In a proper Scotland poll earlier this week Comres has Labour on 18% for Holyrood. Its Westminster rating is likely to be higher. I don't believe the subsample putting the Tories ahead in Wales either.
Starmer can continue to play it safe - Johnson continue to be incompetent and a way out from the next election.
The handling of the virus has been awful - but education has been a shambles as well. Could be the start of sustained lab leads
Johnson's recent handling and comms., post Cummings have been excellent, he is also due a significant vaccine bounce.
Once the economic picture becomes clearer, it might be a very different story however.
Thing is that, by their usual standards, the government has had a pretty good start to the year.
Brexit: Done, and unless you are a fisherman, nothing too bad has happened (yet). Vaccines: Genuine achievement Food parcels: not great, but the problem was sorted quickly.
And yet eyeballing the polls over the last month, the two big parties are basically tied.
'Whitehall is to bypass the devolved administrations and replace European structural funds with a centrally-controlled fund.
In Scotland, that means more than £100m is set to be spent by the UK government on projects'
Disappointing we get more centralising from Westminster. What's wrong with involving local County, District and Borough Councils in deciding how and where the money should be spent? Will there be any consultation about these "projects" or will the dead hand of Whitehall take over again?
I thought Conservatives believed in decentralisation.
IN other words, breaching the constitution of the UK.
The opposite, the constitution of the UK is based on the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament at Westminster.
It is about time the UK government started directing more funds to Scotland itself rather than letting the Nationalists use them to push their Nat agenda to break up the UK
Your unwritten constitution included the Sewell convention, whcih makes such actions illegal in devolved areas without the permission of the Scottish Parliament. Much was made of it by the unionists. Turns out because it's only an unwritten convention when it comes to actually looking at the law, it is meanijngless, and can be ignored.
That is your precious unwritten constitution and that is how precious useless it is.
These are funds reclaimed from the EU being spent by the UK government in Scotland, still part of the UK,
The Sewel convention was made before Brexit and did not cover new powers and new funds then neither available to Westminster or Holyrood which have now become available post Brexit
But the funds and powers fall within areas determined by the devolution acts as pertaining to the Scottish Government. And changing those powers requires consent by the Scottish Parliament under the Sewell Convention. Unless you think Brexit cancelled that? What else did it ****ing cancel? Magna Carta?
How can those areas be determined by the devolution acts as pertaining to the Scottish Government when they fell within the purview of the European Commission?
Because they are in areas which revert to Scotland on Brexit under the devolution legislation.
National Trust moves with the times; right-wing Tories gnash their teeth.
Anything else happening?
My mum always refused to visit National Trust properties on the grounds that a lot of them became National Trust properties due to Labour's introduction of massive death duties.
So this isn't a new thing.
That was a period of cultural vandalism. Thousands of beautiful country houses were demolished to satisfy socialist hatred of what they saw as the landed gentry. The alternative was to hand over the properties to the National Trust. Nationalised theft on a massive scale.
The break up of the stranglehold that the aristocracy had on land via death duties was the most overdue piece of land reform in the UK and Ireland and a highly appropriate example of a wealth tax in action.
But the stranglehold wasn't broken up. It was consolidated into the hands of a different aristocracy.
"They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs."
Are the English REALLY so fond of tugging their forelocks, doffing their hats and otherwise abasing themselves before their highers and (?) betters (if not bettors)?
We are, and there is something romantic about aristocratic power, but the tragedy isn't that that era has passed, it's the buildings that were destroyed in the rush toward a 'brave new world' - beauty that we can't get back. It was vandalism on an epic scale. We have a lot to thank the National Trust for, because without that organisation, many many more great houses and parks would have been demolished and torn up.
Wasn’t it more an exhausted and impoverished aristocracy (often with the sons and heirs dead in the war) unable to keep their houses going after WWI rather than some rush to the modern? During a summer working in a second hand book shop I read a few volumes of the diaries of James Lees-Milne who worked for the NT in their early days, an entertainingly bitchy read. I suspect you’d enjoy the books if you don’t already know him.
Thanks, I'll check them out.
Of course the families couldn't keep them going, but it was the lack of alternatives that surprises me. I wasn't alive in the mid to mid-late 20th century, but everything I've heard about how historic houses were demolished in that era tells me that they just didn't place any value on the beauty of these buildings, or the stories they could tell.
National Trust moves with the times; right-wing Tories gnash their teeth.
Anything else happening?
My mum always refused to visit National Trust properties on the grounds that a lot of them became National Trust properties due to Labour's introduction of massive death duties.
So this isn't a new thing.
That was a period of cultural vandalism. Thousands of beautiful country houses were demolished to satisfy socialist hatred of what they saw as the landed gentry. The alternative was to hand over the properties to the National Trust. Nationalised theft on a massive scale.
The break up of the stranglehold that the aristocracy had on land via death duties was the most overdue piece of land reform in the UK and Ireland and a highly appropriate example of a wealth tax in action.
But the stranglehold wasn't broken up. It was consolidated into the hands of a different aristocracy.
"They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs."
Are the English REALLY so fond of tugging their forelocks, doffing their hats and otherwise abasing themselves before their highers and (?) betters (if not bettors)?
We are, and there is something romantic about aristocratic power, but the tragedy isn't that that era has passed, it's the buildings that were destroyed in the rush toward a 'brave new world' - beauty that we can't get back. It was vandalism on an epic scale. We have a lot to thank the National Trust for, because without that organisation, many many more great houses and parks would have been demolished and torn up.
Wasn’t it more an exhausted and impoverished aristocracy (often with the sons and heirs dead in the war) unable to keep their houses going after WWI rather than some rush to the modern? During a summer working in a second hand book shop I read a few volumes of the diaries of James Lees-Milne who worked for the NT in their early days, an entertainingly bitchy read. I suspect you’d enjoy the books if you don’t already know him.
Of course Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, and most of all Brideshead Revisited, is an elegy to thje copuntry house, as (IIRC) the foreword to the latter shows.
National Trust moves with the times; right-wing Tories gnash their teeth.
Anything else happening?
Yes, attitudes like yours and comments like that are the problem.
My attitude is bad whereas yours is good, because...?
Because you are blind to seeing any criticism of it and simply view my opposition as reactionary.
If you recognised and at least engaged with some of my points, I'd perhaps think differently.
You know what? I really don't care.
If you don't like the National Trust, don't go and don't pay.
I don't like Wetherspoons, so I don't go there.
I'd almost rather saw my own ear off than get involved in this argument, but that is a bad point. Mr Wetherspoon owns his Wetherspoonses outright and can do what he wants with them. The NT owns properties on trust, for the nation, and would best discharge its duties by quietly maintaining the fabric, managing the land and leaving history to the historians.
The NT has no connection to the nation (unlike HRP or EH). It’s just clever branding
Starmer can continue to play it safe - Johnson continue to be incompetent and a way out from the next election.
The handling of the virus has been awful - but education has been a shambles as well. Could be the start of sustained lab leads
Johnson's recent handling and comms., post Cummings have been excellent, he is also due a significant vaccine bounce.
Once the economic picture becomes clearer, it might be a very different story however.
Vaccine rollout has been excellent, but will he resist the temptation to reopen too quickly again, thereby triggering yet another virus wave?
Also, public messaging seems to be sorely lacking with regards to the partial protection from a single vaccine shot. Cue vaccinated people getting careless and adding to the problem.
I think reopening will be cautious. Boris knows that we need to knock it on the head this time.
No reopening before April. No pubs and restaurants until May. Even if they get all 9 groups vaccinated by 31 March. Which they need to aim for.
I hope so. Then run Summer 2021 as a more chilled version of Summer 2020, outside as much as possible (it's good for us, and it's a thing we can carry forward into the New Times, I hope); the really hard deadline is to have the population Covid-safe for September, in the way we failed to do for 2020.
But it requires Boris to a) face down the loony fringe in his own party and (harder) b) resist the temptation to get one over on Johnny Euro.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
But what lies beneath?
The ladies of a certain age are volunteers. They are always moaning about pay and conditions - or rather, conditions - and how terribly they are treated by the NT, which makes one ask why they don't adopt the obvious remedy.
Really? Did not realise that. I quite like pottering around a National Trust property. There, I've said it.
The more I hear about how the people who work at the front end in the charitable sector are treated, the more I become convinced of two things.
- Reincarnation. In the case of the employing charities, they appear to have got Protestant Irish landlords and the less reputable kinds of mine owner from the 19th cent. - The all need to join a union. Run by a reincarnation of Bob Crow. But angrier.
We do a lot of work advocating for volunteers. Because, sadly, you are right. Their value is massively unappreciated
According to my analysis, Johnson should be pulling away until the second half of the year. I suspect this is an outlier.
The LDs look far too low for me.
Insofar as the calls to Any Answers are anecdotal, they were all scathing about the government’s handling of the crisis. It seems people have really had enough of policy that changes from one day to the next and is always too late, whatever it is.
Yes I think that's right. The on-off closure of schools was the last straw for many people. And I think the vaccine bounce will be another mirage, just as the Brexit bounce has been.
This pandemic has turned the lives of millions of people upside down and Johnson's and his crew of indolent clowns have greatly increased the toll of death and suffering through their incompetence and because they gave credence to the motley crew of scientific and political cranks opposed to lockdown.
National Trust moves with the times; right-wing Tories gnash their teeth.
Anything else happening?
My mum always refused to visit National Trust properties on the grounds that a lot of them became National Trust properties due to Labour's introduction of massive death duties.
So this isn't a new thing.
That was a period of cultural vandalism. Thousands of beautiful country houses were demolished to satisfy socialist hatred of what they saw as the landed gentry. The alternative was to hand over the properties to the National Trust. Nationalised theft on a massive scale.
You exaggerate. But regardless, where did the families of those "victims of theft" get the wealth that built the places in the first place?
In our case, selling horses to Charles I provided the capital to buy a small shop in London.
National Trust moves with the times; right-wing Tories gnash their teeth.
Anything else happening?
My mum always refused to visit National Trust properties on the grounds that a lot of them became National Trust properties due to Labour's introduction of massive death duties.
So this isn't a new thing.
That was a period of cultural vandalism. Thousands of beautiful country houses were demolished to satisfy socialist hatred of what they saw as the landed gentry. The alternative was to hand over the properties to the National Trust. Nationalised theft on a massive scale.
The break up of the stranglehold that the aristocracy had on land via death duties was the most overdue piece of land reform in the UK and Ireland and a highly appropriate example of a wealth tax in action.
But the stranglehold wasn't broken up. It was consolidated into the hands of a different aristocracy.
"They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs."
Are the English REALLY so fond of tugging their forelocks, doffing their hats and otherwise abasing themselves before their highers and (?) betters (if not bettors)?
Not more than any other culture.
It's just that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
A Ghanian friend observed that when the British ran Ghana, white men on horseback gave stupid orders. Then aid agencies arrived and lots more white men in Landrovers gave stupid orders. Now the Chinese are there giving stupid orders....
Not sure I concur with your first sentence above.
Have always been an Anglophile (AND a Fenian, it's complicated). However, have always found the strain of subservience in English culture to be remarkable and (as an American) and off-putting.
Indeed, it is part of our traditional, stereotypical view of the English. Though we recognize that lesser (?) mortals ranging from Jeeves to Michael Caine have their own ways of gaming the class system for fun & profit.
If you get rid of aristocracy you end up with people like Trump running things.
IN other words, breaching the constitution of the UK.
The opposite, the constitution of the UK is based on the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament at Westminster.
It is about time the UK government started directing more funds to Scotland itself rather than letting the Nationalists use them to push their Nat agenda to break up the UK
Your unwritten constitution included the Sewell convention, whcih makes such actions illegal in devolved areas without the permission of the Scottish Parliament. Much was made of it by the unionists. Turns out because it's only an unwritten convention when it comes to actually looking at the law, it is meanijngless, and can be ignored.
That is your precious unwritten constitution and that is how precious useless it is.
These are funds reclaimed from the EU being spent by the UK government in Scotland, still part of the UK,
The Sewel convention was made before Brexit and did not cover new powers and new funds then neither available to Westminster or Holyrood which have now become available post Brexit
But the funds and powers fall within areas determined by the devolution acts as pertaining to the Scottish Government. And changing those powers requires consent by the Scottish Parliament under the Sewell Convention. Unless you think Brexit cancelled that? What else did it ****ing cancel? Magna Carta?
The Sewell Convention sounds daft if a central govt cannot spend money on its constituent nations and regions.
No wonder Sindy sentiment is rising.
Not that: it's actually ultra vires for the UK Gmt to spend money and modify policy directly on areas that are devolved - or was before the recent reinterpretations of the law the way it wanted.
National Trust moves with the times; right-wing Tories gnash their teeth.
Anything else happening?
My mum always refused to visit National Trust properties on the grounds that a lot of them became National Trust properties due to Labour's introduction of massive death duties.
So this isn't a new thing.
That was a period of cultural vandalism. Thousands of beautiful country houses were demolished to satisfy socialist hatred of what they saw as the landed gentry. The alternative was to hand over the properties to the National Trust. Nationalised theft on a massive scale.
The break up of the stranglehold that the aristocracy had on land via death duties was the most overdue piece of land reform in the UK and Ireland and a highly appropriate example of a wealth tax in action.
But the stranglehold wasn't broken up. It was consolidated into the hands of a different aristocracy.
"They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs."
Are the English REALLY so fond of tugging their forelocks, doffing their hats and otherwise abasing themselves before their highers and (?) betters (if not bettors)?
We are, and there is something romantic about aristocratic power, but the tragedy isn't that that era has passed, it's the buildings that were destroyed in the rush toward a 'brave new world' - beauty that we can't get back. It was vandalism on an epic scale. We have a lot to thank the National Trust for, because without that organisation, many many more great houses and parks would have been demolished and torn up.
Wasn’t it more an exhausted and impoverished aristocracy (often with the sons and heirs dead in the war) unable to keep their houses going after WWI rather than some rush to the modern? During a summer working in a second hand book shop I read a few volumes of the diaries of James Lees-Milne who worked for the NT in their early days, an entertainingly bitchy read. I suspect you’d enjoy the books if you don’t already know him.
Of course Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, and most of all Brideshead Revisited, is an elegy to thje copuntry house, as (IIRC) the foreword to the latter shows.
Indeed. I guess the Russian oligarch is the rough modern equivalent to the American heiress whose fortune would get the roof fixed.
According to my analysis, Johnson should be pulling away until the second half of the year. I suspect this is an outlier.
The LDs look far too low for me.
Insofar as the calls to Any Answers are anecdotal, they were all scathing about the government’s handling of the crisis. It seems people have really had enough of policy that changes from one day to the next and is always too late, whatever it is.
Yes. I listened to Any Answers. They were really struggling to find anybody with a good word to say about the government, which isn't normally the case. Nearly all callers were very scathing. (Waiting for: they probably censored all the pro-government calls, so we should defund the BBC of course).
IN other words, breaching the constitution of the UK.
The opposite, the constitution of the UK is based on the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament at Westminster.
It is about time the UK government started directing more funds to Scotland itself rather than letting the Nationalists use them to push their Nat agenda to break up the UK
Your unwritten constitution included the Sewell convention, whcih makes such actions illegal in devolved areas without the permission of the Scottish Parliament. Much was made of it by the unionists. Turns out because it's only an unwritten convention when it comes to actually looking at the law, it is meanijngless, and can be ignored.
That is your precious unwritten constitution and that is how precious useless it is.
These are funds reclaimed from the EU being spent by the UK government in Scotland, still part of the UK,
The Sewel convention was made before Brexit and did not cover new powers and new funds then neither available to Westminster or Holyrood which have now become available post Brexit
But the funds and powers fall within areas determined by the devolution acts as pertaining to the Scottish Government. And changing those powers requires consent by the Scottish Parliament under the Sewell Convention. Unless you think Brexit cancelled that? What else did it ****ing cancel? Magna Carta?
How can those areas be determined by the devolution acts as pertaining to the Scottish Government when they fell within the purview of the European Commission?
Because they are in areas which revert to Scotland on Brexit under the devolution legislation.
I'd be interested to see the source you have for that conclusion. I don't know how good this is, but I have found an article that describes the Sewel Convention thus:
(Sewel)“as happened in Northern Ireland earlier in the century, we would expect a convention to be established that Westminster would not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters in Scotland without the consent of the Scottish parliament”.
The convention was subsequently written into a Memorandum of Understanding on intergovernmental relations in terms that make it clear that, “The United Kingdom Parliament retains authority to legislate on any issue, whether devolved or not. It is ultimately for Parliament to decide what use to make of that power”.
I don't see how that can possibly be interpreted to mean that the UK Government should not be able to fund projects and work with agencies in Scotland without channeling that through the devolved administration, if they don't already. Doing that is not legislating?
National Trust moves with the times; right-wing Tories gnash their teeth.
Anything else happening?
Yes, attitudes like yours and comments like that are the problem.
My attitude is bad whereas yours is good, because...?
Because you are blind to seeing any criticism of it and simply view my opposition as reactionary.
If you recognised and at least engaged with some of my points, I'd perhaps think differently.
You know what? I really don't care.
If you don't like the National Trust, don't go and don't pay.
I don't like Wetherspoons, so I don't go there.
I'd almost rather saw my own ear off than get involved in this argument, but that is a bad point. Mr Wetherspoon owns his Wetherspoonses outright and can do what he wants with them. The NT owns properties on trust, for the nation, and would best discharge its duties by quietly maintaining the fabric, managing the land and leaving history to the historians.
The NT has no connection to the nation (unlike HRP or EH). It’s just clever branding
Bit more complex than that - it was given legal powers by Gmt quite early on, and also effectively sort of brought into the Gmt system as an agent and recipient, effectively on behalf of the Gmt, when the Gmt set up the National Land Fund after WW2. But yes, essentially an independent charity, and more so than say English Heritage which IIRC isd more of a quyango but with charity's benefits.
Now this is proper big news. The likely new leader of the free world. Who in 1950 would have thought Germany would hold that position in 2020? The times they are a changing, no question about it. On which topic I like the Header and especially the title - Europe's Last American. It's fading fast, the sense of kinship between us and the USA. I can vouch for this personally. I used to feel it, even quite recently, but now I don't. I remain fascinated by America but I look upon it as a strange and exotic land. Much of this is because of Trump but not all of it.
Germany's leader is not the leader of the free world. Biden will be from Wednesday.
Germany is not big enough, the EU might be but does not have the will
Well I look to Berlin not Washington these days for a steer on how I as a citizen of the free world should go about my business.
And while I have you, let's just knock our bet on the head. £25 to a Good Cause. I give you 3 options. Mermaids. Jeremy Corbyn's new Peace & Fellowship project. Or the National Trust.
No receipt required. I trust you 100%.
I will make a payment to the NT
Toby Young said we all had to ragequit the NT. Based patriots complied.
Yes, apparently explaining the history of their properties was a crime against British history, or something.
It’s not always a simple as that. A good friend of mine’s cousin was a very private man. His family knew he was gay but he wanted that kept quiet both because it was personal (and because it was illegal at the time).
The national trust chose to make it public without consulting his family which caused a great deal of upset
They have developed a proven track record of breaking covenants - no not just allowing fox-hunting on their land.
A legal friend was involved in one case. A property had been deeded to the National Trust. The NT wanted to break the agreement they had signed with the family in question. The NT argument to the court consisted, essentially, of "We are the National Trust, therefore legal agreements should be varied for us,. Because we want to."
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
They regularly try to break the covenants on our family house (my cousin went on a 3 month safari when she retired and they decided that she had “abandoned” her flat above the public rooms).
Hopefully she got it back? Intact?
My own abode may be a trifle more humble (though being constructed circa 1920 qualifies as "historic" or close to it in Seattle!) BUT sure would NOT want to be treated that way.
We explained our position. Firmly. They eventually apologised. But since then she hires a house sitter every time she goes away
National Trust moves with the times; right-wing Tories gnash their teeth.
Anything else happening?
My mum always refused to visit National Trust properties on the grounds that a lot of them became National Trust properties due to Labour's introduction of massive death duties.
So this isn't a new thing.
That was a period of cultural vandalism. Thousands of beautiful country houses were demolished to satisfy socialist hatred of what they saw as the landed gentry. The alternative was to hand over the properties to the National Trust. Nationalised theft on a massive scale.
The break up of the stranglehold that the aristocracy had on land via death duties was the most overdue piece of land reform in the UK and Ireland and a highly appropriate example of a wealth tax in action.
But the stranglehold wasn't broken up. It was consolidated into the hands of a different aristocracy.
"They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs."
Are the English REALLY so fond of tugging their forelocks, doffing their hats and otherwise abasing themselves before their highers and (?) betters (if not bettors)?
Not more than any other culture.
It's just that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
A Ghanian friend observed that when the British ran Ghana, white men on horseback gave stupid orders. Then aid agencies arrived and lots more white men in Landrovers gave stupid orders. Now the Chinese are there giving stupid orders....
Not sure I concur with your first sentence above.
Have always been an Anglophile (AND a Fenian, it's complicated). However, have always found the strain of subservience in English culture to be remarkable and (as an American) and off-putting.
Indeed, it is part of our traditional, stereotypical view of the English. Though we recognize that lesser (?) mortals ranging from Jeeves to Michael Caine have their own ways of gaming the class system for fun & profit.
If you get rid of aristocracy you end up with people like Trump running things.
Not if you have a proper voting system (which we don´t, of course)
IN other words, breaching the constitution of the UK.
The opposite, the constitution of the UK is based on the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament at Westminster.
It is about time the UK government started directing more funds to Scotland itself rather than letting the Nationalists use them to push their Nat agenda to break up the UK
Your unwritten constitution included the Sewell convention, whcih makes such actions illegal in devolved areas without the permission of the Scottish Parliament. Much was made of it by the unionists. Turns out because it's only an unwritten convention when it comes to actually looking at the law, it is meanijngless, and can be ignored.
That is your precious unwritten constitution and that is how precious useless it is.
These are funds reclaimed from the EU being spent by the UK government in Scotland, still part of the UK,
The Sewel convention was made before Brexit and did not cover new powers and new funds then neither available to Westminster or Holyrood which have now become available post Brexit
But the funds and powers fall within areas determined by the devolution acts as pertaining to the Scottish Government. And changing those powers requires consent by the Scottish Parliament under the Sewell Convention. Unless you think Brexit cancelled that? What else did it ****ing cancel? Magna Carta?
How can those areas be determined by the devolution acts as pertaining to the Scottish Government when they fell within the purview of the European Commission?
Because they are in areas which revert to Scotland on Brexit under the devolution legislation.
I'd be interested to see the source you have for that conclusion. I don't know how good this is, but I have found an article that describes the Sewel Convention thus:
(Sewel)“as happened in Northern Ireland earlier in the century, we would expect a convention to be established that Westminster would not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters in Scotland without the consent of the Scottish parliament”.
The convention was subsequently written into a Memorandum of Understanding on intergovernmental relations in terms that make it clear that, “The United Kingdom Parliament retains authority to legislate on any issue, whether devolved or not. It is ultimately for Parliament to decide what use to make of that power”.
I don't see how that can possibly be interpreted to mean that the UK Government should not be able to fund projects and work with agencies in Scotland without channeling that through the devolved administration, if they don't already. Doing that is not legislating?
Funding projects in area A where Area A is a devolved matter was not permissible as this breached the devolution acts, unless (under the Sewell Convention) the Scottish Pmt had given its permission.
National Trust moves with the times; right-wing Tories gnash their teeth.
Anything else happening?
My mum always refused to visit National Trust properties on the grounds that a lot of them became National Trust properties due to Labour's introduction of massive death duties.
So this isn't a new thing.
That was a period of cultural vandalism. Thousands of beautiful country houses were demolished to satisfy socialist hatred of what they saw as the landed gentry. The alternative was to hand over the properties to the National Trust. Nationalised theft on a massive scale.
The break up of the stranglehold that the aristocracy had on land via death duties was the most overdue piece of land reform in the UK and Ireland and a highly appropriate example of a wealth tax in action.
But the stranglehold wasn't broken up. It was consolidated into the hands of a different aristocracy.
"They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs."
Are the English REALLY so fond of tugging their forelocks, doffing their hats and otherwise abasing themselves before their highers and (?) betters (if not bettors)?
We are, and there is something romantic about aristocratic power, but the tragedy isn't that that era has passed, it's the buildings that were destroyed in the rush toward a 'brave new world' - beauty that we can't get back. It was vandalism on an epic scale. We have a lot to thank the National Trust for, because without that organisation, many many more great houses and parks would have been demolished and torn up.
Wasn’t it more an exhausted and impoverished aristocracy (often with the sons and heirs dead in the war) unable to keep their houses going after WWI rather than some rush to the modern? During a summer working in a second hand book shop I read a few volumes of the diaries of James Lees-Milne who worked for the NT in their early days, an entertainingly bitchy read. I suspect you’d enjoy the books if you don’t already know him.
Of course Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, and most of all Brideshead Revisited, is an elegy to thje copuntry house, as (IIRC) the foreword to the latter shows.
Not just to the country house, but to all the beauties of the past being slowly dissolved in uncaring Philistinism:
'Hooper had no illusions about the Army – or rather no special illusions distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the universe. He had come to it reluctantly, under compulsion, after he had made every feeble effort in his power to obtain deferment. He accepted it, he said, ‘like the measles’. Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert’s horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry – that stoic, redskin interlude which our schools introduce between the fast-flowing tears of the child and the man – Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry’s speech on St. Crispin’s day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they taught him had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon – these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper...'
National Trust moves with the times; right-wing Tories gnash their teeth.
Anything else happening?
My mum always refused to visit National Trust properties on the grounds that a lot of them became National Trust properties due to Labour's introduction of massive death duties.
So this isn't a new thing.
That was a period of cultural vandalism. Thousands of beautiful country houses were demolished to satisfy socialist hatred of what they saw as the landed gentry. The alternative was to hand over the properties to the National Trust. Nationalised theft on a massive scale.
The break up of the stranglehold that the aristocracy had on land via death duties was the most overdue piece of land reform in the UK and Ireland and a highly appropriate example of a wealth tax in action.
But the stranglehold wasn't broken up. It was consolidated into the hands of a different aristocracy.
"They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs."
Are the English REALLY so fond of tugging their forelocks, doffing their hats and otherwise abasing themselves before their highers and (?) betters (if not bettors)?
We are, and there is something romantic about aristocratic power, but the tragedy isn't that that era has passed, it's the buildings that were destroyed in the rush toward a 'brave new world' - beauty that we can't get back. It was vandalism on an epic scale. We have a lot to thank the National Trust for, because without that organisation, many many more great houses and parks would have been demolished and torn up.
Wasn’t it more an exhausted and impoverished aristocracy (often with the sons and heirs dead in the war) unable to keep their houses going after WWI rather than some rush to the modern? During a summer working in a second hand book shop I read a few volumes of the diaries of James Lees-Milne who worked for the NT in their early days, an entertainingly bitchy read. I suspect you’d enjoy the books if you don’t already know him.
That’s pretty much what happened with us - Fat Harry was killed in the First World War (wiping out the junior branch) the senior branch of the family wasn’t confident they could afford the house (there was a tail male provision) and so Henry Hugh gave it to the NT.
My cousin Henry still lives on the other part of the estate, although his son owns and runs it now.
National Trust moves with the times; right-wing Tories gnash their teeth.
Anything else happening?
My mum always refused to visit National Trust properties on the grounds that a lot of them became National Trust properties due to Labour's introduction of massive death duties.
So this isn't a new thing.
That was a period of cultural vandalism. Thousands of beautiful country houses were demolished to satisfy socialist hatred of what they saw as the landed gentry. The alternative was to hand over the properties to the National Trust. Nationalised theft on a massive scale.
The break up of the stranglehold that the aristocracy had on land via death duties was the most overdue piece of land reform in the UK and Ireland and a highly appropriate example of a wealth tax in action.
But the stranglehold wasn't broken up. It was consolidated into the hands of a different aristocracy.
"They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs."
Are the English REALLY so fond of tugging their forelocks, doffing their hats and otherwise abasing themselves before their highers and (?) betters (if not bettors)?
We are, and there is something romantic about aristocratic power, but the tragedy isn't that that era has passed, it's the buildings that were destroyed in the rush toward a 'brave new world' - beauty that we can't get back. It was vandalism on an epic scale. We have a lot to thank the National Trust for, because without that organisation, many many more great houses and parks would have been demolished and torn up.
Wasn’t it more an exhausted and impoverished aristocracy (often with the sons and heirs dead in the war) unable to keep their houses going after WWI rather than some rush to the modern? During a summer working in a second hand book shop I read a few volumes of the diaries of James Lees-Milne who worked for the NT in their early days, an entertainingly bitchy read. I suspect you’d enjoy the books if you don’t already know him.
Thanks, I'll check them out.
Of course the families couldn't keep them going, but it was the lack of alternatives that surprises me. I wasn't alive in the mid to mid-late 20th century, but everything I've heard about how historic houses were demolished in that era tells me that they just didn't place any value on the beauty of these buildings, or the stories they could tell.
That was specifically because of the introduction of the Grade classification. (In the 50s?)
Basically if you had a stately home that was in poor condition you were given 2 years notice that it was going to be Grade 1 listed which created an immediate obligation to restore it. Funny how many houses accidentally burnt to the ground in those 2 years
National Trust moves with the times; right-wing Tories gnash their teeth.
Anything else happening?
My mum always refused to visit National Trust properties on the grounds that a lot of them became National Trust properties due to Labour's introduction of massive death duties.
So this isn't a new thing.
That was a period of cultural vandalism. Thousands of beautiful country houses were demolished to satisfy socialist hatred of what they saw as the landed gentry. The alternative was to hand over the properties to the National Trust. Nationalised theft on a massive scale.
The break up of the stranglehold that the aristocracy had on land via death duties was the most overdue piece of land reform in the UK and Ireland and a highly appropriate example of a wealth tax in action.
But the stranglehold wasn't broken up. It was consolidated into the hands of a different aristocracy.
"They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs."
Are the English REALLY so fond of tugging their forelocks, doffing their hats and otherwise abasing themselves before their highers and (?) betters (if not bettors)?
We are, and there is something romantic about aristocratic power, but the tragedy isn't that that era has passed, it's the buildings that were destroyed in the rush toward a 'brave new world' - beauty that we can't get back. It was vandalism on an epic scale. We have a lot to thank the National Trust for, because without that organisation, many many more great houses and parks would have been demolished and torn up.
Wasn’t it more an exhausted and impoverished aristocracy (often with the sons and heirs dead in the war) unable to keep their houses going after WWI rather than some rush to the modern? During a summer working in a second hand book shop I read a few volumes of the diaries of James Lees-Milne who worked for the NT in their early days, an entertainingly bitchy read. I suspect you’d enjoy the books if you don’t already know him.
That’s pretty much what happened with us - Fat Harry was killed in the First World War (wiping out the junior branch) the senior branch of the family wasn’t confident they could afford the house (there was a tail male provision) and so Henry Hugh gave it to the NT.
My cousin Henry still lives on the other part of the estate, although his son owns and runs it now.
If that's Stourhead, your family's loss was the nation's gain.
Without a doubt the most beautiful landscaped gardens in the country. We're lucky enough to live 10 miles away, so can visit regularly.
Starmer can continue to play it safe - Johnson continue to be incompetent and a way out from the next election.
The handling of the virus has been awful - but education has been a shambles as well. Could be the start of sustained lab leads
Johnson's recent handling and comms., post Cummings have been excellent, he is also due a significant vaccine bounce.
Once the economic picture becomes clearer, it might be a very different story however.
Thing is that, by their usual standards, the government has had a pretty good start to the year.
Brexit: Done, and unless you are a fisherman, nothing too bad has happened (yet). Vaccines: Genuine achievement Food parcels: not great, but the problem was sorted quickly.
And yet eyeballing the polls over the last month, the two big parties are basically tied.
Vaccines: Genuine achievement.
It might be interesting to have a straw poll of the public: "How confident are you that by the end of June 2021, COVID restrictions and COVID hospital admissions will both be significantly lower than they are today? Please rate this on a scale from 0 (no confidence) to 100 (total confidence).
This tweek points to how Andrew Yang just MIGHT assemble a winning coalition based on Asian Americans as well as geeks and others attracted by his technocratic, not-you-average-politician appeal as shown AND publicized by his presidential bid.
However, this will be a hard act to pull off, even IF Yang can consolidate the Asian vote (not a given) because while the community is growing, it is only about 12% of the city population, and way less of the eligible adult electorate. Especially in primary, where the Democratic nomination and (maybe) the election will be decided. In this context, note that just about half of NYC Asians are of Chinese heritage.
One big thing that AY has going for him, is proven fundraising ability on a national scale. Clearly the bulk of his fundraising potential lies OUTSIDE of New York City, which may be an issue for opponents to bring up BUT still a greenback from Fargo or 'Frisco is just as good as one from Flushing or Flatbush.
Further note that for the last thirty years or more, RACE AND ETHNICITY have been THE key factor(s) in NYC municipal politics, certainly for the Democratic nomination for NYC mayor and city office. Which was precisely the reason Mike Bloomberg skipped the Democratic primary altogether (low turnout and dominated by city, borough, neighborhood power-brokers) and ran as a Republican, because he could capture that ballot line, thus qualifying for the general election where higher turnout and greater scope for media, where he had both years of professional expertise AND millions of SSS to deploy.
My own judgement is that same obstacles that would have kept Mike Bloomberg from winning the Democratic nomination, but made it possible for him to run anyway and defeat the Dem nominee, may still be operating re: Andrew Yang. At this point, he appears to be running as a Democrat BUT that doubt IF that is carved in stone.
National Trust moves with the times; right-wing Tories gnash their teeth.
Anything else happening?
My mum always refused to visit National Trust properties on the grounds that a lot of them became National Trust properties due to Labour's introduction of massive death duties.
So this isn't a new thing.
That was a period of cultural vandalism. Thousands of beautiful country houses were demolished to satisfy socialist hatred of what they saw as the landed gentry. The alternative was to hand over the properties to the National Trust. Nationalised theft on a massive scale.
The break up of the stranglehold that the aristocracy had on land via death duties was the most overdue piece of land reform in the UK and Ireland and a highly appropriate example of a wealth tax in action.
But the stranglehold wasn't broken up. It was consolidated into the hands of a different aristocracy.
"They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs."
Are the English REALLY so fond of tugging their forelocks, doffing their hats and otherwise abasing themselves before their highers and (?) betters (if not bettors)?
We are, and there is something romantic about aristocratic power, but the tragedy isn't that that era has passed, it's the buildings that were destroyed in the rush toward a 'brave new world' - beauty that we can't get back. It was vandalism on an epic scale. We have a lot to thank the National Trust for, because without that organisation, many many more great houses and parks would have been demolished and torn up.
Wasn’t it more an exhausted and impoverished aristocracy (often with the sons and heirs dead in the war) unable to keep their houses going after WWI rather than some rush to the modern? During a summer working in a second hand book shop I read a few volumes of the diaries of James Lees-Milne who worked for the NT in their early days, an entertainingly bitchy read. I suspect you’d enjoy the books if you don’t already know him.
That’s pretty much what happened with us - Fat Harry was killed in the First World War (wiping out the junior branch) the senior branch of the family wasn’t confident they could afford the house (there was a tail male provision) and so Henry Hugh gave it to the NT.
My cousin Henry still lives on the other part of the estate, although his son owns and runs it now.
If that's Stourhead, your family's loss was the nation's gain.
Without a doubt the most beautiful landscaped gardens in the country. We're lucky enough to live 10 miles away, so can visit regularly.
We had always opened the grounds to the public! But yes, I do like the walk around the lake (although the house is very impractical), and if I need to make a big decision I go to St Peter’s to think and pray
IN other words, breaching the constitution of the UK.
The opposite, the constitution of the UK is based on the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament at Westminster.
It is about time the UK government started directing more funds to Scotland itself rather than letting the Nationalists use them to push their Nat agenda to break up the UK
Your unwritten constitution included the Sewell convention, whcih makes such actions illegal in devolved areas without the permission of the Scottish Parliament. Much was made of it by the unionists. Turns out because it's only an unwritten convention when it comes to actually looking at the law, it is meanijngless, and can be ignored.
That is your precious unwritten constitution and that is how precious useless it is.
These are funds reclaimed from the EU being spent by the UK government in Scotland, still part of the UK,
The Sewel convention was made before Brexit and did not cover new powers and new funds then neither available to Westminster or Holyrood which have now become available post Brexit
But the funds and powers fall within areas determined by the devolution acts as pertaining to the Scottish Government. And changing those powers requires consent by the Scottish Parliament under the Sewell Convention. Unless you think Brexit cancelled that? What else did it ****ing cancel? Magna Carta?
How can those areas be determined by the devolution acts as pertaining to the Scottish Government when they fell within the purview of the European Commission?
Because they are in areas which revert to Scotland on Brexit under the devolution legislation.
I'd be interested to see the source you have for that conclusion. I don't know how good this is, but I have found an article that describes the Sewel Convention thus:
(Sewel)“as happened in Northern Ireland earlier in the century, we would expect a convention to be established that Westminster would not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters in Scotland without the consent of the Scottish parliament”.
The convention was subsequently written into a Memorandum of Understanding on intergovernmental relations in terms that make it clear that, “The United Kingdom Parliament retains authority to legislate on any issue, whether devolved or not. It is ultimately for Parliament to decide what use to make of that power”.
I don't see how that can possibly be interpreted to mean that the UK Government should not be able to fund projects and work with agencies in Scotland without channeling that through the devolved administration, if they don't already. Doing that is not legislating?
Funding projects in area A where Area A is a devolved matter was not permissible as this breached the devolution acts, unless (under the Sewell Convention) the Scottish Pmt had given its permission.
If this is actually not something that is expressly laid out in the devolution act, and it's not covered by the Sewel convention, then realistically I cannot really see how the UK Government could have done it differently.
Regarding Yang fleeing New York to escape the virus, well if and his friends had produced a new "Decameron" for the 21st century maybe he could be forgiven. However...
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Now 1984 is out of copyright, can we hope for a Muppet adaptation with Michael Caine as Big Brother ?
How would you cast Kermit the (Red?) Frog? Or Miss (or Comrade?) Piggy?
Same question for rest of the crew, from Gonzo the Great to Statler & Hilton.
I will have seriously to think about this. For example, maybe Caine should be O’Brien, not BB.
I would love to see Beaker as Winston Smith in the Room 101 scene!
And "'I likes a pint,' persisted the old man. 'You could 'a drawed me off a pint easy enough. We didn't 'ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man.' " has to be played by Nigel Farage
National Trust moves with the times; right-wing Tories gnash their teeth.
Anything else happening?
My mum always refused to visit National Trust properties on the grounds that a lot of them became National Trust properties due to Labour's introduction of massive death duties.
So this isn't a new thing.
That was a period of cultural vandalism. Thousands of beautiful country houses were demolished to satisfy socialist hatred of what they saw as the landed gentry. The alternative was to hand over the properties to the National Trust. Nationalised theft on a massive scale.
The break up of the stranglehold that the aristocracy had on land via death duties was the most overdue piece of land reform in the UK and Ireland and a highly appropriate example of a wealth tax in action.
But the stranglehold wasn't broken up. It was consolidated into the hands of a different aristocracy.
"They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs."
Are the English REALLY so fond of tugging their forelocks, doffing their hats and otherwise abasing themselves before their highers and (?) betters (if not bettors)?
We are, and there is something romantic about aristocratic power, but the tragedy isn't that that era has passed, it's the buildings that were destroyed in the rush toward a 'brave new world' - beauty that we can't get back. It was vandalism on an epic scale. We have a lot to thank the National Trust for, because without that organisation, many many more great houses and parks would have been demolished and torn up.
Wasn’t it more an exhausted and impoverished aristocracy (often with the sons and heirs dead in the war) unable to keep their houses going after WWI rather than some rush to the modern? During a summer working in a second hand book shop I read a few volumes of the diaries of James Lees-Milne who worked for the NT in their early days, an entertainingly bitchy read. I suspect you’d enjoy the books if you don’t already know him.
That’s pretty much what happened with us - Fat Harry was killed in the First World War (wiping out the junior branch) the senior branch of the family wasn’t confident they could afford the house (there was a tail male provision) and so Henry Hugh gave it to the NT.
My cousin Henry still lives on the other part of the estate, although his son owns and runs it now.
If that's Stourhead, your family's loss was the nation's gain.
Without a doubt the most beautiful landscaped gardens in the country. We're lucky enough to live 10 miles away, so can visit regularly.
We had always opened the grounds to the public! But yes, I do like the walk around the lake (although the house is very impractical), and if I need to make a big decision I go to St Peter’s to think and pray
My wife's cousin got married in St Peter's, I think there were peacocks in the wedding photos but don't recollect seeing any at Stourhead recently.
As a fan of mutuals and membership organisations I do like the National Trust . Any woke politics is only a temp thing and as long as they preserve the houses and gardens and countryside I think thats what most care about
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Starmer can continue to play it safe - Johnson continue to be incompetent and a way out from the next election.
The handling of the virus has been awful - but education has been a shambles as well. Could be the start of sustained lab leads
Johnson's recent handling and comms., post Cummings have been excellent, he is also due a significant vaccine bounce.
Once the economic picture becomes clearer, it might be a very different story however.
Thing is that, by their usual standards, the government has had a pretty good start to the year.
Brexit: Done, and unless you are a fisherman, nothing too bad has happened (yet). Vaccines: Genuine achievement Food parcels: not great, but the problem was sorted quickly.
And yet eyeballing the polls over the last month, the two big parties are basically tied.
Vaccines: Genuine achievement.
It might be interesting to have a straw poll of the public: "How confident are you that by the end of June 2021, COVID restrictions and COVID hospital admissions will both be significantly lower than they are today? Please rate this on a scale from 0 (no confidence) to 100 (total confidence).
I have to say that I am thinking in terms of not counting chickens until they are hatched. I just wonder what the public think.
What's significant?
We know that the virus is much less prevalent in summer, as (a) sunshine is quite a good disinfectant, and (b) people spend more time outside. We can therefore be confident that - even if absolutely no measures whatsoever were introduced - that we would probably see fewer deaths, hospitalisations, etc., in June than now.
It's also a fairly reasonable guess that - by then - a large portion of the population will be vaccinated. It could easily by 70+%.
Put those together, and normality would seem certain to resume.
Against that, there is the very real question about the Brazilian variant of the virus. Will current vaccines offer none, some or total protection against it? Likewise, how much immunity is conferred from having had previous CV19 infections?
And the Brazilian variant may not be the last mutation. There may be others coming.
My guess - FWIW - is that the vaccine will offer at least partial protection, and maybe a lot more. I also have a lot of confidence that the mRNA guys will be able to modify their vaccines very quickly.
So, I'm going to go with 90-95% chance of significant reductions in case numbers and hospitalisations (thanks summer!) and a 75-80% chance of significant reductions in restrictions.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Hmmmm. The schools fiasco massively inconvenienced a heck of a lot of swing voters (ie, the spot on age when cross over from Lab to Con occurs) who had to scramble for childcare. Many of whom, from my sample, knew full well that schools ought not to be returning well before Christmas. Yet the government insisted otherwise till the very last and very worst moment. They knew a lockdown was inevitable too.
National Trust moves with the times; right-wing Tories gnash their teeth.
Anything else happening?
My mum always refused to visit National Trust properties on the grounds that a lot of them became National Trust properties due to Labour's introduction of massive death duties.
So this isn't a new thing.
That was a period of cultural vandalism. Thousands of beautiful country houses were demolished to satisfy socialist hatred of what they saw as the landed gentry. The alternative was to hand over the properties to the National Trust. Nationalised theft on a massive scale.
The break up of the stranglehold that the aristocracy had on land via death duties was the most overdue piece of land reform in the UK and Ireland and a highly appropriate example of a wealth tax in action.
But the stranglehold wasn't broken up. It was consolidated into the hands of a different aristocracy.
"They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs."
Are the English REALLY so fond of tugging their forelocks, doffing their hats and otherwise abasing themselves before their highers and (?) betters (if not bettors)?
We are, and there is something romantic about aristocratic power, but the tragedy isn't that that era has passed, it's the buildings that were destroyed in the rush toward a 'brave new world' - beauty that we can't get back. It was vandalism on an epic scale. We have a lot to thank the National Trust for, because without that organisation, many many more great houses and parks would have been demolished and torn up.
Wasn’t it more an exhausted and impoverished aristocracy (often with the sons and heirs dead in the war) unable to keep their houses going after WWI rather than some rush to the modern? During a summer working in a second hand book shop I read a few volumes of the diaries of James Lees-Milne who worked for the NT in their early days, an entertainingly bitchy read. I suspect you’d enjoy the books if you don’t already know him.
That’s pretty much what happened with us - Fat Harry was killed in the First World War (wiping out the junior branch) the senior branch of the family wasn’t confident they could afford the house (there was a tail male provision) and so Henry Hugh gave it to the NT.
My cousin Henry still lives on the other part of the estate, although his son owns and runs it now.
If that's Stourhead, your family's loss was the nation's gain.
Without a doubt the most beautiful landscaped gardens in the country. We're lucky enough to live 10 miles away, so can visit regularly.
We had always opened the grounds to the public! But yes, I do like the walk around the lake (although the house is very impractical), and if I need to make a big decision I go to St Peter’s to think and pray
My wife's cousin got married in St Peter's, I think there were peacocks in the wedding photos but don't recollect seeing any at Stourhead recently.
I was last there 18 months ago but there were some peacocks around
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
But it is a bit like saying back in 1939/40 that ' We couldn't avoid war - but at least we have now provided people with gas masks and built so many public shelters.'
Regarding Yang fleeing New York to escape the virus, well if and his friends had produced a new "Decameron" for the 21st century maybe he could be forgiven. However...
That WOULD win you some votes in parts of Manhattan from Greenwich Village to the Upper West Side.
But would NOT get you too far electorally in Hell's Kitchen, Corona, Mott Haven or Coney Island.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
That's merely to highlight that for the media bad news is much more interesting than good news. I don't think it indicates a left-biased media, if that's what you are implying. The focus on bad news was the same when Labour was in power.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
But it is a bit like saying back in 1939/40 that ' We couldn't avoid war - but at least we have now provided people with gas masks and built so many public shelters.'
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
National Trust moves with the times; right-wing Tories gnash their teeth.
Anything else happening?
My mum always refused to visit National Trust properties on the grounds that a lot of them became National Trust properties due to Labour's introduction of massive death duties.
So this isn't a new thing.
That was a period of cultural vandalism. Thousands of beautiful country houses were demolished to satisfy socialist hatred of what they saw as the landed gentry. The alternative was to hand over the properties to the National Trust. Nationalised theft on a massive scale.
The break up of the stranglehold that the aristocracy had on land via death duties was the most overdue piece of land reform in the UK and Ireland and a highly appropriate example of a wealth tax in action.
But the stranglehold wasn't broken up. It was consolidated into the hands of a different aristocracy.
"They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords, Lords without anger or honour, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies. And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs."
Are the English REALLY so fond of tugging their forelocks, doffing their hats and otherwise abasing themselves before their highers and (?) betters (if not bettors)?
We are, and there is something romantic about aristocratic power, but the tragedy isn't that that era has passed, it's the buildings that were destroyed in the rush toward a 'brave new world' - beauty that we can't get back. It was vandalism on an epic scale. We have a lot to thank the National Trust for, because without that organisation, many many more great houses and parks would have been demolished and torn up.
Wasn’t it more an exhausted and impoverished aristocracy (often with the sons and heirs dead in the war) unable to keep their houses going after WWI rather than some rush to the modern? During a summer working in a second hand book shop I read a few volumes of the diaries of James Lees-Milne who worked for the NT in their early days, an entertainingly bitchy read. I suspect you’d enjoy the books if you don’t already know him.
That’s pretty much what happened with us - Fat Harry was killed in the First World War (wiping out the junior branch) the senior branch of the family wasn’t confident they could afford the house (there was a tail male provision) and so Henry Hugh gave it to the NT.
My cousin Henry still lives on the other part of the estate, although his son owns and runs it now.
If that's Stourhead, your family's loss was the nation's gain.
Without a doubt the most beautiful landscaped gardens in the country. We're lucky enough to live 10 miles away, so can visit regularly.
We had always opened the grounds to the public! But yes, I do like the walk around the lake (although the house is very impractical), and if I need to make a big decision I go to St Peter’s to think and pray
My wife's cousin got married in St Peter's, I think there were peacocks in the wedding photos but don't recollect seeing any at Stourhead recently.
I was last there 18 months ago but there were some peacocks around
I look forward to being able to visit again later this year🤞
Starmer can continue to play it safe - Johnson continue to be incompetent and a way out from the next election.
The handling of the virus has been awful - but education has been a shambles as well. Could be the start of sustained lab leads
Johnson's recent handling and comms., post Cummings have been excellent, he is also due a significant vaccine bounce.
Once the economic picture becomes clearer, it might be a very different story however.
Thing is that, by their usual standards, the government has had a pretty good start to the year.
Brexit: Done, and unless you are a fisherman, nothing too bad has happened (yet). Vaccines: Genuine achievement Food parcels: not great, but the problem was sorted quickly.
And yet eyeballing the polls over the last month, the two big parties are basically tied.
Vaccines: Genuine achievement.
It might be interesting to have a straw poll of the public: "How confident are you that by the end of June 2021, COVID restrictions and COVID hospital admissions will both be significantly lower than they are today? Please rate this on a scale from 0 (no confidence) to 100 (total confidence).
I have to say that I am thinking in terms of not counting chickens until they are hatched. I just wonder what the public think.
What's significant?
We know that the virus is much less prevalent in summer, as (a) sunshine is quite a good disinfectant, and (b) people spend more time outside. We can therefore be confident that - even if absolutely no measures whatsoever were introduced - that we would probably see fewer deaths, hospitalisations, etc., in June than now.
It's also a fairly reasonable guess that - by then - a large portion of the population will be vaccinated. It could easily by 70+%.
Put those together, and normality would seem certain to resume.
Against that, there is the very real question about the Brazilian variant of the virus. Will current vaccines offer none, some or total protection against it? Likewise, how much immunity is conferred from having had previous CV19 infections?
And the Brazilian variant may not be the last mutation. There may be others coming.
My guess - FWIW - is that the vaccine will offer at least partial protection, and maybe a lot more. I also have a lot of confidence that the mRNA guys will be able to modify their vaccines very quickly.
So, I'm going to go with 90-95% chance of significant reductions in case numbers and hospitalisations (thanks summer!) and a 75-80% chance of significant reductions in restrictions.
I don’t think lockdown will ever collapse but I do think that as it gets warmer more and more people will start to test the edges of it and the edges will fray if things are not better by end April, maybe May. I don’t doubt there is a shadowy behavioural science bod somewhere looking at this.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
I would say that being an anti-nationalist is a VERY good thing. Nationalism is a poisonous creed in all it's forms. It is divisive, often racist and appeals to the lowest common denominator of human nastiness. It is fundamentally different to patriotism. There is no harm in being patriotic, which while often naive and obviously biased, is normally a positive thing.
With respect to the NT, it does a reasonably good job. It is a little too PC in many ways IMO and it's PC agenda in airbrushing out the contribution made to country estates by country sports (so as not to offend the easily offended) is irritating to some of us who like to see proper unbiased historical accounts. But on the whole it does a prgood job as guardian of some of our most famous estates.
"Country sports" = fox hunting? Give me the choice and I'll sit and break bread with any nationalist over someone who tears small animals apart for fun.
They'll never get back into Tier 1 if this happens.
I suppose that much of North Cornwall will be locked down in a different way for the duration. If it goes ahead, it buggers up any plans for a long camping weekend, and some walks on the SW Coast path.
Starmer can continue to play it safe - Johnson continue to be incompetent and a way out from the next election.
The handling of the virus has been awful - but education has been a shambles as well. Could be the start of sustained lab leads
Johnson's recent handling and comms., post Cummings have been excellent, he is also due a significant vaccine bounce.
Once the economic picture becomes clearer, it might be a very different story however.
Thing is that, by their usual standards, the government has had a pretty good start to the year.
Brexit: Done, and unless you are a fisherman, nothing too bad has happened (yet). Vaccines: Genuine achievement Food parcels: not great, but the problem was sorted quickly.
And yet eyeballing the polls over the last month, the two big parties are basically tied.
Vaccines: Genuine achievement.
It might be interesting to have a straw poll of the public: "How confident are you that by the end of June 2021, COVID restrictions and COVID hospital admissions will both be significantly lower than they are today? Please rate this on a scale from 0 (no confidence) to 100 (total confidence).
I have to say that I am thinking in terms of not counting chickens until they are hatched. I just wonder what the public think.
What's significant?
We know that the virus is much less prevalent in summer, as (a) sunshine is quite a good disinfectant, and (b) people spend more time outside. We can therefore be confident that - even if absolutely no measures whatsoever were introduced - that we would probably see fewer deaths, hospitalisations, etc., in June than now.
It's also a fairly reasonable guess that - by then - a large portion of the population will be vaccinated. It could easily by 70+%.
Put those together, and normality would seem certain to resume.
Against that, there is the very real question about the Brazilian variant of the virus. Will current vaccines offer none, some or total protection against it? Likewise, how much immunity is conferred from having had previous CV19 infections?
And the Brazilian variant may not be the last mutation. There may be others coming.
My guess - FWIW - is that the vaccine will offer at least partial protection, and maybe a lot more. I also have a lot of confidence that the mRNA guys will be able to modify their vaccines very quickly.
So, I'm going to go with 90-95% chance of significant reductions in case numbers and hospitalisations (thanks summer!) and a 75-80% chance of significant reductions in restrictions.
As always the gloomster, isn't a Southern California winter much like an English summer, and yet...
We need to get this properly under control until any relaxations. Nothing before April. Regional tiers don't work. Reduction in restrictions must be at national level, ideally the regional authorities in line with Westminster.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
That's a chicken and egg scenario. I think that those looking for optimism know better than to buy newspapers or watch the news hoping to find it.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
Yet another stretch target.....already hit 350k / day, looks like will do 500k / day by next week, immediately another target / ambition mentioned to friendly press.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Starmer can continue to play it safe - Johnson continue to be incompetent and a way out from the next election.
The handling of the virus has been awful - but education has been a shambles as well. Could be the start of sustained lab leads
Johnson's recent handling and comms., post Cummings have been excellent, he is also due a significant vaccine bounce.
Once the economic picture becomes clearer, it might be a very different story however.
Thing is that, by their usual standards, the government has had a pretty good start to the year.
Brexit: Done, and unless you are a fisherman, nothing too bad has happened (yet). Vaccines: Genuine achievement Food parcels: not great, but the problem was sorted quickly.
And yet eyeballing the polls over the last month, the two big parties are basically tied.
Vaccines: Genuine achievement.
It might be interesting to have a straw poll of the public: "How confident are you that by the end of June 2021, COVID restrictions and COVID hospital admissions will both be significantly lower than they are today? Please rate this on a scale from 0 (no confidence) to 100 (total confidence).
I have to say that I am thinking in terms of not counting chickens until they are hatched. I just wonder what the public think.
What's significant?
We know that the virus is much less prevalent in summer, as (a) sunshine is quite a good disinfectant, and (b) people spend more time outside. We can therefore be confident that - even if absolutely no measures whatsoever were introduced - that we would probably see fewer deaths, hospitalisations, etc., in June than now.
It's also a fairly reasonable guess that - by then - a large portion of the population will be vaccinated. It could easily by 70+%.
Put those together, and normality would seem certain to resume.
Against that, there is the very real question about the Brazilian variant of the virus. Will current vaccines offer none, some or total protection against it? Likewise, how much immunity is conferred from having had previous CV19 infections?
And the Brazilian variant may not be the last mutation. There may be others coming.
My guess - FWIW - is that the vaccine will offer at least partial protection, and maybe a lot more. I also have a lot of confidence that the mRNA guys will be able to modify their vaccines very quickly.
So, I'm going to go with 90-95% chance of significant reductions in case numbers and hospitalisations (thanks summer!) and a 75-80% chance of significant reductions in restrictions.
As always the gloomster, isn't a Southern California winter much like an English summer, and yet...
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
I'm really glad to hear that. I do believe in giving credit when a job as been done well, and that IS the case so far with the UK vaccine rollout. But it's far, far to early for a wave of optimism to flood the public consciousness. Almost everyone in this country hasn't been immunised, and if the message gets out that we're leaving most of the rest of the world in our dust, some people will take that as a cue to not take the basic safety measures seriously. We still need to be keeping distant, wearing masks, isolating when we've had symptoms, etc.
We've already seen what complacency has done both here and in other countries, and the situation in our hospitals is really, really bad. We can't afford for good news to become a "phew, thank god all that's over with" response. That could actually undo the good vaccine work that has just begun.
IN other words, breaching the constitution of the UK.
The opposite, the constitution of the UK is based on the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament at Westminster.
It is about time the UK government started directing more funds to Scotland itself rather than letting the Nationalists use them to push their Nat agenda to break up the UK
Your unwritten constitution included the Sewell convention, whcih makes such actions illegal in devolved areas without the permission of the Scottish Parliament. Much was made of it by the unionists. Turns out because it's only an unwritten convention when it comes to actually looking at the law, it is meanijngless, and can be ignored.
That is your precious unwritten constitution and that is how precious useless it is.
These are funds reclaimed from the EU being spent by the UK government in Scotland, still part of the UK,
The Sewel convention was made before Brexit and did not cover new powers and new funds then neither available to Westminster or Holyrood which have now become available post Brexit
You obviously never read the article then, the arsehole specifically pointed out they would be spending it in England.
IN other words, breaching the constitution of the UK.
The opposite, the constitution of the UK is based on the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament at Westminster.
It is about time the UK government started directing more funds to Scotland itself rather than letting the Nationalists use them to push their Nat agenda to break up the UK
Your unwritten constitution included the Sewell convention, whcih makes such actions illegal in devolved areas without the permission of the Scottish Parliament. Much was made of it by the unionists. Turns out because it's only an unwritten convention when it comes to actually looking at the law, it is meanijngless, and can be ignored.
That is your precious unwritten constitution and that is how precious useless it is.
These are funds reclaimed from the EU being spent by the UK government in Scotland, still part of the UK,
The Sewel convention was made before Brexit and did not cover new powers and new funds then neither available to Westminster or Holyrood which have now become available post Brexit
You obviously never read the article then, the arsehole specifically pointed out they would be spending it in England.
No he didn't.
Oh yes he did................"Levelling up" is a UK project, mainly associated with lower income parts of the north of England.
That's what the BBC article has added as an explainer, not a quote from the minister.
You really should learn to read.
You don't like to see your idols being shown up for what they are.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
Mrs P and I bought life memberships when we retired and, this excepted, we've had great value from it ever since.
Funnily enough, whenever we vist a NT property, it's the buildings, landscapes, gardens and art works we tend to notice, not the politics. That said, it seems entriely right to point out to visitors where a property has been built on the back of slave trade profits, and to show the inequities inherent in the country house lifestyle of former times.
Finally, as a wheelchair user I applaud the NT's efforts to make their properties as accessible as possible within the constraints of old buildings etc. They put English Heritage to shame - the latter give the impression they could'nt give a damn about access.
Fair enough, but isn't it harder for English Heritage given they have castles and medieval buildings and the like?
And, on the former, it depends entirely how you do it. If it's a few historical information boards that allow you to explore the story yourself, sure. If it's shoved in your face as the overriding message from the second you walk in the door, together with being told in no uncertain terms what you should think about that, then no. That's insulting and divisive.
Anyway, I must go. Family supper beckons.
I appreciate you have probably gone to supper but to answer your question about English Heritage: No, I don't believe it's harder for them than the NT to made access better.
Because many of their sites are ruins, a lot could be done just by putting in ramps rather than steps on the grass grounds around the ruins. Rivaulx Abbey and Lindisfarne Priory are just a couple of examples where a few ramped paths would make a big difference.
Give me the 'woke' NT any day!
Thanks for this. I agree that's a poor show by English Heritage on the examples you've given.
Why has England only vaccinated 40% of its care home residents Vs 80%+ in Scotland despite the JCVI advising all 4 nations that this was the top priority group?
Starmer can continue to play it safe - Johnson continue to be incompetent and a way out from the next election.
The handling of the virus has been awful - but education has been a shambles as well. Could be the start of sustained lab leads
Johnson's recent handling and comms., post Cummings have been excellent, he is also due a significant vaccine bounce.
Once the economic picture becomes clearer, it might be a very different story however.
Thing is that, by their usual standards, the government has had a pretty good start to the year.
Brexit: Done, and unless you are a fisherman, nothing too bad has happened (yet). Vaccines: Genuine achievement Food parcels: not great, but the problem was sorted quickly.
And yet eyeballing the polls over the last month, the two big parties are basically tied.
Vaccines: Genuine achievement.
It might be interesting to have a straw poll of the public: "How confident are you that by the end of June 2021, COVID restrictions and COVID hospital admissions will both be significantly lower than they are today? Please rate this on a scale from 0 (no confidence) to 100 (total confidence).
I have to say that I am thinking in terms of not counting chickens until they are hatched. I just wonder what the public think.
What's significant?
We know that the virus is much less prevalent in summer, as (a) sunshine is quite a good disinfectant, and (b) people spend more time outside. We can therefore be confident that - even if absolutely no measures whatsoever were introduced - that we would probably see fewer deaths, hospitalisations, etc., in June than now.
It's also a fairly reasonable guess that - by then - a large portion of the population will be vaccinated. It could easily by 70+%.
Put those together, and normality would seem certain to resume.
Against that, there is the very real question about the Brazilian variant of the virus. Will current vaccines offer none, some or total protection against it? Likewise, how much immunity is conferred from having had previous CV19 infections?
And the Brazilian variant may not be the last mutation. There may be others coming.
My guess - FWIW - is that the vaccine will offer at least partial protection, and maybe a lot more. I also have a lot of confidence that the mRNA guys will be able to modify their vaccines very quickly.
So, I'm going to go with 90-95% chance of significant reductions in case numbers and hospitalisations (thanks summer!) and a 75-80% chance of significant reductions in restrictions.
As always the gloomster, isn't a Southern California winter much like an English summer, and yet...
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
I'm really glad to hear that. I do believe in giving credit when a job as been done well, and that IS the case so far with the UK vaccine rollout. But it's far, far to early for a wave of optimism to flood the public consciousness. Almost everyone in this country hasn't been immunised, and if the message gets out that we're leaving most of the rest of the world in our dust, some people will take that as a cue to not take the basic safety measures seriously. We still need to be keeping distant, wearing masks, isolating when we've had symptoms, etc.
We've already seen what complacency has done both here and in other countries, and the situation in our hospitals is really, really bad. We can't afford for good news to become a "phew, thank god all that's over with" response. That could actually undo the good vaccine work that has just begun.
There is lots of things that can still go wrong e.g. vaccines not being effective against mutant Brazilian Bum covid, especially AZN one.
However, the vaccine roll-out has been incredibly efficient and what makes a refreshing change is continuing to push, there is no let up. With testing, the man from Delmonte got us from 10k to 100k a day, and then it all slowed down, so when the school went back we were short of capacity. Hopefully nobody says that is more than enough vaccinations per week, because no amount is enough, until everybody is done.
One area we know is a problem is BAME populations in large urban areas. Reports today say 50% of people in Birmingham from BAME community have turned down their offer. Lots of work needed there to convince people to get jabbed.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
...but you are one of the endless pessimists peddling the notion of perpetual decline created by the liberal elites. You have your socially Conservative Government (on paper at least, granted- probably the most fiscally left-wing ever) and still you bang on about liberal wokeism, whatever that may be.
You sound like Jeremy Corbyn, you would be at your happiest, like him, in perpetual opposition, moaning on about how unfair the world is to you.
Prof Colin Talbot (Shielding: Month 11) @colinrtalbot Yesterday I tweeted that the just published Scottish Government’s vaccine deployment plan looked much better than the Whitehall one for England.
Today the Westminster Government has forced Scotland to withdraw their plan using some highly dubious ‘national security’ excuse.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
"...dangerously Woke" Where's the actual danger?
Just do what (in normal times) millions of other, mainly middle-aged, mainly middle-class, almost certainly predominantly Conservative-voting people do and let it go...
Enjoy the beauty and the tranqulity of the the National Trust properties and landscapes and ignore the stuff you don't like.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
...but you are one of the endless pessimists peddling the notion of perpetual decline created by the liberal elites. You have your socially Conservative Government (on paper at least, granted- probably the most fiscally left-wing ever) and still you bang on about liberal wokeism, whatever that may be.
You sound like Jeremy Corbyn, you would be at your happiest, like him, in perpetual opposition, moaning on about how unfair the world is to you.
Nonsense. My critique is both factual and mainstream. In fact, the Charities Commission is on the cusp of investigating the National Trust for overreach. And the cabinet has it on its radar as well. It's important the NT keeps our nation's heritage in all our interests without getting involved in politics. That's not their job.
However much you'd like to bat me away there's a lot of substance in what I'm saying and well you know it.
Starmer can continue to play it safe - Johnson continue to be incompetent and a way out from the next election.
The handling of the virus has been awful - but education has been a shambles as well. Could be the start of sustained lab leads
Johnson's recent handling and comms., post Cummings have been excellent, he is also due a significant vaccine bounce.
Once the economic picture becomes clearer, it might be a very different story however.
Thing is that, by their usual standards, the government has had a pretty good start to the year.
Brexit: Done, and unless you are a fisherman, nothing too bad has happened (yet). Vaccines: Genuine achievement Food parcels: not great, but the problem was sorted quickly.
And yet eyeballing the polls over the last month, the two big parties are basically tied.
Vaccines: Genuine achievement.
It might be interesting to have a straw poll of the public: "How confident are you that by the end of June 2021, COVID restrictions and COVID hospital admissions will both be significantly lower than they are today? Please rate this on a scale from 0 (no confidence) to 100 (total confidence).
I have to say that I am thinking in terms of not counting chickens until they are hatched. I just wonder what the public think.
What's significant?
We know that the virus is much less prevalent in summer, as (a) sunshine is quite a good disinfectant, and (b) people spend more time outside. We can therefore be confident that - even if absolutely no measures whatsoever were introduced - that we would probably see fewer deaths, hospitalisations, etc., in June than now.
It's also a fairly reasonable guess that - by then - a large portion of the population will be vaccinated. It could easily by 70+%.
Put those together, and normality would seem certain to resume.
Against that, there is the very real question about the Brazilian variant of the virus. Will current vaccines offer none, some or total protection against it? Likewise, how much immunity is conferred from having had previous CV19 infections?
And the Brazilian variant may not be the last mutation. There may be others coming.
My guess - FWIW - is that the vaccine will offer at least partial protection, and maybe a lot more. I also have a lot of confidence that the mRNA guys will be able to modify their vaccines very quickly.
So, I'm going to go with 90-95% chance of significant reductions in case numbers and hospitalisations (thanks summer!) and a 75-80% chance of significant reductions in restrictions.
As always the gloomster, isn't a Southern California winter much like an English summer, and yet...
Multiple differences - even within LA where over 1/3 of California’s deaths have occurred and which accounts for nearly half the state’s cases. Two people in total have died in Bel Air while 230 in poorer East LA have. I’m no medic but the fact that they avoided much of a first wave may have meant they were hit harder by the second? Air quality there is notoriously awful. Finally the scale of the homeless problem in LA is off the charts, 65,000 rough sleepers last January compared to about 10,000 in London at the same point, and that’s where the cases have been worst in this second wave.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
"...dangerously Woke" Where's the actual danger?
Just do what (in normal times) millions of other, mainly middle-aged, mainly middle-class, almost certainly predominantly Conservative-voting people do and let it go...
Enjoy the beauty and the tranqulity of the the National Trust properties and landscapes and ignore the stuff you don't like.
If you can't, only you will be missing out
Yes, it's a lose-lose but it's only by withdrawing my funds and support that they'll learn the lesson and reform.
I will not support - still less fund - an organisation whose activities I vehmently disagree with and believe to be damaging to social cohesion.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I don't think anyone objects to letting the facts speak for themselves.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
Sadly, I think some people DO disagree with that. No individual accusation, but you just know that some people cannot bear to see their icon clasmed. Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
If they're going to vaccinate 5m per week then everyone will be done by the end of March.
With second doses by the end of May.
5m a week within months....the capacity needs to be built, but also the supply. March / April we should start to get Moderna and hopefully J&J (which is one shot).
If they're going to vaccinate 5m per week then everyone will be done by the end of March.
With second doses by the end of May.
Good news. Let's crack on with it. Need to go vaccinations down to 50+ min before any real confidence in being able to open up. Need all 18+ done really.
Starmer can continue to play it safe - Johnson continue to be incompetent and a way out from the next election.
The handling of the virus has been awful - but education has been a shambles as well. Could be the start of sustained lab leads
Johnson's recent handling and comms., post Cummings have been excellent, he is also due a significant vaccine bounce.
Once the economic picture becomes clearer, it might be a very different story however.
Thing is that, by their usual standards, the government has had a pretty good start to the year.
Brexit: Done, and unless you are a fisherman, nothing too bad has happened (yet). Vaccines: Genuine achievement Food parcels: not great, but the problem was sorted quickly.
And yet eyeballing the polls over the last month, the two big parties are basically tied.
Vaccines: Genuine achievement.
It might be interesting to have a straw poll of the public: "How confident are you that by the end of June 2021, COVID restrictions and COVID hospital admissions will both be significantly lower than they are today? Please rate this on a scale from 0 (no confidence) to 100 (total confidence).
I have to say that I am thinking in terms of not counting chickens until they are hatched. I just wonder what the public think.
What's significant?
We know that the virus is much less prevalent in summer, as (a) sunshine is quite a good disinfectant, and (b) people spend more time outside. We can therefore be confident that - even if absolutely no measures whatsoever were introduced - that we would probably see fewer deaths, hospitalisations, etc., in June than now.
It's also a fairly reasonable guess that - by then - a large portion of the population will be vaccinated. It could easily by 70+%.
Put those together, and normality would seem certain to resume.
Against that, there is the very real question about the Brazilian variant of the virus. Will current vaccines offer none, some or total protection against it? Likewise, how much immunity is conferred from having had previous CV19 infections?
And the Brazilian variant may not be the last mutation. There may be others coming.
My guess - FWIW - is that the vaccine will offer at least partial protection, and maybe a lot more. I also have a lot of confidence that the mRNA guys will be able to modify their vaccines very quickly.
So, I'm going to go with 90-95% chance of significant reductions in case numbers and hospitalisations (thanks summer!) and a 75-80% chance of significant reductions in restrictions.
As always the gloomster, isn't a Southern California winter much like an English summer, and yet...
Multiple differences - even within LA where over 1/3 of California’s deaths have occurred and which accounts for nearly half the state’s cases. Two people in total have died in Bel Air while 230 in poorer East LA have. I’m no medic but the fact that they avoided much of a first wave may have meant they were hit harder by the second? Air quality there is notoriously awful. Finally the scale of the homeless problem in LA is off the charts, 65,000 rough sleepers last January compared to about 10,000 in London at the same point, and that’s where the cases have been worst in this second wave.
I am not defending the American medical system, or social inequality. Just pointing out that sunshine is no panacea. See also Brazil and South Africa.
Starmer can continue to play it safe - Johnson continue to be incompetent and a way out from the next election.
The handling of the virus has been awful - but education has been a shambles as well. Could be the start of sustained lab leads
Johnson's recent handling and comms., post Cummings have been excellent, he is also due a significant vaccine bounce.
Once the economic picture becomes clearer, it might be a very different story however.
Thing is that, by their usual standards, the government has had a pretty good start to the year.
Brexit: Done, and unless you are a fisherman, nothing too bad has happened (yet). Vaccines: Genuine achievement Food parcels: not great, but the problem was sorted quickly.
And yet eyeballing the polls over the last month, the two big parties are basically tied.
I doubt many people are aware of how successful vaccination is going and they certainly haven't felt the benefits of it yet.
Instead they hear talk of harder lockdowns and permanent restrictions.
Plus the media focus on the death numbers not the vaccination numbers.
We need to disavow ourselves of the notion The National Trust is a friendly and benign custodian of our nation's heritage anymore.
It isn't. It's become an arrogant and highly politicised campaigning organisation that's been successfully captured by the Left, and thinks it's above the law.
It needs to be put back in its box.
I wouldn't advise anyone giving them any money until they reform themselves, or are reigned in and told to do so by government.
Cancel the National Trust? FFS.
Casino's comment sounds encouraging. Perhaps I should join. What other fronts of the culture war am I neglecting?
All the National Trust properties I have visited seem to be run by ladies of a certain age in tweed skirts and sensible shoes. And the cafes are full of comfortable middle class families in Burberry and wellies having tea and scones. It's all quintessentially English.
Of course the people staffing the properties are; but too many of their bosses are typical anti-nationalists. Charles Moore gently thunders on the topic here:
On the contrary, part of what seems to have pricked Moore's thumb in that article is the criticism of Churchill and Curzon's "antinationalism". Particularly amusing the writer wailing about contested terms like "colonialism" (well that's a woke criticism if ever I saw one) whilst slipping into pejorative terms like "hit list" and bemoaning the fact someone had the temerity to comment about the British monarchy's silence about its chequered past.
I am a member of the NT, and this criticism reads more like the hurt feelings of someone who's stumbled upon the idea that some people see a benefit in reassessing our country's past and emphasising that not everything was good. And God knows, someone needs to say it. I think I'll be keeping my NT membership.
But of course you will - they represent your political ideology now, not that of the public at large. That's, er, the whole point of this discussion.
Not really. Firstly, you don't have a clue about my political ideology. Secondly, pointing out that an estate is the product of the slave trade, or a formed owner was enriched in colonial exploitation is a historical fact. It's only political if your politics is to airbrush that sort of thing out of history altogether. And, if that is your politics, your politics is dangerously anti-intellectual.
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
This is how acute protectiveness about our history comes over to me. Not so much the mad but the fragile. Fragility - with or without the White in front of it. Happy to leave that off if it prevents rational focus. Which it does often seem to - due to white fragility.
This poll is not necessarily inconsistent with the possibility of the Government being given credit for the vaccine rollout- in that we might be looking at a 7% or 8% Labour lead had that not happened. There has to be a good possibility that people are now weary after ten months of Covid and its restrictions . Many will have serious doubts that the sacrifices demanded have produced positive outcomes.
Spoke to my Mum on the phone this week. She's not terribly hot on news and current affairs, but listens to Radio 4/Classic fm, both of which have news bulletins. She was totally unaware that the UK was number 4 on the 'Vaccine league table' and ahead of other European nations - call me a cynic, but I don't think she'd have been unaware of it if we'd been near the bottom, especially if our poor ranking could have been assigned to Brexit somehow.
Good news has never sold newspapers.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
I don't want to hear the National Trust has become dangerously Woke. Unfortunately, it has though.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
"...dangerously Woke" Where's the actual danger?
Just do what (in normal times) millions of other, mainly middle-aged, mainly middle-class, almost certainly predominantly Conservative-voting people do and let it go...
Enjoy the beauty and the tranqulity of the the National Trust properties and landscapes and ignore the stuff you don't like.
If you can't, only you will be missing out
Yes, it's a lose-lose but it's only by withdrawing my funds and support that they'll learn the lesson and reform.
I will not support - still less fund - an organisation whose activities I vehmently disagree with and believe to be damaging to social cohesion.
Airbrushing out the slave trade from our history is an inherently political act. You are essentially asking the NT to whitewash the bit of history you don’t like. You’re saying to Black people in this country “this was built through the unpaid sweat of your ancestors but please let’s not talk about that. It’s political”. A really shockingly extreme position to take.
Comments
I don't believe the subsample putting the Tories ahead in Wales either.
Brexit: Done, and unless you are a fisherman, nothing too bad has happened (yet).
Vaccines: Genuine achievement
Food parcels: not great, but the problem was sorted quickly.
And yet eyeballing the polls over the last month, the two big parties are basically tied.
I thought Conservatives believed in decentralisation.
Of course the families couldn't keep them going, but it was the lack of alternatives that surprises me. I wasn't alive in the mid to mid-late 20th century, but everything I've heard about how historic houses were demolished in that era tells me that they just didn't place any value on the beauty of these buildings, or the stories they could tell.
But it requires Boris to
a) face down the loony fringe in his own party and (harder)
b) resist the temptation to get one over on Johnny Euro.
I'm nervous.
This pandemic has turned the lives of millions of people upside down and Johnson's and his crew of indolent clowns have greatly increased the toll of death and suffering through their incompetence and because they gave credence to the motley crew of scientific and political cranks opposed to lockdown.
I guess the Russian oligarch is the rough modern equivalent to the American heiress whose fortune would get the roof fixed.
For example, maybe Caine should be O’Brien, not BB.
So perhaps Gods' Country rather than God's Country...
Must be a link.
(Sewel)“as happened in Northern Ireland earlier in the century, we would expect a convention to be established that Westminster would not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters in Scotland without the consent of the Scottish parliament”.
The convention was subsequently written into a Memorandum of Understanding on intergovernmental relations in terms that make it clear that, “The United Kingdom Parliament retains authority to legislate on any issue, whether devolved or not. It is ultimately for Parliament to decide what use to make of that power”.
However, the Memorandum of Understanding also acknowledges that “Parliament’s decision to devolve certain matters [means] that Parliament itself will in future be more restricted in its field of operation”.
https://www.consoc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Gordon-Anthony-Devolution-Brexit-and-the-Sewel-Convention-1.pdf
I don't see how that can possibly be interpreted to mean that the UK Government should not be able to fund projects and work with agencies in Scotland without channeling that through the devolved administration, if they don't already. Doing that is not legislating?
Seems a bit extreme. Wouldn't banning them from entering an HSBC branch be sufficient?
'Hooper had no illusions about the Army – or rather no special illusions distinguishable from the general,
enveloping fog from which he observed the universe. He had come to it reluctantly, under compulsion, after he
had made every feeble effort in his power to obtain deferment. He accepted it, he said, ‘like the measles’.
Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert’s horse or sat among the camp fires at
Xanthus-side; at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry – that stoic, redskin interlude which our
schools introduce between the fast-flowing tears of the child and the man – Hooper had wept often, but never
for Henry’s speech on St. Crispin’s day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they taught him had
few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change.
Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon – these, and the Battle
in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless
state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded
in vain to Hooper...'
My cousin Henry still lives on the other part of the estate, although his son owns and runs it now.
The Unlikely Connection Between Wellness Influencers and the Pro-Trump Rioters
Inside the dangerous plot to get conspiracy theories into the mainstream.
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/health-fitness/a35056548/wellness-fitness-influencers-qanon-conspiracy-theories/
Basically if you had a stately home that was in poor condition you were given 2 years notice that it was going to be Grade 1 listed which created an immediate obligation to restore it. Funny how many houses accidentally burnt to the ground in those 2 years
Without a doubt the most beautiful landscaped gardens in the country. We're lucky enough to live 10 miles away, so can visit regularly.
It might be interesting to have a straw poll of the public: "How confident are you that by the end of June 2021, COVID restrictions and COVID hospital admissions will both be significantly lower than they are today? Please rate this on a scale from 0 (no confidence) to 100 (total confidence).
Yesterday the Chief Medical Officer said that things will be substantially better than they are at the moment by the spring: https://news.sky.com/video/covid-19-chris-whitty-says-things-will-be-substantially-better-by-spring-12188921
I have to say that I am thinking in terms of not counting chickens until they are hatched. I just wonder what the public think.
However, this will be a hard act to pull off, even IF Yang can consolidate the Asian vote (not a given) because while the community is growing, it is only about 12% of the city population, and way less of the eligible adult electorate. Especially in primary, where the Democratic nomination and (maybe) the election will be decided. In this context, note that just about half of NYC Asians are of Chinese heritage.
One big thing that AY has going for him, is proven fundraising ability on a national scale. Clearly the bulk of his fundraising potential lies OUTSIDE of New York City, which may be an issue for opponents to bring up BUT still a greenback from Fargo or 'Frisco is just as good as one from Flushing or Flatbush.
Further note that for the last thirty years or more, RACE AND ETHNICITY have been THE key factor(s) in NYC municipal politics, certainly for the Democratic nomination for NYC mayor and city office. Which was precisely the reason Mike Bloomberg skipped the Democratic primary altogether (low turnout and dominated by city, borough, neighborhood power-brokers) and ran as a Republican, because he could capture that ballot line, thus qualifying for the general election where higher turnout and greater scope for media, where he had both years of professional expertise AND millions of SSS to deploy.
My own judgement is that same obstacles that would have kept Mike Bloomberg from winning the Democratic nomination, but made it possible for him to run anyway and defeat the Dem nominee, may still be operating re: Andrew Yang. At this point, he appears to be running as a Democrat BUT that doubt IF that is carved in stone.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/can-the-uk-government-spend-in-areas-devolved-to-scotland/
If this is actually not something that is expressly laid out in the devolution act, and it's not covered by the Sewel convention, then realistically I cannot really see how the UK Government could have done it differently.
has to be played by Nigel Farage
https://twitter.com/itvwestcountry/status/1350552647875616768
We know that the virus is much less prevalent in summer, as (a) sunshine is quite a good disinfectant, and (b) people spend more time outside. We can therefore be confident that - even if absolutely no measures whatsoever were introduced - that we would probably see fewer deaths, hospitalisations, etc., in June than now.
It's also a fairly reasonable guess that - by then - a large portion of the population will be vaccinated. It could easily by 70+%.
Put those together, and normality would seem certain to resume.
Against that, there is the very real question about the Brazilian variant of the virus. Will current vaccines offer none, some or total protection against it? Likewise, how much immunity is conferred from having had previous CV19 infections?
And the Brazilian variant may not be the last mutation. There may be others coming.
My guess - FWIW - is that the vaccine will offer at least partial protection, and maybe a lot more. I also have a lot of confidence that the mRNA guys will be able to modify their vaccines very quickly.
So, I'm going to go with 90-95% chance of significant reductions in case numbers and hospitalisations (thanks summer!) and a 75-80% chance of significant reductions in restrictions.
The schools fiasco massively inconvenienced a heck of a lot of swing voters (ie, the spot on age when cross over from Lab to Con occurs) who had to scramble for childcare.
Many of whom, from my sample, knew full well that schools ought not to be returning well before Christmas.
Yet the government insisted otherwise till the very last and very worst moment.
They knew a lockdown was inevitable too.
https://twitter.com/bakerstherald/status/1350500746035400706?s=19
But would NOT get you too far electorally in Hell's Kitchen, Corona, Mott Haven or Coney Island.
Indeed, the more you make your news negative and paranoid, the more people buy it. People like @Casino_Royale want to hear that the National Trust has become dangerously woke. People like to hear the government is doing a bad job with CV19. People like to believe that we're in decline.
There's no money in optimism.
https://twitter.com/COVID19actuary/status/1350500557975388163?s=19
Give me the choice and I'll sit and break bread with any nationalist over someone who tears small animals apart for fun.
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1350556246940790785
https://twitter.com/IntelOperator/status/1350553316623835136?s=19
I don't even get why it causes people pain to see people in the past criticised for their own actions. Why does the truth hurt some people so much? I could understand it to some degree if you were related to the person, but most of you who get so livid about these things are not. You've just hitched your wagon to an absolutist version of a flawed person, and you feel a strange need to leap to their defence when someone points out they were pretty dismal. You come across as fragile and just a little mad.
I'm sure some will joke and sneer but Cornwall is beautiful and it's good to spread the love outside the usual big cities, particularly London.
As for the future I want it to just hold our heritage in trust for the nation apolitically.
I have no desire for endless pessimism or to believe we're in perpetual decline.
I know centrists who do though.
It's when the facts are selective and then partial conclusions drawn and presented to you from them that causes problems.
I do believe in giving credit when a job as been done well, and that IS the case so far with the UK vaccine rollout. But it's far, far to early for a wave of optimism to flood the public consciousness. Almost everyone in this country hasn't been immunised, and if the message gets out that we're leaving most of the rest of the world in our dust, some people will take that as a cue to not take the basic safety measures seriously.
We still need to be keeping distant, wearing masks, isolating when we've had symptoms, etc.
We've already seen what complacency has done both here and in other countries, and the situation in our hospitals is really, really bad. We can't afford for good news to become a "phew, thank god all that's over with" response. That could actually undo the good vaccine work that has just begun.
However, the vaccine roll-out has been incredibly efficient and what makes a refreshing change is continuing to push, there is no let up. With testing, the man from Delmonte got us from 10k to 100k a day, and then it all slowed down, so when the school went back we were short of capacity. Hopefully nobody says that is more than enough vaccinations per week, because no amount is enough, until everybody is done.
One area we know is a problem is BAME populations in large urban areas. Reports today say 50% of people in Birmingham from BAME community have turned down their offer. Lots of work needed there to convince people to get jabbed.
You sound like Jeremy Corbyn, you would be at your happiest, like him, in perpetual opposition, moaning on about how unfair the world is to you.
@colinrtalbot
Yesterday I tweeted that the just published Scottish Government’s vaccine deployment plan looked much better than the Whitehall one for England.
Today the Westminster Government has forced Scotland to withdraw their plan using some highly dubious ‘national security’ excuse.
Just do what (in normal times) millions of other, mainly middle-aged, mainly middle-class, almost certainly predominantly Conservative-voting people do and let it go...
Enjoy the beauty and the tranqulity of the the National Trust properties and landscapes and ignore the stuff you don't like.
If you can't, only you will be missing out
However much you'd like to bat me away there's a lot of substance in what I'm saying and well you know it.
With second doses by the end of May.
I will not support - still less fund - an organisation whose activities I vehmently disagree with and believe to be damaging to social cohesion.
Churchill is a classic case here. Some people just cannot tolerate hearing about his crimes because he was instrumental in defeating Nazism. And some who can just about bear it, they can't let any mention of them pass without acclaiming his good works too. Stop and think on that for a moment. How weird is that? We don't have to be so invested in a person being either demon or angel. Churchill had a varied career, so it's ok for his heroics to be mentioned without his shithousery coming up, or vice versa.
https://twitter.com/AllieHBNews/status/1350563466084548610?s=20
Instead they hear talk of harder lockdowns and permanent restrictions.
Plus the media focus on the death numbers not the vaccination numbers.