Free movement wasn't really a big problem until three things came together:
(1) The integration of the EU 8, which were very significantly poorer than then existing EU members. When previously poor countries had joined (Portugal, Greece, Spain), they were relatively small, this was 8 countries (including one big one) all at the same time. The UK was also pretty much the only country not to go with transitional controls on immigration. This meant that instead of a few million people being spread out across the whole EU, they came mostly to the UK.
(2) The UK's benefits system. As far as I can tell, there is no other country in Europe that has either a system that is as non-contributory bases, not one which was so generous with in work benefits system like the UK. Prior to the Maastricht treaty, you could work in any member state, but there was no presumption of benefits. The consequence of this is that (pretty much alone of the countries in the EU), it was possible for a migrant to come to the UK and pick up benefits from day one.
(3) The Eurozone crisis, which caused a dramatic dip in demand for migrant labour in the Southern EU states *and* led to the exporting their own young.
Hold on. Are immigrants coming here and depressing wages or are they coming over here and claiming benefits?
Get the story straight, lads.
Both are a factor.
Without universal in-work benefits like housing benefit and tax credits/universal credit then it'd be tougher for someone in a minimum wage job to pay UK housing costs. Still possible especially in overcrowded flatshares, but tougher.
I don't doubt it. What has that got to do with immigration?
Once again it is not immigration or emigration per se that changed pay rates. It is the availability of unlimited immigration that cut real pay rates and prevented real pay rises and the end of that availability is what is reversing that causing real and permanent pay rises.
In-work benefits fuelled the availability of unlimited migration. If you're a poor and unskilled Romanian then are you better off working in a minimum wage Romanian job, or in the UK getting a British minimum wage, plus housing allowance, plus child benefits etc, etc?
You are better off in the UK. Availability of labour has seen nevertheless historic low levels of unemployment both in 2016 (4%) and now (4.6%).
The discussion has centred upon wage rises. Your position is that with the return of the immigrants wages will go up and if that puts up prices then that is also good (your jocular 4.1% vs 4.0% - how we laughed).
Mine is that if that is the case then no one is better off in such a scenario plus I have noted that demand will decrease and hence equilibrium will eventually return to pre-"shock" levels.
Max has noted that per capital demand will be lower with lower wages which of course is true. But demand of course has a multiplier and the contraction means that it is not a 1:1 relationship immigrant out one unit of his demand down.
You also noted that this has been the case for "many years". To which point I have to ask - what and when was the pre-fall state?
🤦♂️
For the umpteenth time my position is not that the return of immigrants will affect wages. It won't. That is not my argument at all. Immigration or emigration cancels out as new immigrants create demands themselves.
The "shock" is not Brexit. The "shock" was the expansion of the supply of labour to unlimited levels in 2004. That infinite supply slashed pay rates to the minimum wage level across many sectors that used to pay a factor more than minimum wage.
Brexit ends the infinite supply of labour which will return us to an equilibrium pre-shock, which is pre-2004 not pre-2020.
2003/04 was the pre-shock state not 2015, 2016 or 2019. The creation of an infinite pool of cheap minimum wage labour turned the minimum wage into a maximum wage and created the permanent "labour shortage" we've had for seventeen years now.
So you're saying that the return of immigrants will affect wages?
NO!
oh, you should have said
The quantity of migrants itself doesn't matter since migrants themselves create new demand. So emigration destroys jobs, and immigration creates them.
What was lowering wages wasn't the immigration per se it was the supply of possible immigration that meant that the quantity of minimum wage jobs could quadruple in just a dozen years post-EU8 accession.
Wages will rise now because that infinite pool of possible future migrants has been cut off, so now supply and demand can work within the country for everyone here. Including those EU migrants who've come here already in the past seventeen years and their children etc.
So you're saying that the return of immigrants will affect wages?
Free movement wasn't really a big problem until three things came together:
(1) The integration of the EU 8, which were very significantly poorer than then existing EU members. When previously poor countries had joined (Portugal, Greece, Spain), they were relatively small, this was 8 countries (including one big one) all at the same time. The UK was also pretty much the only country not to go with transitional controls on immigration. This meant that instead of a few million people being spread out across the whole EU, they came mostly to the UK.
(2) The UK's benefits system. As far as I can tell, there is no other country in Europe that has either a system that is as non-contributory bases, not one which was so generous with in work benefits system like the UK. Prior to the Maastricht treaty, you could work in any member state, but there was no presumption of benefits. The consequence of this is that (pretty much alone of the countries in the EU), it was possible for a migrant to come to the UK and pick up benefits from day one.
(3) The Eurozone crisis, which caused a dramatic dip in demand for migrant labour in the Southern EU states *and* led to the exporting their own young.
Hold on. Are immigrants coming here and depressing wages or are they coming over here and claiming benefits?
Get the story straight, lads.
Both are a factor.
Without universal in-work benefits like housing benefit and tax credits/universal credit then it'd be tougher for someone in a minimum wage job to pay UK housing costs. Still possible especially in overcrowded flatshares, but tougher.
I don't doubt it. What has that got to do with immigration?
Once again it is not immigration or emigration per se that changed pay rates. It is the availability of unlimited immigration that cut real pay rates and prevented real pay rises and the end of that availability is what is reversing that causing real and permanent pay rises.
In-work benefits fuelled the availability of unlimited migration. If you're a poor and unskilled Romanian then are you better off working in a minimum wage Romanian job, or in the UK getting a British minimum wage, plus housing allowance, plus child benefits etc, etc?
You are better off in the UK. Availability of labour has seen nevertheless historic low levels of unemployment both in 2016 (4%) and now (4.6%).
The discussion has centred upon wage rises. Your position is that with the return of the immigrants wages will go up and if that puts up prices then that is also good (your jocular 4.1% vs 4.0% - how we laughed).
Mine is that if that is the case then no one is better off in such a scenario plus I have noted that demand will decrease and hence equilibrium will eventually return to pre-"shock" levels.
Max has noted that per capital demand will be lower with lower wages which of course is true. But demand of course has a multiplier and the contraction means that it is not a 1:1 relationship immigrant out one unit of his demand down.
You also noted that this has been the case for "many years". To which point I have to ask - what and when was the pre-fall state?
🤦♂️
For the umpteenth time my position is not that the return of immigrants will affect wages. It won't. That is not my argument at all. Immigration or emigration cancels out as new immigrants create demands themselves.
The "shock" is not Brexit. The "shock" was the expansion of the supply of labour to unlimited levels in 2004. That infinite supply slashed pay rates to the minimum wage level across many sectors that used to pay a factor more than minimum wage.
Brexit ends the infinite supply of labour which will return us to an equilibrium pre-shock, which is pre-2004 not pre-2020.
2003/04 was the pre-shock state not 2015, 2016 or 2019. The creation of an infinite pool of cheap minimum wage labour turned the minimum wage into a maximum wage and created the permanent "labour shortage" we've had for seventeen years now.
Ah fantastic. Thanks v much for clarifying. So all that joshing about isn't it great wages and prices are rising was just you not being serious and nothing to do with any Brexit bonus. I can't even remember why it was brought up.
And interesting that 2004 was pre-shock. Yes I understand that. For a Brexiter that was Year Zero and le deluge was most unwelcome. As it has been to previous generations.
That video has nothing about about what I was saying.
The quantity of jobs in 2016 was 400% of the quantity of jobs at minimum wage levels in 2003.
Why? Because in 2003 if you wanted a job filling you had to offer a market rate of labour that attracted someone to fill you vacancy, but by 2016 if you wanted a job filling you could offer minimum wage and someone would come because there was an infinite supply of people willing to work fro that rate.
Brexit ends that infinite supply of minimum wage labour and means that supply and demand for wages can start to work properly again.
People throughout the ages have bemoaned immigrants coming to the UK to take our jobs.
I just wondered when your Year Zero was and it turns out it was 2003, when you were if I might hazard, just becoming politically, socially active.
Prior to you, exactly the same arguments were made, as Hollie so eloquently points out, about any wave of immigration you care to name. And yet...and yet....wages have continued to grow this whole time.
The minimum wage is a problem with any excess in the workforce (not just your pool of unlimited immigration) as you describe.
Prior to 2004 there was no infinite supply of labour to work for minimum wage, which is why only half a million jobs were minimum wage as opposed to two million a dozen years later.
If there was a problem of excess supply of workforce then that should be showing itself in unemployment rates. But the UK has been at full employment for a long time, so no there was not an excess domestic supply of labour.
The excess workforce was coming from abroad, not domestic.
We simply don't know whether that is the case. The UK has relied upon immigration to achieve the growth it has shown this past decade or two. Separating out or speculation about one element of one factor input is not I believe possible to do.
Why not 5m minimum wage jobs if it was truly infinite? What is the population of the A8? Did all working age people come here?
Too many unknowns for you to assert that it was because of the "threat" of ever more workers that the number of minimum wage jobs increased.
I knew that the Japanese had behaved horribly in Manchuria with rapes, slave girls and general brutality but the industrial scale is a bit of a shock, as is the complicity in the US covering this abomination up. Appalling.
In a really perverse historical irony, a German called John Rabe became a hero during the Rape of Nanking, saving hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives by creating a semi-official safe zone in the city.
Despite being the head of the local Nazi party.
"Finally, with only his status as an official of an allied nation for protection, Rabe did what now seems the unthinkable: he began to roam about the city, trying to prevent atrocities himself.
Whenever he drove through Nanking, some man would inevitably leap out and stop the car to beg Rabe to stop a rape in progress -- a rape that usually involved a sister, a wife, or a daughter. Rabe would then let the man climb into the car and direct him to the scene of the rape. Once there, he would chase Japanese soldiers away from their prey, on one occasion even bodily lifting a soldier sprawled on top of a young girl. He knew these expeditions were highly dangerous ("The Japanese had pistols and bayonets and I ... had only party symbols and my swastika armband," Rabe wrote in his report to Hitler), but nothing could deter him -- not even the risk of death."
"With these women Rabe developed a warning system to protect them from Japanese rapists. Whenever Japanese soldiers scaled the wall of his yard, the women would blow a whistle and send Rabe running out into the yard to chase the offenders away. This happened so frequently that Rabe rarely left his home at night, fearful that Japanese intruders would commit an orgy of rape in his absence."
After the war, he lived in poverty due to his status as an ex-Nazi. He survived on food parcels and money sent to him from China, where he is now widely regarded as a hero.
When he got back to Germany and started talking about it, he was interrogated by the Gestapo and silenced - geopolitics to avoid offending Japan perhaps.
On 28 February 1938, Rabe left Nanking. He traveled first to Shanghai, returning to Berlin on 15 April 1938. He took with him a large number of source materials documenting Japanese atrocities in Nanking. Rabe showed films and photographs of Japanese atrocities in lecture presentations in Berlin and wrote to Hitler, asking him to use his influence to persuade the Japanese to stop further violence. Rabe was detained and interrogated by the Gestapo; his letter was never delivered to Hitler. Due to the intervention of Siemens AG, Rabe was released. He was allowed to keep evidence of the massacre (excluding films) but not to lecture or write on the subject again. Rabe continued working for Siemens, which briefly posted him to the safety of Siemens AG in Afghanistan. Rabe subsequently worked in the company's Berlin headquarters until the end of the war. (Wiki)
Yes, Frosty blundered the spin there. Should have gone with the Phil Thompson 'the deal was always crap but we knew this cos it made the EU play into our hands' line.
Free movement wasn't really a big problem until three things came together:
(1) The integration of the EU 8, which were very significantly poorer than then existing EU members. When previously poor countries had joined (Portugal, Greece, Spain), they were relatively small, this was 8 countries (including one big one) all at the same time. The UK was also pretty much the only country not to go with transitional controls on immigration. This meant that instead of a few million people being spread out across the whole EU, they came mostly to the UK.
(2) The UK's benefits system. As far as I can tell, there is no other country in Europe that has either a system that is as non-contributory bases, not one which was so generous with in work benefits system like the UK. Prior to the Maastricht treaty, you could work in any member state, but there was no presumption of benefits. The consequence of this is that (pretty much alone of the countries in the EU), it was possible for a migrant to come to the UK and pick up benefits from day one.
(3) The Eurozone crisis, which caused a dramatic dip in demand for migrant labour in the Southern EU states *and* led to the exporting their own young.
Hold on. Are immigrants coming here and depressing wages or are they coming over here and claiming benefits?
Personally, I am broadly in favour of free movement of labour (on the basis that it is good for individuals, in that there is a wider variety of firms they can sell their skills to - and for companies, as there are more individuals they can hire).
What I oppose, though, is a system where people could come to the UK, having not paid a penny in tax or National Insurance, and receive benefits. That seems a very odd system.
I also find the argument that immigration has suppressed capital investment to be one which - while superficially plausible - does not seem to mesh with the fact. Both Switzerland and Germany have seen more immigration of unskilled and semi-skilled labour in the last five years than the UK (as a % of population), and yet both have seen very significant investment in automation.
So, Switzerland's Gross Capital Formation has risen from 22% to 27% as immigration has risen and Gemany's from 15% to 21%. While the UK remains marooned in the mid-teens. The simplistic explanation of "immigration means firms don't need to automate" seems to ignore the fact that in all the countries which saw even greater levels of Eastern European immigration did see much greater investment in automation.
I suspect that the big issue is that the UK has a consumption and services driven economy, which is much less easy to automate. But that is a much bigger problem to solve.
It's of course possible that, in my view, the somewhat misplaced hysteria about accidently killing 20k Brits in today's newspapers just might move the polls but I wouldn't count on it. Firstly, the public are giving the government a great deal more leeway in dealing with this extraordinary situation than the media (who just might, heaven forbid, have a different agenda). Secondly, Labour pretty much went along with everything the government did for the same reasons, it was consistent with the best scientific advice available at the time. Thirdly, at least in my view, it is crap and similar numbers to those who died would have died anyway before the vaccines were available.
At the same time Labour seem to be going through some sort of existential crisis. They look divided, aimless and somewhat short of ideas. God knows where Boris is going to get his program for his next majority from. The pickings of Ed's Manifesto are getting thin and there is not much else to go on. A random poll can of course produce a result as we saw in September but its not looking likely.
Bit in bold is definitely important. I saw a Corbynite Twitter thread today that was trying very hard to argue that all of the internet armchair epidemiologists knew better than the scientists all along. They felt that we were morons for not believing accounts like @Mark50104011 with 35 followers back in March 2020 who were saying the Tories were trying to murder the British people public en masse.
Can you imagine government decisions made by reading social media comments? May as well give Putin and Xi the keys to No 10 now.
There are no keys to number 10! I wonder how many steps there are between the mystery No 10 wallpaper donor and Putin though.
Yes, Frosty blundered the spin there. Should have gone with the Phil Thompson 'the deal was always crap but we knew this cos it made the EU play into our hands' line.
Why should Frost say that? How does that help him in the current negotiations.
Free movement wasn't really a big problem until three things came together:
(1) The integration of the EU 8, which were very significantly poorer than then existing EU members. When previously poor countries had joined (Portugal, Greece, Spain), they were relatively small, this was 8 countries (including one big one) all at the same time. The UK was also pretty much the only country not to go with transitional controls on immigration. This meant that instead of a few million people being spread out across the whole EU, they came mostly to the UK.
(2) The UK's benefits system. As far as I can tell, there is no other country in Europe that has either a system that is as non-contributory bases, not one which was so generous with in work benefits system like the UK. Prior to the Maastricht treaty, you could work in any member state, but there was no presumption of benefits. The consequence of this is that (pretty much alone of the countries in the EU), it was possible for a migrant to come to the UK and pick up benefits from day one.
(3) The Eurozone crisis, which caused a dramatic dip in demand for migrant labour in the Southern EU states *and* led to the exporting their own young.
Hold on. Are immigrants coming here and depressing wages or are they coming over here and claiming benefits?
Get the story straight, lads.
Both are a factor.
Without universal in-work benefits like housing benefit and tax credits/universal credit then it'd be tougher for someone in a minimum wage job to pay UK housing costs. Still possible especially in overcrowded flatshares, but tougher.
I don't doubt it. What has that got to do with immigration?
Once again it is not immigration or emigration per se that changed pay rates. It is the availability of unlimited immigration that cut real pay rates and prevented real pay rises and the end of that availability is what is reversing that causing real and permanent pay rises.
In-work benefits fuelled the availability of unlimited migration. If you're a poor and unskilled Romanian then are you better off working in a minimum wage Romanian job, or in the UK getting a British minimum wage, plus housing allowance, plus child benefits etc, etc?
You are better off in the UK. Availability of labour has seen nevertheless historic low levels of unemployment both in 2016 (4%) and now (4.6%).
The discussion has centred upon wage rises. Your position is that with the return of the immigrants wages will go up and if that puts up prices then that is also good (your jocular 4.1% vs 4.0% - how we laughed).
Mine is that if that is the case then no one is better off in such a scenario plus I have noted that demand will decrease and hence equilibrium will eventually return to pre-"shock" levels.
Max has noted that per capital demand will be lower with lower wages which of course is true. But demand of course has a multiplier and the contraction means that it is not a 1:1 relationship immigrant out one unit of his demand down.
You also noted that this has been the case for "many years". To which point I have to ask - what and when was the pre-fall state?
🤦♂️
For the umpteenth time my position is not that the return of immigrants will affect wages. It won't. That is not my argument at all. Immigration or emigration cancels out as new immigrants create demands themselves.
The "shock" is not Brexit. The "shock" was the expansion of the supply of labour to unlimited levels in 2004. That infinite supply slashed pay rates to the minimum wage level across many sectors that used to pay a factor more than minimum wage.
Brexit ends the infinite supply of labour which will return us to an equilibrium pre-shock, which is pre-2004 not pre-2020.
2003/04 was the pre-shock state not 2015, 2016 or 2019. The creation of an infinite pool of cheap minimum wage labour turned the minimum wage into a maximum wage and created the permanent "labour shortage" we've had for seventeen years now.
So you're saying that the return of immigrants will affect wages?
NO!
oh, you should have said
The quantity of migrants itself doesn't matter since migrants themselves create new demand. So emigration destroys jobs, and immigration creates them.
What was lowering wages wasn't the immigration per se it was the supply of possible immigration that meant that the quantity of minimum wage jobs could quadruple in just a dozen years post-EU8 accession.
Wages will rise now because that infinite pool of possible future migrants has been cut off, so now supply and demand can work within the country for everyone here. Including those EU migrants who've come here already in the past seventeen years and their children etc.
So you're saying that the return of immigrants will affect wages?
No and fuck off.
If I fuck off, do your wages change?
We don't know, do we? He could be paid on results to work all day on PB.
Yes, Frosty blundered the spin there. Should have gone with the Phil Thompson 'the deal was always crap but we knew this cos it made the EU play into our hands' line.
Why should Frost say that? How does that help him in the current negotiations.
Because it won't reflect any fallibility on the part of Boris.
I knew that the Japanese had behaved horribly in Manchuria with rapes, slave girls and general brutality but the industrial scale is a bit of a shock, as is the complicity in the US covering this abomination up. Appalling.
In a really perverse historical irony, a German called John Rabe became a hero during the Rape of Nanking, saving hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives by creating a semi-official safe zone in the city.
Despite being the head of the local Nazi party.
"Finally, with only his status as an official of an allied nation for protection, Rabe did what now seems the unthinkable: he began to roam about the city, trying to prevent atrocities himself.
Whenever he drove through Nanking, some man would inevitably leap out and stop the car to beg Rabe to stop a rape in progress -- a rape that usually involved a sister, a wife, or a daughter. Rabe would then let the man climb into the car and direct him to the scene of the rape. Once there, he would chase Japanese soldiers away from their prey, on one occasion even bodily lifting a soldier sprawled on top of a young girl. He knew these expeditions were highly dangerous ("The Japanese had pistols and bayonets and I ... had only party symbols and my swastika armband," Rabe wrote in his report to Hitler), but nothing could deter him -- not even the risk of death."
"With these women Rabe developed a warning system to protect them from Japanese rapists. Whenever Japanese soldiers scaled the wall of his yard, the women would blow a whistle and send Rabe running out into the yard to chase the offenders away. This happened so frequently that Rabe rarely left his home at night, fearful that Japanese intruders would commit an orgy of rape in his absence."
After the war, he lived in poverty due to his status as an ex-Nazi. He survived on food parcels and money sent to him from China, where he is now widely regarded as a hero.
If Frost is going to impose a trade war on us and trash Northern Ireland in the process, he needs a better justification than that pile of unsupported assertions and non sequiturs, I feel.
You're becoming increasingly irrational about this. How does using a provision of a treaty for its intended purpose constitute 'imposing a trade war'? If the EU chooses to respond in a beligerent 'might is right' fashion, how is that Frost's fault?
At no point in his speech did Frost talk about using a provision of the treaty for its intended purpose. I assume you are referring to Article 16, which is about applying temporary and limited safeguards, and not the imposed and complete replacement of the treaty by a text of Frost's choosing. And as the rationales given in his speech for this total rewrite don't stack up, I think we can legitimately put adverse consequences at his door.
Free movement wasn't really a big problem until three things came together:
(1) The integration of the EU 8, which were very significantly poorer than then existing EU members. When previously poor countries had joined (Portugal, Greece, Spain), they were relatively small, this was 8 countries (including one big one) all at the same time. The UK was also pretty much the only country not to go with transitional controls on immigration. This meant that instead of a few million people being spread out across the whole EU, they came mostly to the UK.
(2) The UK's benefits system. As far as I can tell, there is no other country in Europe that has either a system that is as non-contributory bases, not one which was so generous with in work benefits system like the UK. Prior to the Maastricht treaty, you could work in any member state, but there was no presumption of benefits. The consequence of this is that (pretty much alone of the countries in the EU), it was possible for a migrant to come to the UK and pick up benefits from day one.
(3) The Eurozone crisis, which caused a dramatic dip in demand for migrant labour in the Southern EU states *and* led to the exporting their own young.
Hold on. Are immigrants coming here and depressing wages or are they coming over here and claiming benefits?
Personally, I am broadly in favour of free movement of labour (on the basis that it is good for individuals, in that there is a wider variety of firms they can sell their skills to - and for companies, as there are more individuals they can hire).
What I oppose, though, is a system where people could come to the UK, having not paid a penny in tax or National Insurance, and receive benefits. That seems a very odd system.
I also find the argument that immigration has suppressed capital investment to be one which - while superficially plausible - does not seem to mesh with the fact. Both Switzerland and Germany have seen more immigration of unskilled and semi-skilled labour in the last five years than the UK (as a % of population), and yet both have seen very significant investment in automation.
So, Switzerland's Gross Capital Formation has risen from 22% to 27% as immigration has risen and Gemany's from 15% to 21%. While the UK remains marooned in the mid-teens. The simplistic explanation of "immigration means firms don't need to automate" seems to ignore the fact that in all the countries which saw even greater levels of Eastern European immigration did see much greater investment in automation.
I suspect that the big issue is that the UK has a consumption and services driven economy, which is much less easy to automate. But that is a much bigger problem to solve.
Yes I was being cheeky.
And yes, PT is trying to single out one part of one factor input to the economy, pointing a finger and saying: "told you so".
It is intuitively attractive. Millions of potential workers theoretically applying downwards pressure on wages in the UK such that employers only need pay the minimum because the supply of labour continues to shift the curve rightwards until it buffers up against the minimum wage. But there are too many variables involved to be able to make such a claim.
The number of double-jabbed appears to be flatlining at around 4 million below the number who have had their first jab.
That's an extra 4 million at greater risk of severe infection and death than need be the case.
In addition to the anti-vaxxers, these numpties need rounding up and given their second shot. Presumably 24 hours feeling a bit shit as a side effect of the vaccine has put them off a second jab. Or they somehow think that one dose is sufficient.
Perhaps a government campaign: "Two pricks are better than one"
(Probably not a phrase I should Google on a work laptop.)
If Frost is going to impose a trade war on us and trash Northern Ireland in the process, he needs a better justification than that pile of unsupported assertions and non sequiturs, I feel.
You're becoming increasingly irrational about this. How does using a provision of a treaty for its intended purpose constitute 'imposing a trade war'? If the EU chooses to respond in a beligerent 'might is right' fashion, how is that Frost's fault?
At no point in his speech did Frost talk about using a provision of the treaty for its intended purpose. I assume you are referring to Article 16, which is about applying temporary and limited safeguards, and not the imposed and complete replacement of the treaty by a text of Frost's choosing. And as the rationales given in his speech for this total rewrite don't stack up, I think we can legitimately put adverse consequences at his door.
Measures introduced under Article 16 can last until there is an alternative mutually acceptable solution and are only limited in scope by the need to be targeted at addressing the problem that caused Article 16 to be invoked. The measures that would be sufficient to avoid trade diversion are potentially very broad, so perhaps the EU didn't do such a good job in negotiating the treaty.
Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1 The entire British media (except @talkradio) appears to think the key question about today's Health/Science committee report on the Govt's handling of the start of the pandemic is:
"Will you apologise for not locking down earlier in March 2020?"
Yes, that knocks Frosty's 'UK’s negotiating hand was tied' into a cocked hat. Schoolboy error. Was he just not thinking or has he been immersed in Boris and Borisarnia for so long that there was a genuine false-memory thing going on?
Fascinating mortality patterns by age in today’s CMI Mortality Monitor for Q3 2021. Whilst year-to-date death rates at older ages are back within the normal range, at ages below 65 they are even higher than last year! https://t.co/HQpntIMpN2
It's of course possible that, in my view, the somewhat misplaced hysteria about accidently killing 20k Brits in today's newspapers just might move the polls but I wouldn't count on it. Firstly, the public are giving the government a great deal more leeway in dealing with this extraordinary situation than the media (who just might, heaven forbid, have a different agenda). Secondly, Labour pretty much went along with everything the government did for the same reasons, it was consistent with the best scientific advice available at the time. Thirdly, at least in my view, it is crap and similar numbers to those who died would have died anyway before the vaccines were available.
At the same time Labour seem to be going through some sort of existential crisis. They look divided, aimless and somewhat short of ideas. God knows where Boris is going to get his program for his next majority from. The pickings of Ed's Manifesto are getting thin and there is not much else to go on. A random poll can of course produce a result as we saw in September but its not looking likely.
It was said repeatedly in spring 2020 that the government's policy was to flatten the curve. That means, inevitably, that the area under the curve (= total deaths) would be the same, but delayed to some extent. The purpose of the delay was to prevent extra deaths that might be caused by overwhelming the health service. "Behavioural scientists" (goodness knows how many such paragons exist) opined that after eight weeks or so a strict lockdown would crumble so it was important not to start too soon or the crumbling would coincide with maximum plague.
Yes, and in a world before vaccines there was really very little option. 1-1.5% of us were going to die and 3-4% of us were going to need hospital admission. Everything else is details.
The winter of 2020 was different because we had a choice. In March 2020 we didn't and pretending that moving deaths around was in some way reducing the death toll is just delusional.
The correct approach when under siege is to keep the enemy at bay until the cavalry arrives. The UK Government's half-arsed approach meant that while the cavalry got to rescue half of the garrison, the other half had been handed over to the attackers as human sacrifices and hostages.
Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1 The entire British media (except @talkradio) appears to think the key question about today's Health/Science committee report on the Govt's handling of the start of the pandemic is:
"Will you apologise for not locking down earlier in March 2020?"
And they are correct. That is the decision that cost 20,000 lives.
Yes, that knocks Frosty's 'UK’s negotiating hand was tied' into a cocked hat. Schoolboy error. Was he just not thinking or has he been immersed in Boris and Borisarnia for so long that there was a genuine false-memory thing going on?
Yes, that knocks Frosty's 'UK’s negotiating hand was tied' into a cocked hat. Schoolboy error. Was he just not thinking or has he been immersed in Boris and Borisarnia for so long that there was a genuine false-memory thing going on?
Fascinating mortality patterns by age in today’s CMI Mortality Monitor for Q3 2021. Whilst year-to-date death rates at older ages are back within the normal range, at ages below 65 they are even higher than last year! https://t.co/HQpntIMpN2
Death rates for 0-64 year old men are currently running close to 10% above normal levels, and are above March levels.
Fascinating mortality patterns by age in today’s CMI Mortality Monitor for Q3 2021. Whilst year-to-date death rates at older ages are back within the normal range, at ages below 65 they are even higher than last year! https://t.co/HQpntIMpN2
Of course the UK government made mistakes last year - the biggest of which was not shutting (or at least limiting via quarantine) international travel.
We don't know the detailed discussions about who advised what and to whom, but there should be little doubt that being a bit more ahead of the curve with travel would have severely reduced the number of cases seeded in the UK. It would also have had a fairly significant impact on length and severity of lockdowns needed.
Fascinating mortality patterns by age in today’s CMI Mortality Monitor for Q3 2021. Whilst year-to-date death rates at older ages are back within the normal range, at ages below 65 they are even higher than last year! https://t.co/HQpntIMpN2
Fascinating mortality patterns by age in today’s CMI Mortality Monitor for Q3 2021. Whilst year-to-date death rates at older ages are back within the normal range, at ages below 65 they are even higher than last year! https://t.co/HQpntIMpN2
Death rates for 0-64 year old men are currently running close to 10% above normal levels, and are above March levels.
That's quite a surprise.
Given the backlogs and the state of the NHS - why are you surprised?
Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1 The entire British media (except @talkradio) appears to think the key question about today's Health/Science committee report on the Govt's handling of the start of the pandemic is:
"Will you apologise for not locking down earlier in March 2020?"
And they are correct. That is the decision that cost 20,000 lives.
I noticed this morning that Kay Burley on Sky repetitively demanded an apology from Steve Barclay without success, and then the labour spokesperson who she demanded an apology for agreeing to HMG decisions and again she could not extract an apology
I assume the lack of apology relates to possible future litigation and liability, but no doubt the lawyers among us can confirm
Fascinating mortality patterns by age in today’s CMI Mortality Monitor for Q3 2021. Whilst year-to-date death rates at older ages are back within the normal range, at ages below 65 they are even higher than last year! https://t.co/HQpntIMpN2
Death rates for 0-64 year old men are currently running close to 10% above normal levels, and are above March levels.
That's quite a surprise.
Yep. Those are the ones that are on the ventilators. About 30% mortality at that severity.
Of course the UK government made mistakes last year - the biggest of which was not shutting (or at least limiting via quarantine) international travel.
We don't know the detailed discussions about who advised what and to whom, but there should be little doubt that being a bit more ahead of the curve with travel would have severely reduced the number of cases seeded in the UK. It would also have had a fairly significant impact on length and severity of lockdowns needed.
Wow. Frosty's on the war path. Boris's NI deal is as dead as a dodo.
It's all very predictable. The past tells us the future on this one:
"Boris" needs something to wave around and say "look, Deal" for his Brexit GE in Dec 19, because he doubts he can win on a No Deal platform.
So he accepts the 'NI stays in the SM' concept that the EU likes but which "No British Prime Minister could ever accept" and he presents this Protocol to the electorate as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds. Vote for me and this 'oven ready' Withdrawal Agreement and Brexit Will Be Done.
People do so in their droves, both those swallowing his bullshit and those sick & tired of the whole shebang and wanting it over. He's made it. PM with a big majority.
We duly exit under the WA and he must now conclude the FTA. No extending of the deadline due to the pandemic or for any other reason, this is not how he rolls, how he rolls is to pull exactly the same stunt as before. He lies.
He has to have a deal because for all the bluster he can't risk the chaos of No Deal. So he mendaciously affirms the details of the Protocol and we get a barebones FTA, just sufficient to allow the claim he has delivered on his promise. He has Got Brexit (with a deal) Done. It's choreographed to happen last minute on Christmas Eve and is presented once again to the public as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds.
Just as "No Deal" served its sole purpose (bogeyman to create a joy & relief dividend for domestic consumption) so the Protocol has served its sole purpose. Its sole purpose being to get the deal he needed to win an election and cement himself in power.
Time now to renege on it because it's burdensome and it threatens the constitutional integrity of the UK.
It is, in fact, something that no British Prime Minister could ever accept.
UKG has no intention of keeping to what it negotiated & signed up to. His speech is a calculated insult, containing much falsehood, culminating in an impossible demand to replace the Protocol with a new UK drafted legal text. This will not end well.
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.
Surely the only other group that is relevant here after "women" are pre-surgical, transgender men, ie women who have changed gender and still have a cervix?
(Unless post-surgical transgender men also qualify - which I do not know without looking it up.)
What are the gender-critical lobby saying about them?
Wow. Frosty's on the war path. Boris's NI deal is as dead as a dodo.
It's all very predictable. The past tells us the future on this one:
"Boris" needs something to wave around and say "look, Deal" for his Brexit GE in Dec 19, because he doubts he can win on a No Deal platform.
So he accepts the 'NI stays in the SM' concept that the EU likes but which "No British Prime Minister could ever accept" and he presents this Protocol to the electorate as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds. Vote for me and this 'oven ready' Withdrawal Agreement and Brexit Will Be Done.
People do so in their droves, both those swallowing his bullshit and those sick & tired of the whole shebang and wanting it over. He's made it. PM with a big majority.
We duly exit under the WA and he must now conclude the FTA. No extending of the deadline due to the pandemic or for any other reason, this is not how he rolls, how he rolls is to pull exactly the same stunt as before. He lies.
He has to have a deal because for all the bluster he can't risk the chaos of No Deal. So he mendaciously affirms the details of the Protocol and we get a barebones FTA, just sufficient to allow the claim he has delivered on his promise. He has Got Brexit (with a deal) Done. It's choreographed to happen last minute on Christmas Eve and is presented once again to the public as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds.
Just as "No Deal" served its sole purpose (bogeyman to create a joy & relief dividend for domestic consumption) so the Protocol has served its sole purpose. Its sole purpose being to get the deal he needed to win an election and cement himself in power.
Time now to renege on it because it's burdensome and it threatens the constitutional integrity of the UK.
It is, in fact, something that no British Prime Minister could ever accept.
Or Frost blindsided the EU with A16 which they signed up to
This looks rather like mudslinging tbh. A number of other 'top leaders' weren't there either, including UVDL.
Ah, this is clearly some new meaning of the phrase 'top leaders' that I was previously unaware of.
I think Boris is grooming the Truss to be his successor, so expect to see much more of her than him on foreign-policy outings from now on. I also expect Frosty to be sidelined in the Brexit negotiations shortly with the Truss 'taking a more hands-on role'. (When that happens the spin will write itself, but you heard it here first.)
This looks rather like mudslinging tbh. A number of other 'top leaders' weren't there either, including UVDL.
Anyone like to offer a view on the Russian representative's name? I went through all 8 Deputy Presidents, couldn't match any of them to the readable letters.
If Frost is going to impose a trade war on us and trash Northern Ireland in the process, he needs a better justification than that pile of unsupported assertions and non sequiturs, I feel.
You're becoming increasingly irrational about this. How does using a provision of a treaty for its intended purpose constitute 'imposing a trade war'? If the EU chooses to respond in a beligerent 'might is right' fashion, how is that Frost's fault?
At no point in his speech did Frost talk about using a provision of the treaty for its intended purpose. I assume you are referring to Article 16, which is about applying temporary and limited safeguards, and not the imposed and complete replacement of the treaty by a text of Frost's choosing. And as the rationales given in his speech for this total rewrite don't stack up, I think we can legitimately put adverse consequences at his door.
Measures introduced under Article 16 can last until there is an alternative mutually acceptable solution and are only limited in scope by the need to be targeted at addressing the problem that caused Article 16 to be invoked. The measures that would be sufficient to avoid trade diversion are potentially very broad, so perhaps the EU didn't do such a good job in negotiating the treaty.
Indeed. A16 seems to have completely slipped past the EU, both sides ratified it and now the EU is stuffed because they have, over the last year, caused a significant diversion of trade which is one of the reasons given for triggering it and suspending the whole protocol. They know it as well which is why suddenly they've gone from a "no negotiation, Brexit means Brexit" position on it to opening negotiations with what looks like a pretty generous offer. It's weird (and a bit sad) that some of our EUphiles are pitching a position that the EU aren't, they're projecting their own fear that maybe, just maybe, the leavers were right and the UK negotiating position is actually pretty strong.
All they're left with is "lol Frost is renegotiating his own deal, lol, lol". I can't see anything beyond that as the the last year of blue tick wankers saying the EU won't ever reopen the NI protocol comes crashing down around them. They've got nothing left except border pedantry and even there the EU has begun softening on agricultural standards equivalence having realised we won't sign up for dynamic alignment, probably ever.
Free movement wasn't really a big problem until three things came together:
(1) The integration of the EU 8, which were very significantly poorer than then existing EU members. When previously poor countries had joined (Portugal, Greece, Spain), they were relatively small, this was 8 countries (including one big one) all at the same time. The UK was also pretty much the only country not to go with transitional controls on immigration. This meant that instead of a few million people being spread out across the whole EU, they came mostly to the UK.
(2) The UK's benefits system. As far as I can tell, there is no other country in Europe that has either a system that is as non-contributory bases, not one which was so generous with in work benefits system like the UK. Prior to the Maastricht treaty, you could work in any member state, but there was no presumption of benefits. The consequence of this is that (pretty much alone of the countries in the EU), it was possible for a migrant to come to the UK and pick up benefits from day one.
(3) The Eurozone crisis, which caused a dramatic dip in demand for migrant labour in the Southern EU states *and* led to the exporting their own young.
Hold on. Are immigrants coming here and depressing wages or are they coming over here and claiming benefits?
Personally, I am broadly in favour of free movement of labour (on the basis that it is good for individuals, in that there is a wider variety of firms they can sell their skills to - and for companies, as there are more individuals they can hire).
What I oppose, though, is a system where people could come to the UK, having not paid a penny in tax or National Insurance, and receive benefits. That seems a very odd system.
I also find the argument that immigration has suppressed capital investment to be one which - while superficially plausible - does not seem to mesh with the fact. Both Switzerland and Germany have seen more immigration of unskilled and semi-skilled labour in the last five years than the UK (as a % of population), and yet both have seen very significant investment in automation.
So, Switzerland's Gross Capital Formation has risen from 22% to 27% as immigration has risen and Gemany's from 15% to 21%. While the UK remains marooned in the mid-teens. The simplistic explanation of "immigration means firms don't need to automate" seems to ignore the fact that in all the countries which saw even greater levels of Eastern European immigration did see much greater investment in automation.
I suspect that the big issue is that the UK has a consumption and services driven economy, which is much less easy to automate. But that is a much bigger problem to solve.
Yes I was being cheeky.
And yes, PT is trying to single out one part of one factor input to the economy, pointing a finger and saying: "told you so".
It is intuitively attractive. Millions of potential workers theoretically applying downwards pressure on wages in the UK such that employers only need pay the minimum because the supply of labour continues to shift the curve rightwards until it buffers up against the minimum wage. But there are too many variables involved to be able to make such a claim.
There weren't millions of workers on the minimum wage pre-expansion though - and now sectors reliant upon minimum wage labour are saying they're struggling to recruit without free movement.
We'll see what happens going forwards. The proof will be in the pudding, but if the proportion of jobs stuck the minimum wage ceiling comes down then I view that as a good thing. Do you?
Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1 The entire British media (except @talkradio) appears to think the key question about today's Health/Science committee report on the Govt's handling of the start of the pandemic is:
"Will you apologise for not locking down earlier in March 2020?"
And they are correct. That is the decision that cost 20,000 lives.
I noticed this morning that Kay Burley on Sky repetitively demanded an apology from Steve Barclay without success, and then the labour spokesperson who she demanded an apology for agreeing to HMG decisions and again she could not extract an apology
I assume the lack of apology relates to possible future litigation and liability, but no doubt the lawyers among us can confirm
Leadership mantra: Never apologise, never explain, never complain. If you listen carefully it doesn't really vary.
(Also: never actually answer the question; and don't say yes, don't say no.)
Wow. Frosty's on the war path. Boris's NI deal is as dead as a dodo.
It's all very predictable. The past tells us the future on this one:
"Boris" needs something to wave around and say "look, Deal" for his Brexit GE in Dec 19, because he doubts he can win on a No Deal platform.
So he accepts the 'NI stays in the SM' concept that the EU likes but which "No British Prime Minister could ever accept" and he presents this Protocol to the electorate as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds. Vote for me and this 'oven ready' Withdrawal Agreement and Brexit Will Be Done.
People do so in their droves, both those swallowing his bullshit and those sick & tired of the whole shebang and wanting it over. He's made it. PM with a big majority.
We duly exit under the WA and he must now conclude the FTA. No extending of the deadline due to the pandemic or for any other reason, this is not how he rolls, how he rolls is to pull exactly the same stunt as before. He lies.
He has to have a deal because for all the bluster he can't risk the chaos of No Deal. So he mendaciously affirms the details of the Protocol and we get a barebones FTA, just sufficient to allow the claim he has delivered on his promise. He has Got Brexit (with a deal) Done. It's choreographed to happen last minute on Christmas Eve and is presented once again to the public as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds.
Just as "No Deal" served its sole purpose (bogeyman to create a joy & relief dividend for domestic consumption) so the Protocol has served its sole purpose. Its sole purpose being to get the deal he needed to win an election and cement himself in power.
Time now to renege on it because it's burdensome and it threatens the constitutional integrity of the UK.
It is, in fact, something that no British Prime Minister could ever accept.
With small variations of tone, I would heartily endorse this analysis. In particular Boris showed a degree of statesmanship in avoiding No Deal (which would have landed the Irish problem onto the EU); and it was inevitable reality that he had to accept an Ireland deal knowing it would have to change.
The whole island of Ireland thing has had to be finessed constantly at least since Gladstone's day, and it is a bit bogus of Boris's critics to suggest it should magically end now.
I have no dog in the fight because I support a united Ireland.
I recall during the BREXIT debate @rcs1000 posting a comment from a physicist that the reason he supported BREXIT was that the U.K. was ultimately good at “error correction” while the EU was not. What is today’s COVID report if not a major intervention in “error correction”? Lord yes, we got things wrong, but we’re learning. Not sure I’ve seen the same from the EU….
Smarkets – I’m after some opinions about this morning’s Smarkets rule clarification on this market:
“Any Covid restrictions to be re-introduced in England in 2021”
I’m on “No”.
The original rules have been appended with three clarifications; the latter states that compulsory vaccination for care workers would immediately settle the market for “Yes”.
The Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2021 was made 22nd July:
From 22 July we have known that care workers will - by law - have to be vaccinated by 11 November.
I first placed a bet on this market on 6th September. I’m struggling to find out when Smarkets opened this market but suspect I was quick off the mark and it was only a day or two prior to my first bet. But – whatever – it was way after 22 July.
It therefore never occurred to me that the care home worker mandate would come under “Yes” in the settlement of this market.
As I posted on the previous thread (I’ve been simmering over this) if Smarkets were going to settle it in this way I would have bet “Yes” as the result was already known! We would all have been on "Yes".
I think Smarkets have run a false market.
Before the rule clarification of this morning “Yes” was trading at approx 1.45 and “No” 2.2. I got on “No” at 4.0. After the clarification “Yes” came down to 1.01 (has now settled at 1.09). This dramatic change is purely due to the clarification - and the shock it caused shows therefore that it must have been widely understood that mandatory vaccinations for care workers would not constitute a reintroduction of restrictions before the end of 2021 for the purposes of the bet.
Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1 The entire British media (except @talkradio) appears to think the key question about today's Health/Science committee report on the Govt's handling of the start of the pandemic is:
"Will you apologise for not locking down earlier in March 2020?"
And they are correct. That is the decision that cost 20,000 lives.
I noticed this morning that Kay Burley on Sky repetitively demanded an apology from Steve Barclay without success, and then the labour spokesperson who she demanded an apology for agreeing to HMG decisions and again she could not extract an apology
I assume the lack of apology relates to possible future litigation and liability, but no doubt the lawyers among us can confirm
Leadership mantra: Never apologise, never explain, never complain. If you listen carefully it doesn't really vary.
(Also: never actually answer the question; and don't say yes, don't say no.)
"On the topic of human wanderlust, evolution and freedom of movement. This is something I've long found fascinating. Is there a genetic difference between those people who are happy to stay put, and are rooted in their communities, and those who are forever on the search for new horizons. Citizens of the world. The Paul Young gene. And by extension does this have an impact on politics or are other factors like social class, upbringing and economics much more important?
The question is does this also drive differences between the somewheres and the nowheres, the migratory urban populations and the sedentary rural ones? Who knows."
+++++
I've always thought that humanity can usefully be divided between the farmers and the hunter-gatherers. The 9 to 5 ers and the freelancers. The stay-at-homes and the travel addicts. Immanuel Kant v Bruce Chatwin.
A lot of human misery is likely created by forcing the natural farmers to move, or by forcing the travellers to stay home and have jobs
Check out any book on the genetic basis of personality. A very readable start is Mousy Cats and Sheepish Coyotes by John Shivik. The science seems to indicate that, across all animal species there is a genetic basis (based on species, rather than individual, survival) for personality across 4 parameters (roughly, 1. lover/fighter, 2. homebody/explorer - your wanderlust, 3. social/solitary, and 4. brave/timid.) For humans, there is a fifth which is roughly reliable/idiosyncratic.
It's fascinating stuff. Some turn their noses up at overwrought deterministic theories about evolution and personality, but I say bring it on. It's fun.
Not deterministic. The algorithm is more probably approximately correct. Even where personality traits are linked to genes, the link is not 100% genetic, and the percentage can vary even within different populations of the same species. An example given in the book talks of a Dutch population of birds having, say, 20-25% genetic link to a trait, whereas the British population of the same species was 40% (forgive me if the numbers are not right).
So think about it as the genetics give us a probability disposition to a certain trait, whereas our experience adds a layer on top of that as to how we actually express that trait.
Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1 The entire British media (except @talkradio) appears to think the key question about today's Health/Science committee report on the Govt's handling of the start of the pandemic is:
"Will you apologise for not locking down earlier in March 2020?"
And they are correct. That is the decision that cost 20,000 lives.
I noticed this morning that Kay Burley on Sky repetitively demanded an apology from Steve Barclay without success, and then the labour spokesperson who she demanded an apology for agreeing to HMG decisions and again she could not extract an apology
I assume the lack of apology relates to possible future litigation and liability, but no doubt the lawyers among us can confirm
Leadership mantra: Never apologise, never explain, never complain. If you listen carefully it doesn't really vary.
(Also: never actually answer the question; and don't say yes, don't say no.)
Give a target. Or a date. Never both.
You are allowed to apologise profusely for what someone 300 years ago did to someone else.
Honoured to be appointed United Nations Special Representative. I’ll be working with the @UN@ECA_OFFICIAL to help African economic recovery from the pandemic and promote sustainable development.
Wow. Frosty's on the war path. Boris's NI deal is as dead as a dodo.
It's all very predictable. The past tells us the future on this one:
"Boris" needs something to wave around and say "look, Deal" for his Brexit GE in Dec 19, because he doubts he can win on a No Deal platform.
So he accepts the 'NI stays in the SM' concept that the EU likes but which "No British Prime Minister could ever accept" and he presents this Protocol to the electorate as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds. Vote for me and this 'oven ready' Withdrawal Agreement and Brexit Will Be Done.
People do so in their droves, both those swallowing his bullshit and those sick & tired of the whole shebang and wanting it over. He's made it. PM with a big majority.
We duly exit under the WA and he must now conclude the FTA. No extending of the deadline due to the pandemic or for any other reason, this is not how he rolls, how he rolls is to pull exactly the same stunt as before. He lies.
He has to have a deal because for all the bluster he can't risk the chaos of No Deal. So he mendaciously affirms the details of the Protocol and we get a barebones FTA, just sufficient to allow the claim he has delivered on his promise. He has Got Brexit (with a deal) Done. It's choreographed to happen last minute on Christmas Eve and is presented once again to the public as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds.
Just as "No Deal" served its sole purpose (bogeyman to create a joy & relief dividend for domestic consumption) so the Protocol has served its sole purpose. Its sole purpose being to get the deal he needed to win an election and cement himself in power.
Time now to renege on it because it's burdensome and it threatens the constitutional integrity of the UK.
It is, in fact, something that no British Prime Minister could ever accept.
It's a real bugger's muddle. I'm actually losing track of what historical rewrite Boris's admirers are going with. We seem to have three options at present (with doubtless more to come):
1) The Frost opening: the deal was always crap and unworkable, but the British government signed it in panic because the EU frightened us.
2) The Phil Thompson variant: the deal was always crap but this was the intention because it gave Boris the perfect excuse to rip it up later (for reasons that are not altogether clear).
3) The Big G gambit: Article 16 blindsided the EU. (Still work in progress.)
Smarkets – I’m after some opinions about this morning’s Smarkets rule clarification on this market:
“Any Covid restrictions to be re-introduced in England in 2021”
I’m on “No”.
The original rules have been appended with three clarifications; the latter states that compulsory vaccination for care workers would immediately settle the market for “Yes”.
The Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2021 was made 22nd July:
From 22 July we have known that care workers will - by law - have to be vaccinated by 11 November.
I first placed a bet on this market on 6th September. I’m struggling to find out when Smarkets opened this market but suspect I was quick off the mark and it was only a day or two prior to my first bet. But – whatever – it was way after 22 July.
It therefore never occurred to me that the care home worker mandate would come under “Yes” in the settlement of this market.
As I posted on the previous thread (I’ve been simmering over this) if Smarkets were going to settle it in this way I would have bet “Yes” as the result was already known! We would all have been on "Yes".
I think Smarkets have run a false market.
Before the rule clarification of this morning “Yes” was trading at approx 1.45 and “No” 2.2. I got on “No” at 4.0. After the clarification “Yes” came down to 1.01 (has now settled at 1.09). This dramatic change is purely due to the clarification - and the shock it caused shows therefore that it must have been widely understood that mandatory vaccinations for care workers would not constitute a reintroduction of restrictions before the end of 2021 for the purposes of the bet.
Thoughts?
One of the perils of betting on an exchange where the operator is also a significant positional trader. This could be fine if the exchange went out of its way to be favourable to clients but we know they have closed some winners and limit API access to certain traders.
I agree it is unfair, the wrong decision both for the market and a sustainable future for Smarkets, but caveat emptor has to apply as well, betting on specials does come with rules risks.
Biden, Draghi and Modi were there. Xi, Putin were not. Cannot ascertain if the FS was there. But it seems like her job.
Yes Liz Truss represented the UK
The next Prime Minister rather the current one.
But "His foreign secretary" sounds like and is intended to sound like he sent along his PA. She isn't his foreign secretary, she's our Foreign Secretary. Not the same thing.
I have invested in the prospect of her being next PM, so don't like these attempts to talk her down.
Smarkets – I’m after some opinions about this morning’s Smarkets rule clarification on this market:
“Any Covid restrictions to be re-introduced in England in 2021”
I’m on “No”.
The original rules have been appended with three clarifications; the latter states that compulsory vaccination for care workers would immediately settle the market for “Yes”.
The Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2021 was made 22nd July:
From 22 July we have known that care workers will - by law - have to be vaccinated by 11 November.
I first placed a bet on this market on 6th September. I’m struggling to find out when Smarkets opened this market but suspect I was quick off the mark and it was only a day or two prior to my first bet. But – whatever – it was way after 22 July.
It therefore never occurred to me that the care home worker mandate would come under “Yes” in the settlement of this market.
As I posted on the previous thread (I’ve been simmering over this) if Smarkets were going to settle it in this way I would have bet “Yes” as the result was already known! We would all have been on "Yes".
I think Smarkets have run a false market.
Before the rule clarification of this morning “Yes” was trading at approx 1.45 and “No” 2.2. I got on “No” at 4.0. After the clarification “Yes” came down to 1.01 (has now settled at 1.09). This dramatic change is purely due to the clarification - and the shock it caused shows therefore that it must have been widely understood that mandatory vaccinations for care workers would not constitute a reintroduction of restrictions before the end of 2021 for the purposes of the bet.
Thoughts?
I'd be narked.
As a pedant the the care work vaccination mandate isn't something being reintroduced, just introduced.
Wow. Frosty's on the war path. Boris's NI deal is as dead as a dodo.
It's all very predictable. The past tells us the future on this one:
"Boris" needs something to wave around and say "look, Deal" for his Brexit GE in Dec 19, because he doubts he can win on a No Deal platform.
So he accepts the 'NI stays in the SM' concept that the EU likes but which "No British Prime Minister could ever accept" and he presents this Protocol to the electorate as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds. Vote for me and this 'oven ready' Withdrawal Agreement and Brexit Will Be Done.
People do so in their droves, both those swallowing his bullshit and those sick & tired of the whole shebang and wanting it over. He's made it. PM with a big majority.
We duly exit under the WA and he must now conclude the FTA. No extending of the deadline due to the pandemic or for any other reason, this is not how he rolls, how he rolls is to pull exactly the same stunt as before. He lies.
He has to have a deal because for all the bluster he can't risk the chaos of No Deal. So he mendaciously affirms the details of the Protocol and we get a barebones FTA, just sufficient to allow the claim he has delivered on his promise. He has Got Brexit (with a deal) Done. It's choreographed to happen last minute on Christmas Eve and is presented once again to the public as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds.
Just as "No Deal" served its sole purpose (bogeyman to create a joy & relief dividend for domestic consumption) so the Protocol has served its sole purpose. Its sole purpose being to get the deal he needed to win an election and cement himself in power.
Time now to renege on it because it's burdensome and it threatens the constitutional integrity of the UK.
It is, in fact, something that no British Prime Minister could ever accept.
It's a real bugger's muddle. I'm actually losing track of what historical rewrite Boris's admirers are going with. We seem to have three options at present (with doubtless more to come):
1) The Frost opening: the deal was always crap and unworkable, but the British government signed it in panic because the EU frightened us.
2) The Phil Thompson variant: the deal was always crap but this was the intention because it gave Boris the perfect excuse to rip it up later (for reasons that are not altogether clear).
3) The Big G gambit: Article 16 blindsided the EU. (Still work in progress.)
Any more for any more?
Thanks. I'm a modified (2). Neither with regard to Ireland especially, not lots of other things, was the best deal (have and eat cake) available. So the deal was done to avoid no deal (which privately Boris knew would be the end of him). No more delay was politically possible.
As there is no solution to Ireland without a red line giving way, a defective deal had to be done. Boris and co are using force majeure to try to get a different defective deal.
Yes, it is amazingly invisible. Quietly hidden under the carpet of history
When you consider the huge industry dedicated to remembering the Holocaust - the books, the museums, the movies, the art, the tours of the death camps - and yet, on Unit 731 there is almost nothing. And yet it is comparable in horror, and enormous in scale.
In addition to the Booker-prize winning novel, you have ...
(Proper) video nasty "Men behind the sun" There's an X-files arc/series of episodes about Unit 731 one of the Call of Duty games uses the backstory for the zombie mini-game.
This is clearly not meant to be an exclusive list, just some higher profile media in which it is referenced.
Haven't commented on this as my professional career started in BW disarmament, and no history of BW is complete without the obligatory reference to Unit 731. So to me, it's unimaginable that anyone who has any knowledge of BW would be unaware of this unit.
But I know that is a fallacy to assume that something is common knowledge because you have known it for a long while.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire declares that the US needs to recognize "Europe as one of the three superpowers in the world for the 21st century,” alongside the US & China.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire declares that the US needs to recognize "Europe as one of the three superpowers in the world for the 21st century,” alongside the US & China.
Wow. Frosty's on the war path. Boris's NI deal is as dead as a dodo.
It's all very predictable. The past tells us the future on this one:
"Boris" needs something to wave around and say "look, Deal" for his Brexit GE in Dec 19, because he doubts he can win on a No Deal platform.
So he accepts the 'NI stays in the SM' concept that the EU likes but which "No British Prime Minister could ever accept" and he presents this Protocol to the electorate as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds. Vote for me and this 'oven ready' Withdrawal Agreement and Brexit Will Be Done.
People do so in their droves, both those swallowing his bullshit and those sick & tired of the whole shebang and wanting it over. He's made it. PM with a big majority.
We duly exit under the WA and he must now conclude the FTA. No extending of the deadline due to the pandemic or for any other reason, this is not how he rolls, how he rolls is to pull exactly the same stunt as before. He lies.
He has to have a deal because for all the bluster he can't risk the chaos of No Deal. So he mendaciously affirms the details of the Protocol and we get a barebones FTA, just sufficient to allow the claim he has delivered on his promise. He has Got Brexit (with a deal) Done. It's choreographed to happen last minute on Christmas Eve and is presented once again to the public as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds.
Just as "No Deal" served its sole purpose (bogeyman to create a joy & relief dividend for domestic consumption) so the Protocol has served its sole purpose. Its sole purpose being to get the deal he needed to win an election and cement himself in power.
Time now to renege on it because it's burdensome and it threatens the constitutional integrity of the UK.
It is, in fact, something that no British Prime Minister could ever accept.
It's a real bugger's muddle. I'm actually losing track of what historical rewrite Boris's admirers are going with. We seem to have three options at present (with doubtless more to come):
1) The Frost opening: the deal was always crap and unworkable, but the British government signed it in panic because the EU frightened us.
2) The Phil Thompson variant: the deal was always crap but this was the intention because it gave Boris the perfect excuse to rip it up later (for reasons that are not altogether clear).
3) The Big G gambit: Article 16 blindsided the EU. (Still work in progress.)
Any more for any more?
Thanks. I'm a modified (2). Neither with regard to Ireland especially, not lots of other things, was the best deal (have and eat cake) available. So the deal was done to avoid no deal (which privately Boris knew would be the end of him). No more delay was politically possible.
As there is no solution to Ireland without a red line giving way, a defective deal had to be done. Boris and co are using force majeure to try to get a different defective deal.
Yes, that's also a possibility, though it probably reflects worst of all upon Boris, making the whole thing about him.
I knew that the Japanese had behaved horribly in Manchuria with rapes, slave girls and general brutality but the industrial scale is a bit of a shock, as is the complicity in the US covering this abomination up. Appalling.
In a really perverse historical irony, a German called John Rabe became a hero during the Rape of Nanking, saving hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives by creating a semi-official safe zone in the city.
Despite being the head of the local Nazi party.
"Finally, with only his status as an official of an allied nation for protection, Rabe did what now seems the unthinkable: he began to roam about the city, trying to prevent atrocities himself.
Whenever he drove through Nanking, some man would inevitably leap out and stop the car to beg Rabe to stop a rape in progress -- a rape that usually involved a sister, a wife, or a daughter. Rabe would then let the man climb into the car and direct him to the scene of the rape. Once there, he would chase Japanese soldiers away from their prey, on one occasion even bodily lifting a soldier sprawled on top of a young girl. He knew these expeditions were highly dangerous ("The Japanese had pistols and bayonets and I ... had only party symbols and my swastika armband," Rabe wrote in his report to Hitler), but nothing could deter him -- not even the risk of death."
"With these women Rabe developed a warning system to protect them from Japanese rapists. Whenever Japanese soldiers scaled the wall of his yard, the women would blow a whistle and send Rabe running out into the yard to chase the offenders away. This happened so frequently that Rabe rarely left his home at night, fearful that Japanese intruders would commit an orgy of rape in his absence."
After the war, he lived in poverty due to his status as an ex-Nazi. He survived on food parcels and money sent to him from China, where he is now widely regarded as a hero.
Even some fairly hardline Nazis were sickened by the behaviour of groups like the Ustasha and other local militias.
Some of them were disgusted by the behaviour of their own equivalents, the worst of whom was probably Dirlewanger. This tended to result in averting of eyes rather than any preventative action though.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire declares that the US needs to recognize "Europe as one of the three superpowers in the world for the 21st century,” alongside the US & China.
They could be if they stepped up to the plate and paid for their own defence. Most in the EU have been quite happy for the US to foot the bill for their defence for a long time. Can't see them doing that. They would rather placate Putin and Xi.
Wow. Frosty's on the war path. Boris's NI deal is as dead as a dodo.
He truly has the zeal of the convert. Someone's going to need to rein him in at some point. I think he's starting to believe some of his own hype, like Cummings did. We all saw what happened to Cummings.
On PB we've certainly seen just how zealous new converts can be.
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.
Surely the only other group that is relevant here after "women" are pre-surgical, transgender men, ie women who have changed gender and still have a cervix?
(Unless post-surgical transgender men also qualify - which I do not know without looking it up.)
What are the gender-critical lobby saying about them?
I knew that the Japanese had behaved horribly in Manchuria with rapes, slave girls and general brutality but the industrial scale is a bit of a shock, as is the complicity in the US covering this abomination up. Appalling.
In a really perverse historical irony, a German called John Rabe became a hero during the Rape of Nanking, saving hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives by creating a semi-official safe zone in the city.
Despite being the head of the local Nazi party.
"Finally, with only his status as an official of an allied nation for protection, Rabe did what now seems the unthinkable: he began to roam about the city, trying to prevent atrocities himself.
Whenever he drove through Nanking, some man would inevitably leap out and stop the car to beg Rabe to stop a rape in progress -- a rape that usually involved a sister, a wife, or a daughter. Rabe would then let the man climb into the car and direct him to the scene of the rape. Once there, he would chase Japanese soldiers away from their prey, on one occasion even bodily lifting a soldier sprawled on top of a young girl. He knew these expeditions were highly dangerous ("The Japanese had pistols and bayonets and I ... had only party symbols and my swastika armband," Rabe wrote in his report to Hitler), but nothing could deter him -- not even the risk of death."
"With these women Rabe developed a warning system to protect them from Japanese rapists. Whenever Japanese soldiers scaled the wall of his yard, the women would blow a whistle and send Rabe running out into the yard to chase the offenders away. This happened so frequently that Rabe rarely left his home at night, fearful that Japanese intruders would commit an orgy of rape in his absence."
After the war, he lived in poverty due to his status as an ex-Nazi. He survived on food parcels and money sent to him from China, where he is now widely regarded as a hero.
Even some fairly hardline Nazis were sickened by the behaviour of groups like the Ustasha and other local militias.
Some of them were disgusted by the behaviour of their own equivalents, the worst of whom was probably Dirlewanger. This tended to result in averting of eyes rather than any preventative action though.
They were too busy counting the extra money that Hitler was shovelling into their pockets to actually do something.
I recall during the BREXIT debate @rcs1000 posting a comment from a physicist that the reason he supported BREXIT was that the U.K. was ultimately good at “error correction” while the EU was not. What is today’s COVID report if not a major intervention in “error correction”? Lord yes, we got things wrong, but we’re learning. Not sure I’ve seen the same from the EU….
Smaller organizations will tend to be more nimble, and to error correct more quickly. (And this is a particular issue with the EU, whose very structure results in tortuous decision making processes.)
That being said... here's an example: vaccine procurement. The EU did error correct relatively quickly. They fucked up. And then they got their chequebook out, and then they corrected.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire declares that the US needs to recognize "Europe as one of the three superpowers in the world for the 21st century,” alongside the US & China.
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.
Surely the only other group that is relevant here after "women" are pre-surgical, transgender men, ie women who have changed gender and still have a cervix?
(Unless post-surgical transgender men also qualify - which I do not know without looking it up.)
What are the gender-critical lobby saying about them?
How do you have a cervix if you are not a woman
Asking that at some universities would get you the sack.
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.
Surely the only other group that is relevant here after "women" are pre-surgical, transgender men, ie women who have changed gender and still have a cervix?
(Unless post-surgical transgender men also qualify - which I do not know without looking it up.)
What are the gender-critical lobby saying about them?
Just having a think on what @TheScreamingEagles said about one of the scenes in NTTD riling people up but I can't think of which one it was. I didn't detect anything overtly woke in the movie.
Wow. Frosty's on the war path. Boris's NI deal is as dead as a dodo.
It's all very predictable. The past tells us the future on this one:
"Boris" needs something to wave around and say "look, Deal" for his Brexit GE in Dec 19, because he doubts he can win on a No Deal platform.
So he accepts the 'NI stays in the SM' concept that the EU likes but which "No British Prime Minister could ever accept" and he presents this Protocol to the electorate as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds. Vote for me and this 'oven ready' Withdrawal Agreement and Brexit Will Be Done.
People do so in their droves, both those swallowing his bullshit and those sick & tired of the whole shebang and wanting it over. He's made it. PM with a big majority.
We duly exit under the WA and he must now conclude the FTA. No extending of the deadline due to the pandemic or for any other reason, this is not how he rolls, how he rolls is to pull exactly the same stunt as before. He lies.
He has to have a deal because for all the bluster he can't risk the chaos of No Deal. So he mendaciously affirms the details of the Protocol and we get a barebones FTA, just sufficient to allow the claim he has delivered on his promise. He has Got Brexit (with a deal) Done. It's choreographed to happen last minute on Christmas Eve and is presented once again to the public as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds.
Just as "No Deal" served its sole purpose (bogeyman to create a joy & relief dividend for domestic consumption) so the Protocol has served its sole purpose. Its sole purpose being to get the deal he needed to win an election and cement himself in power.
Time now to renege on it because it's burdensome and it threatens the constitutional integrity of the UK.
It is, in fact, something that no British Prime Minister could ever accept.
It's a real bugger's muddle. I'm actually losing track of what historical rewrite Boris's admirers are going with. We seem to have three options at present (with doubtless more to come):
1) The Frost opening: the deal was always crap and unworkable, but the British government signed it in panic because the EU frightened us.
2) The Phil Thompson variant: the deal was always crap but this was the intention because it gave Boris the perfect excuse to rip it up later (for reasons that are not altogether clear).
3) The Big G gambit: Article 16 blindsided the EU. (Still work in progress.)
Any more for any more?
Thanks. I'm a modified (2). Neither with regard to Ireland especially, not lots of other things, was the best deal (have and eat cake) available. So the deal was done to avoid no deal (which privately Boris knew would be the end of him). No more delay was politically possible.
As there is no solution to Ireland without a red line giving way, a defective deal had to be done. Boris and co are using force majeure to try to get a different defective deal.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire declares that the US needs to recognize "Europe as one of the three superpowers in the world for the 21st century,” alongside the US & China.
Free movement wasn't really a big problem until three things came together:
(1) The integration of the EU 8, which were very significantly poorer than then existing EU members. When previously poor countries had joined (Portugal, Greece, Spain), they were relatively small, this was 8 countries (including one big one) all at the same time. The UK was also pretty much the only country not to go with transitional controls on immigration. This meant that instead of a few million people being spread out across the whole EU, they came mostly to the UK.
(2) The UK's benefits system. As far as I can tell, there is no other country in Europe that has either a system that is as non-contributory bases, not one which was so generous with in work benefits system like the UK. Prior to the Maastricht treaty, you could work in any member state, but there was no presumption of benefits. The consequence of this is that (pretty much alone of the countries in the EU), it was possible for a migrant to come to the UK and pick up benefits from day one.
(3) The Eurozone crisis, which caused a dramatic dip in demand for migrant labour in the Southern EU states *and* led to the exporting their own young.
Hold on. Are immigrants coming here and depressing wages or are they coming over here and claiming benefits?
Personally, I am broadly in favour of free movement of labour (on the basis that it is good for individuals, in that there is a wider variety of firms they can sell their skills to - and for companies, as there are more individuals they can hire).
What I oppose, though, is a system where people could come to the UK, having not paid a penny in tax or National Insurance, and receive benefits. That seems a very odd system.
I also find the argument that immigration has suppressed capital investment to be one which - while superficially plausible - does not seem to mesh with the fact. Both Switzerland and Germany have seen more immigration of unskilled and semi-skilled labour in the last five years than the UK (as a % of population), and yet both have seen very significant investment in automation.
So, Switzerland's Gross Capital Formation has risen from 22% to 27% as immigration has risen and Gemany's from 15% to 21%. While the UK remains marooned in the mid-teens. The simplistic explanation of "immigration means firms don't need to automate" seems to ignore the fact that in all the countries which saw even greater levels of Eastern European immigration did see much greater investment in automation.
I suspect that the big issue is that the UK has a consumption and services driven economy, which is much less easy to automate. But that is a much bigger problem to solve.
Yes I was being cheeky.
And yes, PT is trying to single out one part of one factor input to the economy, pointing a finger and saying: "told you so".
It is intuitively attractive. Millions of potential workers theoretically applying downwards pressure on wages in the UK such that employers only need pay the minimum because the supply of labour continues to shift the curve rightwards until it buffers up against the minimum wage. But there are too many variables involved to be able to make such a claim.
There weren't millions of workers on the minimum wage pre-expansion though - and now sectors reliant upon minimum wage labour are saying they're struggling to recruit without free movement.
We'll see what happens going forwards. The proof will be in the pudding, but if the proportion of jobs stuck the minimum wage ceiling comes down then I view that as a good thing. Do you?
Free movement wasn't really a big problem until three things came together:
(1) The integration of the EU 8, which were very significantly poorer than then existing EU members. When previously poor countries had joined (Portugal, Greece, Spain), they were relatively small, this was 8 countries (including one big one) all at the same time. The UK was also pretty much the only country not to go with transitional controls on immigration. This meant that instead of a few million people being spread out across the whole EU, they came mostly to the UK.
(2) The UK's benefits system. As far as I can tell, there is no other country in Europe that has either a system that is as non-contributory bases, not one which was so generous with in work benefits system like the UK. Prior to the Maastricht treaty, you could work in any member state, but there was no presumption of benefits. The consequence of this is that (pretty much alone of the countries in the EU), it was possible for a migrant to come to the UK and pick up benefits from day one.
(3) The Eurozone crisis, which caused a dramatic dip in demand for migrant labour in the Southern EU states *and* led to the exporting their own young.
Hold on. Are immigrants coming here and depressing wages or are they coming over here and claiming benefits?
Personally, I am broadly in favour of free movement of labour (on the basis that it is good for individuals, in that there is a wider variety of firms they can sell their skills to - and for companies, as there are more individuals they can hire).
What I oppose, though, is a system where people could come to the UK, having not paid a penny in tax or National Insurance, and receive benefits. That seems a very odd system.
I also find the argument that immigration has suppressed capital investment to be one which - while superficially plausible - does not seem to mesh with the fact. Both Switzerland and Germany have seen more immigration of unskilled and semi-skilled labour in the last five years than the UK (as a % of population), and yet both have seen very significant investment in automation.
So, Switzerland's Gross Capital Formation has risen from 22% to 27% as immigration has risen and Gemany's from 15% to 21%. While the UK remains marooned in the mid-teens. The simplistic explanation of "immigration means firms don't need to automate" seems to ignore the fact that in all the countries which saw even greater levels of Eastern European immigration did see much greater investment in automation.
I suspect that the big issue is that the UK has a consumption and services driven economy, which is much less easy to automate. But that is a much bigger problem to solve.
Yes I was being cheeky.
And yes, PT is trying to single out one part of one factor input to the economy, pointing a finger and saying: "told you so".
It is intuitively attractive. Millions of potential workers theoretically applying downwards pressure on wages in the UK such that employers only need pay the minimum because the supply of labour continues to shift the curve rightwards until it buffers up against the minimum wage. But there are too many variables involved to be able to make such a claim.
There weren't millions of workers on the minimum wage pre-expansion though - and now sectors reliant upon minimum wage labour are saying they're struggling to recruit without free movement.
We'll see what happens going forwards. The proof will be in the pudding, but if the proportion of jobs stuck the minimum wage ceiling comes down then I view that as a good thing. Do you?
I do if it was accompanied by productivity gains.
Well I expect that will happen yes.
Have you got a way you think that can be objectively measured say a few years from now?
Wow. Frosty's on the war path. Boris's NI deal is as dead as a dodo.
It's all very predictable. The past tells us the future on this one:
"Boris" needs something to wave around and say "look, Deal" for his Brexit GE in Dec 19, because he doubts he can win on a No Deal platform.
So he accepts the 'NI stays in the SM' concept that the EU likes but which "No British Prime Minister could ever accept" and he presents this Protocol to the electorate as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds. Vote for me and this 'oven ready' Withdrawal Agreement and Brexit Will Be Done.
People do so in their droves, both those swallowing his bullshit and those sick & tired of the whole shebang and wanting it over. He's made it. PM with a big majority.
We duly exit under the WA and he must now conclude the FTA. No extending of the deadline due to the pandemic or for any other reason, this is not how he rolls, how he rolls is to pull exactly the same stunt as before. He lies.
He has to have a deal because for all the bluster he can't risk the chaos of No Deal. So he mendaciously affirms the details of the Protocol and we get a barebones FTA, just sufficient to allow the claim he has delivered on his promise. He has Got Brexit (with a deal) Done. It's choreographed to happen last minute on Christmas Eve and is presented once again to the public as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds.
Just as "No Deal" served its sole purpose (bogeyman to create a joy & relief dividend for domestic consumption) so the Protocol has served its sole purpose. Its sole purpose being to get the deal he needed to win an election and cement himself in power.
Time now to renege on it because it's burdensome and it threatens the constitutional integrity of the UK.
It is, in fact, something that no British Prime Minister could ever accept.
It's a real bugger's muddle. I'm actually losing track of what historical rewrite Boris's admirers are going with. We seem to have three options at present (with doubtless more to come):
1) The Frost opening: the deal was always crap and unworkable, but the British government signed it in panic because the EU frightened us.
2) The Phil Thompson variant: the deal was always crap but this was the intention because it gave Boris the perfect excuse to rip it up later (for reasons that are not altogether clear).
3) The Big G gambit: Article 16 blindsided the EU. (Still work in progress.)
Any more for any more?
Thanks. I'm a modified (2). Neither with regard to Ireland especially, not lots of other things, was the best deal (have and eat cake) available. So the deal was done to avoid no deal (which privately Boris knew would be the end of him). No more delay was politically possible.
As there is no solution to Ireland without a red line giving way, a defective deal had to be done. Boris and co are using force majeure to try to get a different defective deal.
Yes and primarily move the defect of the deal into EU rather than the UK. The end game for Frost is for the EU to check for illicit UK exports into the single market via Ireland in Calais or wherever Ireland's exports land on the continent. That suits everyone because the EU don't have to have a physical border in NI which is vulnerable to their people getting bombed and if they do it quietly they can maintain the pretence of no market disruption or call it something other than what it is.
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.
Surely the only other group that is relevant here after "women" are pre-surgical, transgender men, ie women who have changed gender and still have a cervix?
(Unless post-surgical transgender men also qualify - which I do not know without looking it up.)
What are the gender-critical lobby saying about them?
I recall during the BREXIT debate @rcs1000 posting a comment from a physicist that the reason he supported BREXIT was that the U.K. was ultimately good at “error correction” while the EU was not. What is today’s COVID report if not a major intervention in “error correction”? Lord yes, we got things wrong, but we’re learning. Not sure I’ve seen the same from the EU….
That being said... here's an example: vaccine procurement. The EU did error correct relatively quickly. They fucked up. And then they got their chequebook out, and then they corrected.
And in the process traduced then sued the producer of one of the effective vaccines.
Just having a think on what @TheScreamingEagles said about one of the scenes in NTTD riling people up but I can't think of which one it was. I didn't detect anything overtly woke in the movie.
Free movement wasn't really a big problem until three things came together:
(1) The integration of the EU 8, which were very significantly poorer than then existing EU members. When previously poor countries had joined (Portugal, Greece, Spain), they were relatively small, this was 8 countries (including one big one) all at the same time. The UK was also pretty much the only country not to go with transitional controls on immigration. This meant that instead of a few million people being spread out across the whole EU, they came mostly to the UK.
(2) The UK's benefits system. As far as I can tell, there is no other country in Europe that has either a system that is as non-contributory bases, not one which was so generous with in work benefits system like the UK. Prior to the Maastricht treaty, you could work in any member state, but there was no presumption of benefits. The consequence of this is that (pretty much alone of the countries in the EU), it was possible for a migrant to come to the UK and pick up benefits from day one.
(3) The Eurozone crisis, which caused a dramatic dip in demand for migrant labour in the Southern EU states *and* led to the exporting their own young.
Hold on. Are immigrants coming here and depressing wages or are they coming over here and claiming benefits?
Personally, I am broadly in favour of free movement of labour (on the basis that it is good for individuals, in that there is a wider variety of firms they can sell their skills to - and for companies, as there are more individuals they can hire).
What I oppose, though, is a system where people could come to the UK, having not paid a penny in tax or National Insurance, and receive benefits. That seems a very odd system.
I also find the argument that immigration has suppressed capital investment to be one which - while superficially plausible - does not seem to mesh with the fact. Both Switzerland and Germany have seen more immigration of unskilled and semi-skilled labour in the last five years than the UK (as a % of population), and yet both have seen very significant investment in automation.
So, Switzerland's Gross Capital Formation has risen from 22% to 27% as immigration has risen and Gemany's from 15% to 21%. While the UK remains marooned in the mid-teens. The simplistic explanation of "immigration means firms don't need to automate" seems to ignore the fact that in all the countries which saw even greater levels of Eastern European immigration did see much greater investment in automation.
I suspect that the big issue is that the UK has a consumption and services driven economy, which is much less easy to automate. But that is a much bigger problem to solve.
Yes I was being cheeky.
And yes, PT is trying to single out one part of one factor input to the economy, pointing a finger and saying: "told you so".
It is intuitively attractive. Millions of potential workers theoretically applying downwards pressure on wages in the UK such that employers only need pay the minimum because the supply of labour continues to shift the curve rightwards until it buffers up against the minimum wage. But there are too many variables involved to be able to make such a claim.
There weren't millions of workers on the minimum wage pre-expansion though - and now sectors reliant upon minimum wage labour are saying they're struggling to recruit without free movement.
We'll see what happens going forwards. The proof will be in the pudding, but if the proportion of jobs stuck the minimum wage ceiling comes down then I view that as a good thing. Do you?
Hang on.
That can happen two ways.
Imagine that in the UK today, there are 100 people working and 10 of those are doing minimum wage jobs. If 9 of those 10 are made redundant, then the proportion of people doing minimum wage jobs has declined 90% (yay!), but it's not because they're being paid more, it's because they are now unemployed.
I'd rather they were employed in minimum wage jobs than not employed at all.
Ministers and civil servants are required by policy to set instant messaging chats to delete automatically, it has been revealed, as a judicial review over the government’s use of self-destructing messages was given the go-ahead.
The not-profit organisation the Citizens says the use of disappearing messages, which has been described as “government by WhatsApp”, violates British law on public records and freedom of information.
Its legal challenge comes amid concerns that the likes of WhatsApp and Signal, which have a disappearing messages option, are being used to avoid scrutiny of decision-making processes, including on significant issues such as the government’s coronavirus response.
At a high court hearing in London on Tuesday, it was revealed that the Cabinet Office’s “information and records retention and destruction policy”, disclosed in response to the Citizens application for a judicial review, obliges officials to delete instant chats.
The policy says: “Instant messaging is provided to all staff and should be used in preference to email for routine communications where there is no need to retain a record of the communication. Instant messages history in individual and group chats must be switched off and should not be retained once a session is finished. If the content of an instant message is required for the record or as an audit trail, a note for the record should be created and the message content saved in that.”
Comments
Why not 5m minimum wage jobs if it was truly infinite? What is the population of the A8? Did all working age people come here?
Too many unknowns for you to assert that it was because of the "threat" of ever more workers that the number of minimum wage jobs increased.
When he got back to Germany and started talking about it, he was interrogated by the Gestapo and silenced - geopolitics to avoid offending Japan perhaps.
On 28 February 1938, Rabe left Nanking. He traveled first to Shanghai, returning to Berlin on 15 April 1938. He took with him a large number of source materials documenting Japanese atrocities in Nanking. Rabe showed films and photographs of Japanese atrocities in lecture presentations in Berlin and wrote to Hitler, asking him to use his influence to persuade the Japanese to stop further violence. Rabe was detained and interrogated by the Gestapo; his letter was never delivered to Hitler. Due to the intervention of Siemens AG, Rabe was released. He was allowed to keep evidence of the massacre (excluding films) but not to lecture or write on the subject again. Rabe continued working for Siemens, which briefly posted him to the safety of Siemens AG in Afghanistan. Rabe subsequently worked in the company's Berlin headquarters until the end of the war.
(Wiki)
Longer version here:
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4480
Personally, I am broadly in favour of free movement of labour (on the basis that it is good for individuals, in that there is a wider variety of firms they can sell their skills to - and for companies, as there are more individuals they can hire).
What I oppose, though, is a system where people could come to the UK, having not paid a penny in tax or National Insurance, and receive benefits. That seems a very odd system.
I also find the argument that immigration has suppressed capital investment to be one which - while superficially plausible - does not seem to mesh with the fact. Both Switzerland and Germany have seen more immigration of unskilled and semi-skilled labour in the last five years than the UK (as a % of population), and yet both have seen very significant investment in automation.
So, Switzerland's Gross Capital Formation has risen from 22% to 27% as immigration has risen and Gemany's from 15% to 21%. While the UK remains marooned in the mid-teens. The simplistic explanation of "immigration means firms don't need to automate" seems to ignore the fact that in all the countries which saw even greater levels of Eastern European immigration did see much greater investment in automation.
I suspect that the big issue is that the UK has a consumption and services driven economy, which is much less easy to automate. But that is a much bigger problem to solve.
and complete replacement of the treaty by a text of Frost's choosing. And as the rationales given in his speech for this total rewrite don't stack up, I think we can legitimately put adverse consequences at his door.
And yes, PT is trying to single out one part of one factor input to the economy, pointing a finger and saying: "told you so".
It is intuitively attractive. Millions of potential workers theoretically applying downwards pressure on wages in the UK such that employers only need pay the minimum because the supply of labour continues to shift the curve rightwards until it buffers up against the minimum wage. But there are too many variables involved to be able to make such a claim.
The number of double-jabbed appears to be flatlining at around 4 million below the number who have had their first jab.
That's an extra 4 million at greater risk of severe infection and death than need be the case.
In addition to the anti-vaxxers, these numpties need rounding up and given their second shot. Presumably 24 hours feeling a bit shit as a side effect of the vaccine has put them off a second jab. Or they somehow think that one dose is sufficient.
Perhaps a government campaign: "Two pricks are better than one"
(Probably not a phrase I should Google on a work laptop.)
https://twitter.com/patrickwintour/status/1447960890389696522
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202107/19/WS60f4de4ea310efa1bd662bf0.html
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-09-18/The-secrets-behind-Unit-731-research-findings-13Ffit84Evu/index.html
https://www.ecns.cn/news/sci-tech/2021-08-05/detail-ihaptpct3741748.shtml
Japan may have to make that apology. Finally
Julia Hartley-Brewer
@JuliaHB1
The entire British media (except
@talkradio) appears to think the key question about today's Health/Science committee report on the Govt's handling of the start of the pandemic is:
"Will you apologise for not locking down earlier in March 2020?"
Fascinating mortality patterns by age in today’s CMI Mortality Monitor for Q3 2021. Whilst year-to-date death rates at older ages are back within the normal range, at ages below 65 they are even higher than last year! https://t.co/HQpntIMpN2
That's quite a surprise.
We don't know the detailed discussions about who advised what and to whom, but there should be little doubt that being a bit more ahead of the curve with travel would have severely reduced the number of cases seeded in the UK. It would also have had a fairly significant impact on length and severity of lockdowns needed.
The government does bear blame for this.
Cannot ascertain if the FS was there. But it seems like her job.
I assume the lack of apology relates to possible future litigation and liability, but no doubt the lawyers among us can confirm
With gigantic Union Jacks attached to her shoulder pads by the look of things.
I think unionists have a legitimate grievance *and* nationalists never asked for this.
I think the trilemma exists *and* that it can be much better balanced.
I think it’s complicated.
https://twitter.com/TomMcTague/status/1447957665741778954?s=20
"Boris" needs something to wave around and say "look, Deal" for his Brexit GE in Dec 19, because he doubts he can win on a No Deal platform.
So he accepts the 'NI stays in the SM' concept that the EU likes but which "No British Prime Minister could ever accept" and he presents this Protocol to the electorate as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds. Vote for me and this 'oven ready' Withdrawal Agreement and Brexit Will Be Done.
People do so in their droves, both those swallowing his bullshit and those sick & tired of the whole shebang and wanting it over. He's made it. PM with a big majority.
We duly exit under the WA and he must now conclude the FTA. No extending of the deadline due to the pandemic or for any other reason, this is not how he rolls, how he rolls is to pull exactly the same stunt as before. He lies.
He has to have a deal because for all the bluster he can't risk the chaos of No Deal. So he mendaciously affirms the details of the Protocol and we get a barebones FTA, just sufficient to allow the claim he has delivered on his promise. He has Got Brexit (with a deal) Done. It's choreographed to happen last minute on Christmas Eve and is presented once again to the public as a great negotiating triumph (!) against the odds.
Just as "No Deal" served its sole purpose (bogeyman to create a joy & relief dividend for domestic consumption) so the Protocol has served its sole purpose. Its sole purpose being to get the deal he needed to win an election and cement himself in power.
Time now to renege on it because it's burdensome and it threatens the constitutional integrity of the UK.
It is, in fact, something that no British Prime Minister could ever accept.
UKG has no intention of keeping to what it negotiated & signed up to. His speech is a calculated insult, containing much falsehood, culminating in an impossible demand to replace the Protocol with a new UK drafted legal text. This will not end well.
https://twitter.com/FabianZuleeg/status/1447966965679656964?s=20
Although I'm not sure what he thinks "not well" involves...
Surely the only other group that is relevant here after "women" are pre-surgical, transgender men, ie women who have changed gender and still have a cervix?
(Unless post-surgical transgender men also qualify - which I do not know without looking it up.)
What are the gender-critical lobby saying about them?
All they're left with is "lol Frost is renegotiating his own deal, lol, lol". I can't see anything beyond that as the the last year of blue tick wankers saying the EU won't ever reopen the NI protocol comes crashing down around them. They've got nothing left except border pedantry and even there the EU has begun softening on agricultural standards equivalence having realised we won't sign up for dynamic alignment, probably ever.
We'll see what happens going forwards. The proof will be in the pudding, but if the proportion of jobs stuck the minimum wage ceiling comes down then I view that as a good thing. Do you?
https://dcist.com/story/21/10/11/montgomery-county-hits-99-partial-vaccination-rate-for-eligible-residents/
You would expect high uptake here, as it is home to NIH and Navy Hospital, and healthcare/medical research is the biggest employer in the state.
Of course, it is also a fast-growing county, so the denominator may be off, and the 99% a little too rosy. But even so ...
(Also: never actually answer the question; and don't say yes, don't say no.)
The whole island of Ireland thing has had to be finessed constantly at least since Gladstone's day, and it is a bit bogus of Boris's critics to suggest it should magically end now.
I have no dog in the fight because I support a united Ireland.
“Any Covid restrictions to be re-introduced in England in 2021”
I’m on “No”.
The original rules have been appended with three clarifications; the latter states that compulsory vaccination for care workers would immediately settle the market for “Yes”.
The Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2021 was made 22nd July:
https://policymogul.com/monitor/key-updates/18045/the-health-and-social-care-act-2008-regulated-activities-amendment-coronavirus-regulations-2021
From 22 July we have known that care workers will - by law - have to be vaccinated by 11 November.
I first placed a bet on this market on 6th September. I’m struggling to find out when Smarkets opened this market but suspect I was quick off the mark and it was only a day or two prior to my first bet. But – whatever – it was way after 22 July.
It therefore never occurred to me that the care home worker mandate would come under “Yes” in the settlement of this market.
As I posted on the previous thread (I’ve been simmering over this) if Smarkets were going to settle it in this way I would have bet “Yes” as the result was already known! We would all have been on "Yes".
I think Smarkets have run a false market.
Before the rule clarification of this morning “Yes” was trading at approx 1.45 and “No” 2.2. I got on “No” at 4.0. After the clarification “Yes” came down to 1.01 (has now settled at 1.09). This dramatic change is purely due to the clarification - and the shock it caused shows therefore that it must have been widely understood that mandatory vaccinations for care workers would not constitute a reintroduction of restrictions before the end of 2021 for the purposes of the bet.
Thoughts?
So think about it as the genetics give us a probability disposition to a certain trait, whereas our experience adds a layer on top of that as to how we actually express that trait.
I’ll be working with the @UN @ECA_OFFICIAL to help African economic recovery from the pandemic and promote sustainable development.
https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/1447970376131170305?s=20
1) The Frost opening: the deal was always crap and unworkable, but the British government signed it in panic because the EU frightened us.
2) The Phil Thompson variant: the deal was always crap but this was the intention because it gave Boris the perfect excuse to rip it up later (for reasons that are not altogether clear).
3) The Big G gambit: Article 16 blindsided the EU. (Still work in progress.)
Any more for any more?
Scariest experience of my life sharing screens as I typed a letter in the address bar.
Auto suggestion and my history was a heady mix.
I agree it is unfair, the wrong decision both for the market and a sustainable future for Smarkets, but caveat emptor has to apply as well, betting on specials does come with rules risks.
I have invested in the prospect of her being next PM, so don't like these attempts to talk her down.
As a pedant the the care work vaccination mandate isn't something being reintroduced, just introduced.
As there is no solution to Ireland without a red line giving way, a defective deal had to be done. Boris and co are using force majeure to try to get a different defective deal.
But I know that is a fallacy to assume that something is common knowledge because you have known it for a long while.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/world/europe/france-us-differences-bruno-le-maire.html
These guys are really just a bit mental.
Will the city ever recover from its pursuit of Zero Covid?
BY TOM CHODOR"
https://unherd.com/2021/10/inside-melbournes-eternal-lockdown/
Only got one pair of hands, you know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bribery_of_senior_Wehrmacht_officers
EDIT: Hitler learnt one thing from Napoleon. A man is quite loyal *while he is counting the money*.
That being said... here's an example: vaccine procurement. The EU did error correct relatively quickly. They fucked up. And then they got their chequebook out, and then they corrected.
Unless or until France takes the EU seriously, why should anyone else?
Whenever a new iPhone was released, there would be a massive rush of "oh, I'm so sorry, my phone broke".
It used to make me extremely cross.
What do you think of https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smokehead-Single-Islay-Malt-Whisky/dp/B0043YHWXC, by the way?
Have you got a way you think that can be objectively measured say a few years from now?
I doubt they'll learn from that....
That can happen two ways.
Imagine that in the UK today, there are 100 people working and 10 of those are doing minimum wage jobs. If 9 of those 10 are made redundant, then the proportion of people doing minimum wage jobs has declined 90% (yay!), but it's not because they're being paid more, it's because they are now unemployed.
I'd rather they were employed in minimum wage jobs than not employed at all.
Ministers and civil servants are required by policy to set instant messaging chats to delete automatically, it has been revealed, as a judicial review over the government’s use of self-destructing messages was given the go-ahead.
The not-profit organisation the Citizens says the use of disappearing messages, which has been described as “government by WhatsApp”, violates British law on public records and freedom of information.
Its legal challenge comes amid concerns that the likes of WhatsApp and Signal, which have a disappearing messages option, are being used to avoid scrutiny of decision-making processes, including on significant issues such as the government’s coronavirus response.
At a high court hearing in London on Tuesday, it was revealed that the Cabinet Office’s “information and records retention and destruction policy”, disclosed in response to the Citizens application for a judicial review, obliges officials to delete instant chats.
The policy says: “Instant messaging is provided to all staff and should be used in preference to email for routine communications where there is no need to retain a record of the communication. Instant messages history in individual and group chats must be switched off and should not be retained once a session is finished. If the content of an instant message is required for the record or as an audit trail, a note for the record should be created and the message content saved in that.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/oct/12/cabinet-policy-ministers-delete-whatsapp-messages?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter