas was a disaster. I remember being out for a walk with a mate in early Dec and cases were rising again, in spite of the last days of the November lock down.
And the less about the Nightingale hospitals the better. It seemed like they had a plan based on something sensible and then didn't use them. If it was staffing, then they would/should have known in advance.
Italy - obviously hit first outside China - 9 March
Spain - 14 March
Canada - 17 March
France - 17 March
Swiss - 17 March
California - 19 March
Germany - 22 March
New York - 22 March
UK - 23 March
Australia - 23 March
NZ - 23 March
And on the 17 March the government advised against all unnecessary contact, at which point over half the country went into a defacto lockdown, even if many carried on as normal for a few days more.
Not to listen to J. Random Scientist who had a model predicting the course of the pandemic ...
There were plenty calling for an earlier lockdown, including Keir and indeed - according to his later testimony - Dominic Cummings.
Although I suppose you’d assign DC to the lying category.
But there are far better "horses for courses" available, and some homework is required. Just as for a gas boiler.
Gas boiler - Do need weather-compensating controls? what about exhaust heat recovery? how low a temperature does it need to modulate to? do I need a buffer tank to stop the underfloor heating short-cycling? Am I better with a non-combi and a solar pv hot water system, or should I use an inline heat battery such as a Sunamp?
ASHP - Do I need one that cools as well? What sort of hot water setup? Indoor or outdoor kit? Split or integrated? Do I combine it with the ventilation? What about legionella cycles? Do I need larger radiators?
The users have not been happy with the end result, firstly the equipment taking up so much space and the key fact ASHP only provide low background heat, they will never warm a radiator to anything more than lukewarm.
We are not aware of any advance in the ASHP technology that in anyway matches the convinience of a standard boiler.
Also we can supply and fit a decent boiler for around £1200-£1500. An ASHP cost 10 times that.
Both views are entirely rational, centrist and moderate. I think the nation state is the natural unit, supporters of the EU think the larger unit is.
For good political and humanist reasons I don't think people can automatically be placed alongside goods and services as interchangeable assets. Similarly I believe a Tanzanian or Korean should have the same opportunity to live in the UK, Ecuador or Belgium as a German or Estonian should have. Which is why I voted for Brexit.
Unlimited immigration creates an inequality issue, not a GDP issue. In a welfare state it also creates a tax issue.
Data also missed on booster shoJt
*also, taking PCRs as perfect is an interesting line to take, in itself.
I'd also suggest that big, densely populated countries that are well-connected, both intra- and inter-nationally, will end up faring poorer when people start to try to compare apples with apples.
What was the total number of international passengers into New Zealand in total in 2019? Go on, guess. Give you a second or two.
Well, 3.88 million is the total number of overseas visitors. It's not perfect but it's a good proxy.
That's slightly less than total passengers into Leeds-Bradford for the same year.
https://twitter.com/spgoz6_0/status/1447859330989137925?s=20
It wasn't as late as December 2020, and it wasn't as early as March 2020 (though I've got vague memories of some of the vaccine people being pretty confident pretty early on).
Anyone got a better feel for when the "if" of vaccination became "when"?
And as to your last line; does that mean that, for the sake of an example, the UK being the only country to fully open its borders to the newly joined EU states, could have caused some non-good immigration?
Similarly political and economic innovations changed the equilibrium. And those equilibria are also affected by geography, language, climate and so on.
None of that makes it easy to decide where the equilibrium should be, but I'd gently guide people away from thinking in terms of what worked in 500AD, 1000AD, or 1500AD being natural for other times.
Criticise the scientists advising the government(s) by all means, and behavioural scientists most of all, but science itself has played a blinder with vaccines.
A close parallel would be: Your house was on fire, and you had a fire extinguisher, but yoy didn't use it for fear of damaging the carpet. Then once the fire had spread to the bedroom you called the fire brigade and the carpet got wrecked anyhow, plus most of the house burned down.
- Our fertility rate is well below the replacement and has been falling again in recent years
- The demographic challenge is likely to get worse, as we have chosen for the moment to reduce immigration from previous highs, which previously mitigated the increased dependency ratio by bringing in a lot of 20 to 30 year-olds
- For single parents or where the lower-earner is on a modest income, childcare costs (for young children in particular) can have a really detrimental impact on the family's finances, and therefore reduce the likelihood of having children / both parents going back to work
It strikes me as an area where free or heavily subsidised childcare could have a positive overall impact on the economy in terms of both workforce participation longer-term demographic trends.
FT on Sept 23 -> "How close is a coronavirus vaccine?"
https://www.ft.com/content/e5012891-58da-4a4f-8a05-182adf3ba0e2
BBC on Oct 17 -> Kate Bingham says most vulnerable could be jabbed by Christmas
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-54573288
Reuters on Nov 09 -> "Pfizer vaccine trial success signals breakthrough"
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-vaccines-pfizer-idUSKBN27P1ID
It’s impossible! Lois Lane could never have Superman’s baby. Do you think her fallopian tubes could handle his sperm? I guarantee you that when he cums during sex, he probably blows a load like a shotgun blast… right through her back! And if by chance Lois does get pregnant, what about her womb? Do you think it’s strong enough to carry his child?...
...He’s an alien, for Christ sake. His Kryptonian biological makeup is enhanced by Earth’s yellow sun. If Lois gets a tan, the kid could kick right through her stomach. Only someone like Wonder Woman has a strong enough uterus to carry his kid. The only way Superman could bang regular chicks is if he does it with a kryptonite condom, but that would probably kill him!
Even if we'd never developed a vaccine, improvements in treatment would mean that delaying cases would save a large proportion of deaths.
And the protocols of medical testing rightly stop you using a product until you're sure and no peeking.
But there's also a kind of scientific sixth sense that can tell the difference between "this problem can't be solved" and "we're going to crack this one pretty soon". Although it wouldn't have been right to use vaccines before all the numbers were in, the timeframe of how long we were likely to have to sit it out would have been moderately clear before December. From a decision-making point of view, that's the when I'm wondering about.
(And given that the vaccination campaign started in late December, the decisions about Christmas were a bit like celebrating VE day in July 1944.)
Lockdowns are immensely harmful. This time they proved a necessary evil, but an unnecessary lockdown would be hideous. This is the thin line that governments need to tread.
https://smarkets.com/event/42288882/current-affairs/covid-19/lifestyle/will-covid-restrictions-be-re-introduced-in-2021/?market=15612636
Another rules update which means vaccine mandates for people working in care homes settles this for yes.
This is bad form, I think - last one on vaccine passports was arguable, but this is hard to put in the original definition of restrictions on social contact, imho.
I'm green either way on this market (traded out some of my no position after the last clarification) but biased towards no.
Edit: for example, it was made clear that the TfL mask mandate did not settle this market for yes - seems inconsistent with respect to vaccine mandates for care home staff?
I liked three things about using the EU single market for providing that immigration. First, it was reciprocal, so we got something in return. Second, freedom of movement gave people rights and freedoms. It treated people as citizens, not simply commodities, tied to a specific employer or job. Third, the system was simple, lowering the burden of red tape for both employers and employees.
My guess is that we will end up with continued immigration, because of the demand for workers created by our ageing society, but with no reciprocity, loads more red tape, and with workers treated as simply labour inputs, not citizens with rights.
Reminds me of this discussion.
It’s impossible! Lois Lane could never have Superman’s baby. Do you think her fallopian tubes could handle his sperm? I guarantee you that when he cums during sex, he probably blows a load like a shotgun blast… right through her back! And if by chance Lois does get pregnant, what about her womb? Do you think it’s strong enough to carry his child?...
...He’s an alien, for Christ sake. His Kryptonian biological makeup is enhanced by Earth’s yellow sun. If Lois gets a tan, the kid could kick right through her stomach. Only someone like Wonder Woman has a strong enough uterus to carry his kid. The only way Superman could bang regular chicks is if he does it with a kryptonite condom, but that would probably kill him!
Given which, we'd better pray his son is a confirmed bottom.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/12/sally-rooney-beautiful-world-where-are-you-israeli-publisher-hebrew
That's the treatment where the opposition to regime X never allows anyone else to draw attention relevantly to the evils of anyone else, or to any virtues in regime X, and where it is an unforgiveable sin to think differently. One to watch.
I'm all for inclusivity but I feel like it is not beyond the wit of man (or anyone else for that matter) to come up with an umbrella term that is acceptable and pronouncable. If you have to speak out each letter, you really cannot go much beyond 4-5 or it becomes unwieldy to say.
But for some reason, it's not happening and I haven't had any indication on when Schoolchild in Romford is getting their jab.
Someone needs to be saying "Action This Day" in a booming voice (Geoffrey Cox, maybe?) until action is enacted. Yeah, right.
Given that cumulative reported deaths only reach three figures on 18/03/21 I doubt the public would have been ready for more restrictions earlier which were in any case already being introduced a week before the first lockdown.
Sadly, what took time was the testing, production and distribution of the vaccines. This was all massively accelerated, but occurred just two or three months too late to tackle the worst of the Delta strain at the beginning of 2021.
(1) https://jbiomedsci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12929-020-00695-2/tables/2
(*) I think over a hundred.
I don't know about the windows though - not emphasising ventilation has been one of the strange mistakes.
The correct course of action turned out to be blind panic and shut down everything.
But, there was no way of knowing that at the time
And, as @Stuartinromford has alluded, the critical question to answer at the beginning of the pandemic was: when will a cheap & effective vaccine become available?
That turned out to be a much shorter time interval than I would have guessed.
Probably, very few scientists could really have known the answer to that question at outset.
Journalists somewhere between one and two out of ten. Do I hear an apology from them?
I know, let's go with social media and see who shouts loudest.
I suspect the journos know they had a bad war, their ignorance revealed. They see this as some revenge for being side-lined. Next time, they hope the plebs will restore them to their rightful position. And demote scientists to their proper staion. On tap, but not on top.
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/live-updates-couple-go-trial-21764057
Poor kid. The story (and backstory) is tragic. I simply don’t understand how people can be so cruel to an innocent child.
https://ourworldindata.org/vaccination
If you think in terms of the nature of the state since the birth of the modern era, that too has changed radically. From a kingly absolutism, to a kind of oligarchy, to a colonial power, to a nation-state, to a member of the EEC/EU, and then back again to a nation-state. In fact, the nation-state bit in between colonial centre and EEC accession is basically a generation long.
A week after that it was pretty obvious what was to come.
Someone will write a classic play or movie about that couple of weeks.
Even then, the walk in option should be made available, they're sitting around doing nothing at the moment anyway.
Next up, anecdotes about threats of circumcision.
https://twitter.com/LordIanAustin/status/1446938801876635650?s=20
Importing higher skills absolutely is good* but then people extrapolate from that "if a little is good, more must be better." Getting some dentists, doctors and other qualified people coming boosts our skills and our economy but that doesn't mean that supplementing them with getting hand car wash workers does the same.
Almost every country around the globe has immigrants arriving who have been filtered via some form of points-based system to ensure the people arriving are those who are wanted. Countries cherrypick from potential applicants who they want to receive. So of course once filtered the migrants who arrive tend to be disproportionately beneficial. That's not necessarily the same if those who are arriving are utterly unfiltered and are coming to work in a hand car wash while claiming housing allowance and universal credit.
Plus given that practically speaking we can only handle a certain proportion of migration per annum, the looser we are with migration for unskilled hand car wash employees the tighter we have to be on the other end of the spectrum for skilled worker. We face an Opportunity Cost of missing out on more skilled migrants.
Drinking water is good for you. There is plenty of scientific evidence showing the benefits of hydration. If you take that evidence, go on a boat and into the ocean and drink a few litres of unfiltered ocean water on the basis of "the evidence says water is good for you" then that's not good for you. You have to be careful in how you apply your evidence.
* Though not a reason or excuse not to invest in skills ourselves.
"Probably, very few scientists could really have known the answer to that question at outset."
They didn't 'know' for sure, but various political actions eg "Go away and we'll underwrite it' helped a lot. At one stage we had over a hundred vaccines in trials, and after twenty years in the pharmaceutical industry, I was fairly confident throughout - once the political will as there. I predicted it would be over by Christmas.
OK, I meant Christmas 2020, but by then, the worst was over. To the several people I said that too, I don't mind apologising.