It seems to me, scientifically there doesn’t seem clear consensus. Would it be fair to say it wouldn’t be followed anyway, because such political promise is tied into vaccination targets?
I don't think it is in doubt that the government is taking a calculated risk.
But then, there are no 'no risk' options.
Absolutely. I think a bigger risk is that the vaccines don't work well against these mutant versions (apparently a cluster in Liverpool of a homegrown mutation with similar characteristics to Brazil / SA one) and that undoes a lot of all the good work done getting millions jabbed quickly.
East 62,169 London 42,015 ??? Midlands 84,163 NE & Yorks 62,618 North-West 60,255 South East 63,109 South West 49,197
Not surprised that the Midlands has the highest numbers. I've heard from multiple sources that things are pretty well organised there.
Though the combined East and West Midlands is presumably also the most populous of these counting areas?
Glad to see improved numbers from the East of England. Hopefully this indicates that we've finished our tyre change and are speeding back out of the pit lane.
Lord alone knows what's going on with London.
Is there a smaller proportion of oldies in London?
Probably. Many couples living in Greater London retire, sell the house and move somewhere cheaper with a more relaxed pace of life.
There is a reverse thing as well - a friend used to arrange mortgages/financial setups for this.
Couples in the sticks would sell a big house, and get a flat in London, in one of the new blocks.
All the maintenance taken care of in the service charge, no garden to worry about, and a short tube/bus ride to all the theatres, museums etc.Any spare money would go in a investment to fund trips abroad etc.
You would think Labour would/should be doing a lot better than "neck and neck" given the circumstances?
My impression was that we were expecting clear Tory leads after the Brexit deal and vaccine roll out.
My guess, from talking to people, is that the vaccination thing hasn't really filtered through to the politically uninvolved yet.
Yes, granny is getting her jab. But the scale of what is going on, is curiously below the radar. Yes, it is on the BBC etc, but it doesn't seem to have sunk in.
There have always been far left & right groups that are prone to violence. The difference surely is that the Democratic Party and Biden don't support the far-leftists whereas the GOP and Trump clearly do.
That wasn't the point being made. The point the US has problems with both of these groups of extremists. Neither have gone away.
However, it is worth saying the far leftist in Portland and Seattle have been tolerated for too long by local officials. The likes of Ted Wheeler for months kept making wishy washy statements and as I linked below in Seattle a local official was still banging on about not tolerating homophobic hate crimes...when it wasn't the Proud Boys doing the smashing up.
As for the far right lot, I can never get my head around in a modern democratic country you can have these militia. It is somebody you expect in an unstable African country, not pottering around a major US city.
One year ago today, I developed a high temperature which came on in about an hour. Spent the next two days in bed with a hacking, dry cough. Recovered to spend day 3 and 4 as pretty normal if weary. Came back on day 5 and went downhill for the next week. Completely lost all taste and smell. Worst cold I'd ever had. Yes. I'd had what was known locally as the "boomerang cold". Put 4 people I knew in hospital with pneumonia...
Basically what I had Dec 25-29th 2019. Fever broke on 28th. Went to a NYE party, cooked dinner and kept apologising it was tasteless. My mates all looked blank. I thought they were being nice. 9th Jan I ordered a chicken kiev and realised I'd basically lost all taste until that evening.
And yes, I'd had a 3 bottle lunch on the 19th with a chap who a few days earlier had had dinner with a mate just back from Wuhan....
I'm reading the Battle of Singapore at present, which is a campaign that's always fascinated me, particularly as we outnumbered the Japanese so significantly.
At the end of the day Malaya was bottom of the list for men and materials, as we were fighting for survival in Europe, so it got green troops and no tanks, modern fighter or bomber aircraft, or aircraft carriers, few ships, and had to make do with men, armoured cars, field artillery and anti-tank rifles. And a handful of obsolescent aircraft.
It could never have held out forever given that but the reason it fell in 2 months (rather than 5-6 months, with at least the prospect of a stalemate) is due to immense racial prejudice against the Japanese, myth-making about "Fortress Singapore", which was just wishful thinking, and poor officers.
The psychology of Percival as a commander is interesting. He's not quite as atrocious as I always thought he was. He was good on paper and had a fair military brain. But, he didn't have the assertiveness or strength of character to push back against the Governor (and some of his unit commanders) who pushed him around nor the inner confidence to revisit his assumptions when they were disproved by reality, and thus fell prey to confirmation bias.
The chief example is that he (correctly, in my view) determined that the Japanese could only be defeated by mobile infiltration and flanking tactics in the field. However, he concluded from that that building fixed defences would therefore be bad for morale, as the troops would just cower behind them, and it would involve admitting just how vulnerable Singapore really was. In reality, this is why they couldn't rest or hold the Japanese (as they had nowhere to do it) and why British Empire troops became exhausted and increasingly ineffective.
He'd have made a good staff officer, but very senior command is far more about character. It's like the difference between a good psephological statistician and a successful gambler.
Thanks - interesting. The ability to recognise that one's a good staff officer rather than a good leader is really rare - nearly everyone wants to get to the top, and then not infrequently regrets it. I've come to see in civilian management that I'm a good, reliable chief of staff but not really a creative leader, but it took a long while before I decided that that's actually OK, and it's better to do a less senior job well than to struggle at the top. Perhaps something to be imparted gently in career advice. just to keep in mind as one discovers one's limits.
In the Army, of course, it's a gross failure at the top if they don't recognise it for you and lose a war because of routine promotion. Does it give Percival's background and how he came to get that role?
Interestingly, Percival had a civilian career first and joined the army quite late in life. He was then considered something of a high flyer, and was promoted largely on merit as opposed to the old school tie like a lot of his compatriots. He was certainly brave, and won the military cross in WW1. However, most of his work was in staff or intelligence roles, where he excelled, rather than senior command of troops in combat.
I know what you mean. One still fears being deemed as a failure unless you reach the top of your business or profession, but it's not for everyone.
Husband tells me that the total number of first doses now administered in the whole UK is "5.4 million plus change." This unit may henceforth be referred to as a Scotland.
When we get to about three Scotlands then priority cohorts 1 through 4 should all have had their first jabs. It seems to be going well so far, better than I'd have predicted when we got started before Christmas.
The rest of JCVI phase one entails approximately three more Scotlands on top of that. So, that's the first major target. Six Scotlands = end of total lockdown, assuming no vaccine resistance disasters occur. But I still think we've got to wait until all ten Scotlands (i.e. the entire adult population) have been lanced at least once before we return to something even vaguely resembling normality. So, much work to be done.
Just rattled through my calendar. Assuming I've got my maths right, if we were to manage a constant rate of one Scotland every three weeks (or approximately 1.8 million per week) from now until the end of the vaccination program, we get to the end of the top four priority cohorts about a week ahead of schedule in early February, the end of the entirety of phase one just after Easter, and the whole of the adult population gets their first shot by the end of July.
Looks achievable on the face of it, but that's not taking into account the need at some point in the not-too-distant future to get the second doses administered in large numbers. Thus, how quickly we can get to the end of the program will depend very much on how far above that 1.8m per week figure the first shots get between now and early March.
If things go very well, my guess is that the last of the over 50s get their first jab by late April/early May, everyone's had the first shot by the end of August, and the last stragglers have their second doses in October; it will help that the younger the recipients get, the more able they will be to get to mass vaccination centres under their own power and at inconvenient times, though OTOH the sense of urgency in getting all the twentysomethings done will be somewhat lower than for old crocs.
Many thanks. An awful lot of what we "know" about WWI comes down to Alan Clark's book, The Donkeys. Reading Castastrophe, by Max Hastings, dispelled a lot of the wrong ideas I had about WWI.
Few scholars would take The Donkeys seriously, but OTOH, I do think his Barbarossa has really stood the test of time. It lacked the benefit of much in the way of Russian primary sources, (it was written in the 1960's) and has some odd gaps (little about the Siege of Leningrad, and only two chapters covering the year after Kursk) but I think his judgements about the 1941-43 period are very sound.
He is unsparing in his criticisms of the German High Command, and implicates them (and not just the SS) in atrocities, and offers justified praise for the fighting qualities of the Red Army, all of which would have gone against the grain of popular history in the 1960's.
What shocks me, Sean, is how many people seem to take Blackadder (a comedy show) seriously.
Catastrophe by Max Hastings is excellent. And very readable.
We didn't have much of a choice once Belgium was invaded.
The Germans would have won. Once that had happened they'd have dominated the Channel and the North sea, and our supply lines, and our word as an ally and upholder of the international order would never have been taken seriously again - risking our long-term isolation and a supplicant rather than a world power.
Larry King being second story on the BBC news site is more evidence for the contention that Auntie blindly follows American news channels, especially at weekends.
Newsman's death is story with other newsmen is hardly a story....
The government said they wanted 500k / day by the end of this week. They are going to be just short, but fantastic effort by all concerned. But no surrender....got to keep pushing. We really shouldn't be doing this nonsense though...
Somerset’s only Covid-19 vaccination centre to close this Saturday for horse racing
Some nags racing really isn't important at the moment.
Terribly misleading headline. Taunton Racecourse might be Somerset’s only mass Covid-19 vaccination centre, but it's certainly not the only vaccination centre in the county.
Yes, that's local news for you. But still, its stupid having a mass vaccination centre close for an afternoon of gee-gees.
10-1 that the Racecourse was booked as a vaccination centre for use on the days when it isn't being used for racing. i.e. this was the plan all along.
The report says that is the case, but still. It seems a bit stupid.
It would be stupid, if there was a queue of people wait for their shot, because there were piles of vaccine, but no space to give it to them.
All the reports I have come across suggest that we have a surplus of vaccination capacity, but a restricted supply (relatively) of vaccine.
I am sure that is the case, but I bet we see lower numbers associated with the weekend again. With this programme there shouldn't be any weekend effect built-in, it should be max numbers every day based on supply, but it seems like there is a certain element of reduction in jabbing on Saturday and Sundays.
In the long run, working a system 7 days a week, let alone 24/7, has a number of effects.
There is a reason that many operations gravitate to the working week cycle - it gives humans and systems time for rest, repair and re-stock.
If you can deliver all the vaccine available in 5 days a week, with a lower key operation on Saturday and Sunday - why not?
That is why Wimbledon insist on the middle Sunday being a rest day.
You would think Labour would/should be doing a lot better than "neck and neck" given the circumstances?
My impression was that we were expecting clear Tory leads after the Brexit deal and vaccine roll out.
My guess, from talking to people, is that the vaccination thing hasn't really filtered through to the politically uninvolved yet.
Yes, granny is getting her jab. But the scale of what is going on, is curiously below the radar. Yes, it is on the BBC etc, but it doesn't seem to have sunk in.
Well the media aren't giving the government any credit either....today it is still all about how the government have got the programme wrong, they are hiding delivery data, they are distributing it unfairly to different regions....
Unlike during the first wave where we got a chart every night saying look this is how shit the UK is doing vs every other European country on testing, cases, deaths...strangely these graphs on vaccinations, rarely appear.
Instead we are just told Israel doing amazing....far better than the UK.
TBH, I had no idea that anyone associated that term with racism. Can you be racist for using a term that you had no idea was racist?
Well in ignorance people can say something very offensive, and treating people doing something offensive in ignorance with those doing it with malice would be wrong.
But it doesn't seem like many people would ever think that term was offensive in the first place.
A brief internet search seems to indicate that there is a retrospective effort now to prove it is, with very little prima facie evidence of its roots in slavery. Suggesting nits were prevalent in slave ships and grits are what poor people in the South eat, hence nitty-gritty came from the slave trade is thin gruel indeed. That nigritique from the French transformed itself into nitty-gritty is a little more convincing, but why is there no printed record of the term contemporaneous to the slave trade itself? Why does it only first appear in the 1930s, and then not in reference to slavery?
I am calling bullshit on this one
The notion that the term "nitty-gritty" is offensive to Black people (in the USA anyway) let alone inherently racist, is indeed total bullshit.
"Spook" is interesting in that was once pretty common as slang for "Black person" very similar to "spade". However, if someone was clearly using "spook" to mean a spy (or using "spade" meaning a kind of shovel) then it is NOT offensive or racist.
"Orientials" used to be an acceptable way of referring to "Asians" but that ended decades ago, now it is regarded as in the same league as "colored person" or (dare I say it) "piccaninny").
"Nigardly" is a special case, as it is not inherently racist HOWEVER the phonetics of the first two syllables make it MOST impolitic to use, in either oral or written communication. Unless you are willing to put up with a LOT of adverse comment (to put it mildly).
It seems to me, scientifically there doesn’t seem clear consensus. Would it be fair to say it wouldn’t be followed anyway, because such political promise is tied into vaccination targets?
I don't think it is in doubt that the government is taking a calculated risk.
But then, there are no 'no risk' options.
Absolutely. I think a bigger risk is that the vaccines don't work well against these mutant versions (apparently a cluster in Liverpool of a homegrown mutation with similar characteristics to Brazil / SA one) and that undoes a lot of all the good work done getting millions jabbed quickly.
Apparently with the Scouse variant the spike proteins have mutated to resemble a curly perm.
Do the voters of the respective parties have much in common. I should think Green voters are well to the left of Lib Dem voters.
The Greens in Germany have become progressively more centrist as their support base has grown.
The Green party in Germany (sorry that should be the elegant "League 90/the Greens") famously has Fundis and Realos. The Fundis (fundamentalists) help keep the party fixed on green issues and pick up lots of votes on the mid-left. The Realos are good at negotiating hard to get green policies into the mainstream and to form coalitions, which picks votes from the centre and centre-left.
I only see the SDP continuing to decline, as the Green Party continue to strengthen.
There really needs to be a push to have community leaders changing minds on this. Otherwise, race relations are going to be set back hugely, should high levels of Covid in ethnic communities be the reason that areas are staying in high tiers even though the rest of the community has been vaxxed. There's going to be a very vocal element saying "fuck 'em, they had their chance, why should my local stay closed?"
Isn't this "community leaders" thing a bit patronising? As if EMs can't think for themselves. You never hear about white people having to be encouraged to do things via their community leaders, much as the Archbishop of Canterbury might like it to be so.
The Greens policies have been successfully and comprehensively absorbed into both main parties platforms, and are being pursued as far and as fast as is economically and socially practicable - with constant challenging to do better. That just leaves a lunatic XR fringe; there's no space for them.
There's definitely a space for a traditional liberal party (something I think we've lost) but the Lib Dems seem to be more interested in being a very posh, pompous and obsessive Rejoin party instead.
Many thanks. An awful lot of what we "know" about WWI comes down to Alan Clark's book, The Donkeys. Reading Castastrophe, by Max Hastings, dispelled a lot of the wrong ideas I had about WWI.
Few scholars would take The Donkeys seriously, but OTOH, I do think his Barbarossa has really stood the test of time. It lacked the benefit of much in the way of Russian primary sources, (it was written in the 1960's) and has some odd gaps (little about the Siege of Leningrad, and only two chapters covering the year after Kursk) but I think his judgements about the 1941-43 period are very sound.
He is unsparing in his criticisms of the German High Command, and implicates them (and not just the SS) in atrocities, and offers justified praise for the fighting qualities of the Red Army, all of which would have gone against the grain of popular history in the 1960's.
What shocks me, Sean, is how many people seem to take Blackadder (a comedy show) seriously.
Thank goodness it's only the fourth series which contained any inaccuraries.
Many thanks. An awful lot of what we "know" about WWI comes down to Alan Clark's book, The Donkeys. Reading Castastrophe, by Max Hastings, dispelled a lot of the wrong ideas I had about WWI.
Few scholars would take The Donkeys seriously, but OTOH, I do think his Barbarossa has really stood the test of time. It lacked the benefit of much in the way of Russian primary sources, (it was written in the 1960's) and has some odd gaps (little about the Siege of Leningrad, and only two chapters covering the year after Kursk) but I think his judgements about the 1941-43 period are very sound.
He is unsparing in his criticisms of the German High Command, and implicates them (and not just the SS) in atrocities, and offers justified praise for the fighting qualities of the Red Army, all of which would have gone against the grain of popular history in the 1960's.
What shocks me, Sean, is how many people seem to take Blackadder (a comedy show) seriously.
Catastrophe by Max Hastings is excellent. And very readable.
We didn't have much of a choice once Belgium was invaded.
The Germans would have won. Once that had happened they'd have dominated the Channel and the North sea, and our supply lines, and our word as an ally and upholder of the international order would never have been taken seriously again - risking our long-term isolation and a supplicant rather than a world power.
We had to fight.
Yes. Imagine a Imperial Germany that had won 1870 and 1914. They believed in War. War is Good.. War is God.
Seriously, read some the 1900s stuff from there... crazy to us. Imagine that affirmed by a quick victory in WWI.
They were planning on the next war while fighting in 1914 - they wanted to be in a good position when the next one kicked off.
So, imagine, without the destruction of 1914-18 - how many years before the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute gets it's uranium machine up and running?
You would think Labour would/should be doing a lot better than "neck and neck" given the circumstances?
My impression was that we were expecting clear Tory leads after the Brexit deal and vaccine roll out.
My guess, from talking to people, is that the vaccination thing hasn't really filtered through to the politically uninvolved yet.
Yes, granny is getting her jab. But the scale of what is going on, is curiously below the radar. Yes, it is on the BBC etc, but it doesn't seem to have sunk in.
I don't think people will realise until they and their parents start getting their first doses in a few weeks. While it's an over 70s thing there are fewer people who know lots of people who will have had it already. Additionally, because of the 12 week policy the immediate gains aren't clear and it hasn't fed through to the death rate just yet and will only start doing so in 7-12 days.
TBH, I had no idea that anyone associated that term with racism. Can you be racist for using a term that you had no idea was racist?
Well in ignorance people can say something very offensive, and treating people doing something offensive in ignorance with those doing it with malice would be wrong.
But it doesn't seem like many people would ever think that term was offensive in the first place.
A brief internet search seems to indicate that there is a retrospective effort now to prove it is, with very little prima facie evidence of its roots in slavery. Suggesting nits were prevalent in slave ships and grits are what poor people in the South eat, hence nitty-gritty came from the slave trade is thin gruel indeed. That nigritique from the French transformed itself into nitty-gritty is a little more convincing, but why is there no printed record of the term contemporaneous to the slave trade itself? Why does it only first appear in the 1930s, and then not in reference to slavery?
I am calling bullshit on this one
The notion that the term "nitty-gritty" is offensive to Black people (in the USA anyway) let alone inherently racist, is indeed total bullshit.
"Spook" is interesting in that was once pretty common as slang for "Black person" very similar to "spade". However, if someone was clearly using "spook" to mean a spy (or using "spade" meaning a kind of shovel) then it is NOT offensive or racist.
"Orientials" used to be an acceptable way of referring to "Asians" but that ended decades ago, now it is regarded as in the same league as "colored person" or (dare I say it) "piccaninny").
"Nigardly" is a special case, as it is not inherently racist HOWEVER the phonetics of the first two syllables make it MOST impolitic to use, in either oral or written communication. Unless you are willing to put up with a LOT of adverse comment (to put it mildly).
Back in the 80's my father worked for BT
He took over a new team and when saying a few words to them he included the phrase "I will call a spade a spade"
Man of afro Caribbean heritage complained - management and union got involved
My father being the type of man he was stood by his guns and told the guy in question he knew what my father meant and no, he would not apologise.
It all went away - nowadays probably would have been sacked......
There really needs to be a push to have community leaders changing minds on this. Otherwise, race relations are going to be set back hugely, should high levels of Covid in ethnic communities be the reason that areas are staying in high tiers even though the rest of the community has been vaxxed. There's going to be a very vocal element saying "fuck 'em, they had their chance, why should my local stay closed?"
Isn't this "community leaders" thing a bit patronising? As if EMs can't think for themselves. You never hear about white people having to be encouraged to do things via their community leaders, much as the Archbishop of Canterbury might like it to be so.
There's a fine line to tread between paronising and insulting, but when a much larger proportion in ethnic communities are refusing the vaccine, then you have to ask why? And who can turn that around?
Because it looks dangerously like they aren't thinking. Just giving in to some wholly undeserved primal fear of science.
You would think Labour would/should be doing a lot better than "neck and neck" given the circumstances?
My impression was that we were expecting clear Tory leads after the Brexit deal and vaccine roll out.
My guess, from talking to people, is that the vaccination thing hasn't really filtered through to the politically uninvolved yet.
Yes, granny is getting her jab. But the scale of what is going on, is curiously below the radar. Yes, it is on the BBC etc, but it doesn't seem to have sunk in.
Well the media aren't giving the government any credit either....today it is still all about how the government have got the programme wrong, they are hiding delivery data, they are distributing it unfairly to different regions....
Unlike during the first wave where we got a chart every night saying look this is how shit the UK is doing vs every other European country on testing, cases, deaths...strangely these graphs on vaccinations, rarely appear.
Instead we are just told Israel doing amazing....far better than the UK.
The Government may be letting itself down here. If it reinstated the daily pressers and stuck up a graph showing international comparisons for vaccination figures, then the relatively strong progress of the UK would be made obvious and would have to be reported.
Graphs showing international comparisons of deaths were plastered all over those briefings during the first lockdown. There's no reason at all why they couldn't repeat the exercise, only this time with something that's actually positive.
The only good reason I can think of for why they aren't doing this is that perhaps they're afraid that showing day after day of strong vaccination stats will encourage the population to go demob happy, and increase public and political opposition to the seemingly endless Covid restrictions. I continue to suspect that ministers, through a combination of caution born of past experience and the scientific advice they're getting, want to leave as much of lockdown in place for as long as they can possibly get away with this time around.
TBH, I had no idea that anyone associated that term with racism. Can you be racist for using a term that you had no idea was racist?
Well in ignorance people can say something very offensive, and treating people doing something offensive in ignorance with those doing it with malice would be wrong.
But it doesn't seem like many people would ever think that term was offensive in the first place.
A brief internet search seems to indicate that there is a retrospective effort now to prove it is, with very little prima facie evidence of its roots in slavery. Suggesting nits were prevalent in slave ships and grits are what poor people in the South eat, hence nitty-gritty came from the slave trade is thin gruel indeed. That nigritique from the French transformed itself into nitty-gritty is a little more convincing, but why is there no printed record of the term contemporaneous to the slave trade itself? Why does it only first appear in the 1930s, and then not in reference to slavery?
I am calling bullshit on this one
The notion that the term "nitty-gritty" is offensive to Black people (in the USA anyway) let alone inherently racist, is indeed total bullshit.
"Spook" is interesting in that was once pretty common as slang for "Black person" very similar to "spade". However, if someone was clearly using "spook" to mean a spy (or using "spade" meaning a kind of shovel) then it is NOT offensive or racist.
"Orientials" used to be an acceptable way of referring to "Asians" but that ended decades ago, now it is regarded as in the same league as "colored person" or (dare I say it) "piccaninny").
"Nigardly" is a special case, as it is not inherently racist HOWEVER the phonetics of the first two syllables make it MOST impolitic to use, in either oral or written communication. Unless you are willing to put up with a LOT of adverse comment (to put it mildly).
iirc there is a Philip Roth novel where an academic loses his career because he refers to a missing student as a 'spook' meaning someone not there.
You would think Labour would/should be doing a lot better than "neck and neck" given the circumstances?
My impression was that we were expecting clear Tory leads after the Brexit deal and vaccine roll out.
My guess, from talking to people, is that the vaccination thing hasn't really filtered through to the politically uninvolved yet.
Yes, granny is getting her jab. But the scale of what is going on, is curiously below the radar. Yes, it is on the BBC etc, but it doesn't seem to have sunk in.
Well the media aren't giving the government any credit either....today it is still all about how the government have got the programme wrong, they are hiding delivery data, they are distributing it unfairly to different regions....
Unlike during the first wave where we got a chart every night saying look this is how shit the UK is doing vs every other European country on testing, cases, deaths...strangely these graphs on vaccinations, rarely appear.
Instead we are just told Israel doing amazing....far better than the UK.
The Government may be letting itself down here. If it reinstated the daily pressers and stuck up a graph showing international comparisons for vaccination figures, then the relatively strong progress of the UK would be made obvious and would have to be reported.
Graphs showing international comparisons of deaths were plastered all over those briefings during the first lockdown. There's no reason at all why they couldn't repeat the exercise, only this time with something that's actually positive.
The only good reason I can think of for why they aren't doing this is that perhaps they're afraid that showing day after day of strong vaccination stats will encourage the population to go demob happy, and increase public and political opposition to the seemingly endless Covid restrictions. I continue to suspect that ministers, through a combination of caution born of past experience and the scientific advice they're getting, want to leave as much of lockdown in place for as long as they can possibly get away with this time around.
Perhaps...I notice that Angela Stratton is now off isolating due to a close contact with COVID....her hiring isn't going very well.
TBH, I had no idea that anyone associated that term with racism. Can you be racist for using a term that you had no idea was racist?
Well in ignorance people can say something very offensive, and treating people doing something offensive in ignorance with those doing it with malice would be wrong.
But it doesn't seem like many people would ever think that term was offensive in the first place.
A brief internet search seems to indicate that there is a retrospective effort now to prove it is, with very little prima facie evidence of its roots in slavery. Suggesting nits were prevalent in slave ships and grits are what poor people in the South eat, hence nitty-gritty came from the slave trade is thin gruel indeed. That nigritique from the French transformed itself into nitty-gritty is a little more convincing, but why is there no printed record of the term contemporaneous to the slave trade itself? Why does it only first appear in the 1930s, and then not in reference to slavery?
I am calling bullshit on this one
The notion that the term "nitty-gritty" is offensive to Black people (in the USA anyway) let alone inherently racist, is indeed total bullshit.
"Spook" is interesting in that was once pretty common as slang for "Black person" very similar to "spade". However, if someone was clearly using "spook" to mean a spy (or using "spade" meaning a kind of shovel) then it is NOT offensive or racist.
"Orientials" used to be an acceptable way of referring to "Asians" but that ended decades ago, now it is regarded as in the same league as "colored person" or (dare I say it) "piccaninny").
"Nigardly" is a special case, as it is not inherently racist HOWEVER the phonetics of the first two syllables make it MOST impolitic to use, in either oral or written communication. Unless you are willing to put up with a LOT of adverse comment (to put it mildly).
Back in the 80's my father worked for BT
He took over a new team and when saying a few words to them he included the phrase "I will call a spade a spade"
Man of afro Caribbean heritage complained - management and union got involved
My father being the type of man he was stood by his guns and told the guy in question he knew what my father meant and no, he would not apologise.
It all went away - nowadays probably would have been sacked......
Apparently 'call a spade a spade' came about from a mistranslation of ancient Greek texts. It should be 'call a canoe a canoe'.
It seems to me, scientifically there doesn’t seem clear consensus. Would it be fair to say it wouldn’t be followed anyway, because such political promise is tied into vaccination targets?
I don't think it is in doubt that the government is taking a calculated risk.
But then, there are no 'no risk' options.
Absolutely. I think a bigger risk is that the vaccines don't work well against these mutant versions (apparently a cluster in Liverpool of a homegrown mutation with similar characteristics to Brazil / SA one) and that undoes a lot of all the good work done getting millions jabbed quickly.
Apparently with the Scouse variant the spike proteins have mutated to resemble a curly perm.
But it can be easily treated by (yes, you've guessed it) shouting "Calm down! Calm down!" at it.....
TBH, I had no idea that anyone associated that term with racism. Can you be racist for using a term that you had no idea was racist?
Don't use the word "spook" on American chat-rooms unless wearing flame-retardent clothing.
Really? I thought it meant spy over there too, as in a CIA spook. Though IIRC the show Spooks was renamed to MI-5 for the american market.
Another one to be careful of is "thug" - through usage it has become associated, in the US, with er.... pejorative, and inaccurate labelling of young black gentlemen.
Wasn't that originally a somewhat 'eccentric' quasi religious group in India? Although I suppose that's just as bad!
Mr Cole, I am sad to say that your history is lagging latest scholarly interpretation. The Thugs were invented by the colonialist Brits as a means of suppression. They did not exist.
Nonsense! The original Thugs were public-spirited progressive indigenous elements dedicated (albeit by rather drastic methods) to solving two problems at once: over-population AND traffic congestion.
For you to try to appropriate credit to the British, is itself evidence of your colonialist, jingo mentality!
12 months ago I was attending a talk by Sir David Spiegelhalter and in the Q&A afterwards he merrily pointed out how estimates of deaths from previous outbreaks like BSE/swine flu/bird flu etc. were order of magnitude greater than what had occured and therefore not to worry our heads about this outbreak of flu in China.
Ha ... I have a high opinion of David Spiegelhalter, and of course his history is correct (tbf, he is a professional statistician not an epidemiologist).
COVID is an exceptionally well-designed virus ... it has wrought more havoc than anyone could have ever imagined.
Except COVID is not designed at all, it is evolved.
It has been designed by evolution
I used the word mischievously ... because if you were going to design a killer vaccine, you might well have come up with something quite like COVID
Sorry, can't let you wriggle free on this one. Evolution and design have no overlap. In the laboratory, we can use directed evolution to select top performers against design parameters, rather than having to design them. But it is still not design.
Intent is implicit in design. There is absolutely no intent in evolution.
Perhaps I can phrase my underlying question thus.
Suppose an evil biotechnologist wanted to improve on COVID & make it more destructive?
What would the e.b. do to make it worse?
I am not one for conspiracy theories, but it is not obvious to me that this virus was not engineered.
Sure, it could have come naturally from bats & that is perhaps a much more likely explanation. But, an escape from a lab does not look to me it can be immediately ruled out. It is certainly a curious coincidence that Wuhan houses an Institute of Virology.
After all, we do know viruses can & do escape from labs (Birmingham smallpox).
If an evil microbiologist wanted to "design" a worse virus, they would increase the proportion of people who get bad syptoms, and probably lengthen the time before symptoms kick in, making things like track-and-trace even less effective than they are with Corona.
They would also make the age profile younger, so that relatively more people of working age die, but leaving the oldies less affected, as they are already an "economic burden on society"
Israel began administering Covid-19 vaccines to teenagers Saturday as it pushed ahead with its inoculation drive, with 30 percent of the population now having received the first dose, health officials said.
Many thanks. An awful lot of what we "know" about WWI comes down to Alan Clark's book, The Donkeys. Reading Castastrophe, by Max Hastings, dispelled a lot of the wrong ideas I had about WWI.
Few scholars would take The Donkeys seriously, but OTOH, I do think his Barbarossa has really stood the test of time. It lacked the benefit of much in the way of Russian primary sources, (it was written in the 1960's) and has some odd gaps (little about the Siege of Leningrad, and only two chapters covering the year after Kursk) but I think his judgements about the 1941-43 period are very sound.
He is unsparing in his criticisms of the German High Command, and implicates them (and not just the SS) in atrocities, and offers justified praise for the fighting qualities of the Red Army, all of which would have gone against the grain of popular history in the 1960's.
What shocks me, Sean, is how many people seem to take Blackadder (a comedy show) seriously.
Catastrophe by Max Hastings is excellent. And very readable.
We didn't have much of a choice once Belgium was invaded.
The Germans would have won. Once that had happened they'd have dominated the Channel and the North sea, and our supply lines, and our word as an ally and upholder of the international order would never have been taken seriously again - risking our long-term isolation and a supplicant rather than a world power.
We had to fight.
Yes. Imagine a Imperial Germany that had won 1870 and 1914. They believed in War. War is Good.. War is God.
Seriously, read some the 1900s stuff from there... crazy to us. Imagine that affirmed by a quick victory in WWI.
They were planning on the next war while fighting in 1914 - they wanted to be in a good position when the next one kicked off.
So, imagine, without the destruction of 1914-18 - how many years before the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute gets it's uranium machine up and running?
Probably just in time for the next party.....
WWI was terrible, so we like to think we could have avoided it instead.
You would think Labour would/should be doing a lot better than "neck and neck" given the circumstances?
My impression was that we were expecting clear Tory leads after the Brexit deal and vaccine roll out.
My guess, from talking to people, is that the vaccination thing hasn't really filtered through to the politically uninvolved yet.
Yes, granny is getting her jab. But the scale of what is going on, is curiously below the radar. Yes, it is on the BBC etc, but it doesn't seem to have sunk in.
Well the media aren't giving the government any credit either....today it is still all about how the government have got the programme wrong, they are hiding delivery data, they are distributing it unfairly to different regions....
Unlike during the first wave where we got a chart every night saying look this is how shit the UK is doing vs every other European country on testing, cases, deaths...strangely these graphs on vaccinations, rarely appear.
Instead we are just told Israel doing amazing....far better than the UK.
The British media obviously see it as their sacred duty to magnify our failures and scorn our successes. Because Brexit, or Empire, or Tories, or something...
The Greens policies have been successfully and comprehensively absorbed into both main parties platforms, and are being pursued as far and as fast as is economically and socially practicable - with constant challenging to do better. That just leaves a lunatic XR fringe; there's no space for them.
There's definitely a space for a traditional liberal party (something I think we've lost) but the Lib Dems seem to be more interested in being a very posh, pompous and obsessive Rejoin party instead.
I think the LDs are in a transitional process from what they were to what they will be. Parties do this periodically - the LD party I joined and worked for died in the fire of the Coalition. After 2015, the party had no time to re-establish a new liberal identity before the EU Referendum came along and affected it as it did all parties.
I see some encouraging signs it is moving away from the obsession with the EU and Davey is using the experience he gained in the Coalition to position the Party as an environmentally-sensitive free-market alternative and that's not bad ground to be on though of course the eternal populist Johnson will also seek to be on that ground as well.
I'd like the LDs to be the fiscally conservative option in opposition to the two big spending parties - the Liberal Unionists and the Social Democrats. The cost of fighting Covid may have to be some of the Government's vanity projects though the decision to spend money on improving rail links is welcome.
Otherwise it's back to the pavement politics for the LDs and the County Council elections in particular provide some opportunities for the LDs and other parties to crop some of the Conservative seats won at the height of Theresa May's popularity (those words still don't sit well together).
You would think Labour would/should be doing a lot better than "neck and neck" given the circumstances?
My impression was that we were expecting clear Tory leads after the Brexit deal and vaccine roll out.
My guess, from talking to people, is that the vaccination thing hasn't really filtered through to the politically uninvolved yet.
Yes, granny is getting her jab. But the scale of what is going on, is curiously below the radar. Yes, it is on the BBC etc, but it doesn't seem to have sunk in.
Well the media aren't giving the government any credit either....today it is still all about how the government have got the programme wrong, they are hiding delivery data, they are distributing it unfairly to different regions....
Unlike during the first wave where we got a chart every night saying look this is how shit the UK is doing vs every other European country on testing, cases, deaths...strangely these graphs on vaccinations, rarely appear.
Instead we are just told Israel doing amazing....far better than the UK.
The British media obviously see it as their sacred duty to magnify our failures and scorn our successes. Because Brexit, or Empire, or Tories, or something...
Yes, if Starmer/Labour were rolling out an identical programme to the government national and international media would be holding the UK up as the example to follow for large countries.
I'd missed this - is it appropriate for an "expert" to block other experts?
What the hell happened to scientists challenging and arguing with each other? It’s the whole basis of science - or at least it was, before science started to become political.
Professor Sridhar is, insofar as I'm aware, an exceptional case. Overt political bias does not seem to be a feature of the epidemiological community - whether amongst those in favour of the zero Covid strategy or otherwise.
She looks OK
She is very attractive. Sadly she's also become involved politically with the current Scottish Government to a ludicrous extent.
Is that different from the Westminster Tory "Scientists".
The British media obviously see it as their sacred duty to magnify our failures and scorn our successes. Because Brexit, or Empire, or Tories, or something...
The only thing more boring than news stories criticising the Government are news stories praising the Government.
Would you prefer there was no scrutiny and the State media blindly put out whatever propaganda the Government provided?
I'd missed this - is it appropriate for an "expert" to block other experts?
What the hell happened to scientists challenging and arguing with each other? It’s the whole basis of science - or at least it was, before science started to become political.
Professor Sridhar is, insofar as I'm aware, an exceptional case. Overt political bias does not seem to be a feature of the epidemiological community - whether amongst those in favour of the zero Covid strategy or otherwise.
She looks OK
She is very attractive. Sadly she's also become involved politically with the current Scottish Government to a ludicrous extent.
Is that different from the Westminster Tory "Scientists".
Not if they cross the line into political activity or closeness, no.
The Greens policies have been successfully and comprehensively absorbed into both main parties platforms, and are being pursued as far and as fast as is economically and socially practicable - with constant challenging to do better. That just leaves a lunatic XR fringe; there's no space for them.
There's definitely a space for a traditional liberal party (something I think we've lost) but the Lib Dems seem to be more interested in being a very posh, pompous and obsessive Rejoin party instead.
I think the LDs are in a transitional process from what they were to what they will be. Parties do this periodically - the LD party I joined and worked for died in the fire of the Coalition. After 2015, the party had no time to re-establish a new liberal identity before the EU Referendum came along and affected it as it did all parties.
I see some encouraging signs it is moving away from the obsession with the EU and Davey is using the experience he gained in the Coalition to position the Party as an environmentally-sensitive free-market alternative and that's not bad ground to be on though of course the eternal populist Johnson will also seek to be on that ground as well.
I'd like the LDs to be the fiscally conservative option in opposition to the two big spending parties - the Liberal Unionists and the Social Democrats. The cost of fighting Covid may have to be some of the Government's vanity projects though the decision to spend money on improving rail links is welcome.
Otherwise it's back to the pavement politics for the LDs and the County Council elections in particular provide some opportunities for the LDs and other parties to crop some of the Conservative seats won at the height of Theresa May's popularity (those words still don't sit well together).
I think the liberals need to say much more about the philosophy of liberalism, why it matters and what it stands for.
Sure, it might not get them into Government anytime soon. But when you're on 3-4% polls none of that matters.
What does matter is changing the terms of the debate. Long game.
The British media obviously see it as their sacred duty to magnify our failures and scorn our successes. Because Brexit, or Empire, or Tories, or something...
The only thing more boring than news stories criticising the Government are news stories praising the Government.
Would you prefer there was no scrutiny and the State media blindly put out whatever propaganda the Government provided?
I think most would settle for a media that knew what they were talking about when it came to the pandemic.
On merging the Greens and Lib Dems - why would the Greens want to attach themselves to a turd that is in the process of being flushed by the voters. It seems like an idea thought up by a Lib Dem strategist to stay relevant after Brexit.
The British media obviously see it as their sacred duty to magnify our failures and scorn our successes. Because Brexit, or Empire, or Tories, or something...
The only thing more boring than news stories criticising the Government are news stories praising the Government.
Would you prefer there was no scrutiny and the State media blindly put out whatever propaganda the Government provided?
Some balance perhaps...UK doing bloody brilliant on vaccination roll out, nearly 500k / day, which far better than basically every other country in the world. However...they still done shit with x, y, z....its not hard.
Not only it is not giving credit to the UK government, it isn't giving any credit to all the 1000s of people involved in this roll-out.
You would think Labour would/should be doing a lot better than "neck and neck" given the circumstances?
My impression was that we were expecting clear Tory leads after the Brexit deal and vaccine roll out.
My guess, from talking to people, is that the vaccination thing hasn't really filtered through to the politically uninvolved yet.
Yes, granny is getting her jab. But the scale of what is going on, is curiously below the radar. Yes, it is on the BBC etc, but it doesn't seem to have sunk in.
Well the media aren't giving the government any credit either....today it is still all about how the government have got the programme wrong, they are hiding delivery data, they are distributing it unfairly to different regions....
Unlike during the first wave where we got a chart every night saying look this is how shit the UK is doing vs every other European country on testing, cases, deaths...strangely these graphs on vaccinations, rarely appear.
Instead we are just told Israel doing amazing....far better than the UK.
The British media obviously see it as their sacred duty to magnify our failures and scorn our successes. Because Brexit, or Empire, or Tories, or something...
It seems to me, scientifically there doesn’t seem clear consensus. Would it be fair to say it wouldn’t be followed anyway, because such political promise is tied into vaccination targets?
I don't think it is in doubt that the government is taking a calculated risk.
I hope they switch down the gap for Pfizer. That it might look "unfair" to Oxford receipients should be about priority zillion in the reasons they aren't doing so. It's a new type of vaccine.
Many thanks. An awful lot of what we "know" about WWI comes down to Alan Clark's book, The Donkeys. Reading Castastrophe, by Max Hastings, dispelled a lot of the wrong ideas I had about WWI.
Few scholars would take The Donkeys seriously, but OTOH, I do think his Barbarossa has really stood the test of time. It lacked the benefit of much in the way of Russian primary sources, (it was written in the 1960's) and has some odd gaps (little about the Siege of Leningrad, and only two chapters covering the year after Kursk) but I think his judgements about the 1941-43 period are very sound.
He is unsparing in his criticisms of the German High Command, and implicates them (and not just the SS) in atrocities, and offers justified praise for the fighting qualities of the Red Army, all of which would have gone against the grain of popular history in the 1960's.
What shocks me, Sean, is how many people seem to take Blackadder (a comedy show) seriously.
Catastrophe by Max Hastings is excellent. And very readable.
We didn't have much of a choice once Belgium was invaded.
The Germans would have won. Once that had happened they'd have dominated the Channel and the North sea, and our supply lines, and our word as an ally and upholder of the international order would never have been taken seriously again - risking our long-term isolation and a supplicant rather than a world power.
We had to fight.
Yes. Imagine a Imperial Germany that had won 1870 and 1914. They believed in War. War is Good.. War is God.
Seriously, read some the 1900s stuff from there... crazy to us. Imagine that affirmed by a quick victory in WWI.
They were planning on the next war while fighting in 1914 - they wanted to be in a good position when the next one kicked off.
So, imagine, without the destruction of 1914-18 - how many years before the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute gets it's uranium machine up and running?
Probably just in time for the next party.....
WWI was terrible, so we like to think we could have avoided it instead.
We couldn't have.
It is worth thinking about this - if Germany hadn't invaded Belgium, the cabinet would have split, and probably we wouldn't have entered the war.
The Germans were told that if they invaded Belgium, we would honour the guarantee, but in diplomatic language. Which the war hawks in Berlin merrily ignored.
A What-if - supposing that Gray, simply told the German Ambassador "If you invade Belgium, we will go to war."?
There really needs to be a push to have community leaders changing minds on this. Otherwise, race relations are going to be set back hugely, should high levels of Covid in ethnic communities be the reason that areas are staying in high tiers even though the rest of the community has been vaxxed. There's going to be a very vocal element saying "fuck 'em, they had their chance, why should my local stay closed?"
Isn't this "community leaders" thing a bit patronising? As if EMs can't think for themselves. You never hear about white people having to be encouraged to do things via their community leaders, much as the Archbishop of Canterbury might like it to be so.
There's a fine line to tread between paronising and insulting, but when a much larger proportion in ethnic communities are refusing the vaccine, then you have to ask why? And who can turn that around?
Because it looks dangerously like they aren't thinking. Just giving in to some wholly undeserved primal fear of science.
You are slipping dangerously between two different lines.
What are their objections to vaccination and how can those be addressed? That is asking why and who can turn it around. That is not the same as blaming unthinking prejudice that will magically evaporate when they see Diane Abbott with a needle in her arm.
I'm reading the Battle of Singapore at present, which is a campaign that's always fascinated me, particularly as we outnumbered the Japanese so significantly.
At the end of the day Malaya was bottom of the list for men and materials, as we were fighting for survival in Europe, so it got green troops and no tanks, modern fighter or bomber aircraft, or aircraft carriers, few ships, and had to make do with men, armoured cars, field artillery and anti-tank rifles. And a handful of obsolescent aircraft.
It could never have held out forever given that but the reason it fell in 2 months (rather than 5-6 months, with at least the prospect of a stalemate) is due to immense racial prejudice against the Japanese, myth-making about "Fortress Singapore", which was just wishful thinking, and poor officers.
.
He'd have made a good staff officer, but very senior command is far more about character. It's like the difference between a good psephological statistician and a successful gambler.
Thanks - interesting. The ability to recognise that one's a good staff officer rather than a good leader is really rare - nearly everyone wants to get to the top, and then not infrequently regrets it. I've come to see in civilian management that I'm a good, reliable chief of staff but not really a creative leader, but it took a long while before I decided that that's actually OK, and it's better to do a less senior job well than to struggle at the top. Perhaps something to be imparted gently in career advice. just to keep in mind as one discovers one's limits.
In the Army, of course, it's a gross failure at the top if they don't recognise it for you and lose a war because of routine promotion. Does it give Percival's background and how he came to get that role?
Interestingly, Percival had a civilian career first and joined the army quite late in life. He was then considered something of a high flyer, and was promoted largely on merit as opposed to the old school tie like a lot of his compatriots. He was certainly brave, and won the military cross in WW1. However, most of his work was in staff or intelligence roles, where he excelled, rather than senior command of troops in combat.
I know what you mean. One still fears being deemed as a failure unless you reach the top of your business or profession, but it's not for everyone.
Why would it be?
Putting a political/intelligance officer in charge of a large army is unlikely to end well, since the skilsets are so different. Typically, as the former, you're working on your own, or else in charge of small numbers of people, and taking decisions very informally, and often acting well above your pay grade. In the 19th century, lots of Russian and British politicals were people whose formal rank was no higher than captain.
I think the liberals need to say much more about the philosophy of liberalism, why it matters and what it stands for.
Sure, it might not get them into Government anytime soon. But when you're on 3-4% polls none of that matters.
What does matter is changing the terms of the debate. Long game.
Oddly enough, that was the Liberal position in the Butskellite years of the 1950s when the Party espoused the classical liberal free market positions but was on the margins.
I don't worry about 5-6% in polls to be honest - I was there in 1988-89 when things were much worse. I could certainly 12-15% next time but you're right in saying the message needs to be clearer and more distinctive.
Apparently the nitty gritty thing, it was one sodding person complaining....and got escalated all the way up the chain, because this person wouldn't accept that there wasn't an issue here.
Yep. Non story like so many of these things. It's become my default setting when I see them. I know if I dived into the detail it would turn out to be much ado about nothing so I save myself the time and just assume that.
"The UK has so far secured access to 367 million doses from 7 vaccine developers across 4 different formats (viral vectored vaccines, recombinant protein-based adjuvanted vaccines, whole inactivated viral vaccines and mRNA vaccines)"
Many thanks. An awful lot of what we "know" about WWI comes down to Alan Clark's book, The Donkeys. Reading Castastrophe, by Max Hastings, dispelled a lot of the wrong ideas I had about WWI.
Few scholars would take The Donkeys seriously, but OTOH, I do think his Barbarossa has really stood the test of time. It lacked the benefit of much in the way of Russian primary sources, (it was written in the 1960's) and has some odd gaps (little about the Siege of Leningrad, and only two chapters covering the year after Kursk) but I think his judgements about the 1941-43 period are very sound.
He is unsparing in his criticisms of the German High Command, and implicates them (and not just the SS) in atrocities, and offers justified praise for the fighting qualities of the Red Army, all of which would have gone against the grain of popular history in the 1960's.
What shocks me, Sean, is how many people seem to take Blackadder (a comedy show) seriously.
Catastrophe by Max Hastings is excellent. And very readable.
We didn't have much of a choice once Belgium was invaded.
The Germans would have won. Once that had happened they'd have dominated the Channel and the North sea, and our supply lines, and our word as an ally and upholder of the international order would never have been taken seriously again - risking our long-term isolation and a supplicant rather than a world power.
We had to fight.
Yes. Imagine a Imperial Germany that had won 1870 and 1914. They believed in War. War is Good.. War is God.
Seriously, read some the 1900s stuff from there... crazy to us. Imagine that affirmed by a quick victory in WWI.
They were planning on the next war while fighting in 1914 - they wanted to be in a good position when the next one kicked off.
So, imagine, without the destruction of 1914-18 - how many years before the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute gets it's uranium machine up and running?
Probably just in time for the next party.....
WWI was terrible, so we like to think we could have avoided it instead.
We couldn't have.
It is worth thinking about this - if Germany hadn't invaded Belgium, the cabinet would have split, and probably we wouldn't have entered the war.
The Germans were told that if they invaded Belgium, we would honour the guarantee, but in diplomatic language. Which the war hawks in Berlin merrily ignored.
A What-if - supposing that Gray, simply told the German Ambassador "If you invade Belgium, we will go to war."?
"The UK has so far secured access to 367 million doses from 7 vaccine developers across 4 different formats (viral vectored vaccines, recombinant protein-based adjuvanted vaccines, whole inactivated viral vaccines and mRNA vaccines)"
"The UK has so far secured access to 367 million doses from 7 vaccine developers across 4 different formats (viral vectored vaccines, recombinant protein-based adjuvanted vaccines, whole inactivated viral vaccines and mRNA vaccines)"
Many thanks. An awful lot of what we "know" about WWI comes down to Alan Clark's book, The Donkeys. Reading Castastrophe, by Max Hastings, dispelled a lot of the wrong ideas I had about WWI.
Few scholars would take The Donkeys seriously, but OTOH, I do think his Barbarossa has really stood the test of time. It lacked the benefit of much in the way of Russian primary sources, (it was written in the 1960's) and has some odd gaps (little about the Siege of Leningrad, and only two chapters covering the year after Kursk) but I think his judgements about the 1941-43 period are very sound.
He is unsparing in his criticisms of the German High Command, and implicates them (and not just the SS) in atrocities, and offers justified praise for the fighting qualities of the Red Army, all of which would have gone against the grain of popular history in the 1960's.
What shocks me, Sean, is how many people seem to take Blackadder (a comedy show) seriously.
Catastrophe by Max Hastings is excellent. And very readable.
We didn't have much of a choice once Belgium was invaded.
The Germans would have won. Once that had happened they'd have dominated the Channel and the North sea, and our supply lines, and our word as an ally and upholder of the international order would never have been taken seriously again - risking our long-term isolation and a supplicant rather than a world power.
We had to fight.
I love Blackadder, but no one should take it seriously as history.
Far from feasting in chateaux behind the lines, in WWI, 78 British and Empire generals were killed, and 146 injured or taken prisoner.
I think the liberals need to say much more about the philosophy of liberalism, why it matters and what it stands for.
Sure, it might not get them into Government anytime soon. But when you're on 3-4% polls none of that matters.
What does matter is changing the terms of the debate. Long game.
Oddly enough, that was the Liberal position in the Butskellite years of the 1950s when the Party espoused the classical liberal free market positions but was on the margins.
I don't worry about 5-6% in polls to be honest - I was there in 1988-89 when things were much worse. I could certainly 12-15% next time but you're right in saying the message needs to be clearer and more distinctive.
Like the Tories, I have no idea what the Lib Dems stand for other than reopening the Brexit debate. It's not a party that I could vote for, and while my vote was probably never in play, it does open up the issue that I, as someone who follows politics fairly closely, have got no idea what the Lib Dems want the country to look like in the future. If I can't figure it out, what hope does the average punter have?
I think the liberals need to say much more about the philosophy of liberalism, why it matters and what it stands for.
Sure, it might not get them into Government anytime soon. But when you're on 3-4% polls none of that matters.
What does matter is changing the terms of the debate. Long game.
Oddly enough, that was the Liberal position in the Butskellite years of the 1950s when the Party espoused the classical liberal free market positions but was on the margins.
I don't worry about 5-6% in polls to be honest - I was there in 1988-89 when things were much worse. I could certainly 12-15% next time but you're right in saying the message needs to be clearer and more distinctive.
In that respect talk of merging with the Greens seems like defeatism, given how distinct the Greens are. Liberals have clung on in hard decades before, and will need to again to give themselves a chance.
I think the liberals need to say much more about the philosophy of liberalism, why it matters and what it stands for.
Sure, it might not get them into Government anytime soon. But when you're on 3-4% polls none of that matters.
What does matter is changing the terms of the debate. Long game.
Oddly enough, that was the Liberal position in the Butskellite years of the 1950s when the Party espoused the classical liberal free market positions but was on the margins.
I don't worry about 5-6% in polls to be honest - I was there in 1988-89 when things were much worse. I could certainly 12-15% next time but you're right in saying the message needs to be clearer and more distinctive.
Like the Tories, I have no idea what the Lib Dems stand for other than reopening the Brexit debate. It's not a party that I could vote for, and while my vote was probably never in play, it does open up the issue that I, as someone who follows politics fairly closely, have got no idea what the Lib Dems want the country to look like in the future. If I can't figure it out, what hope does the average punter have?
I remember when they had some very distinctive policies such as local income tax to replace council tax. The last GE all I remember was STOP BREXIT and getting in a total muddle over trans-genders issues.
So it is either not as worrying as Boris made out, or far more worrying....bloody lying Boris and the eggheads....and Newsnight last night were outraged that they didn't consider the possibly it was more dangerous weeks ago and take action (before any scientific research was available).
There really needs to be a push to have community leaders changing minds on this. Otherwise, race relations are going to be set back hugely, should high levels of Covid in ethnic communities be the reason that areas are staying in high tiers even though the rest of the community has been vaxxed. There's going to be a very vocal element saying "fuck 'em, they had their chance, why should my local stay closed?"
Isn't this "community leaders" thing a bit patronising? As if EMs can't think for themselves. You never hear about white people having to be encouraged to do things via their community leaders, much as the Archbishop of Canterbury might like it to be so.
There's a fine line to tread between paronising and insulting, but when a much larger proportion in ethnic communities are refusing the vaccine, then you have to ask why? And who can turn that around?
Because it looks dangerously like they aren't thinking. Just giving in to some wholly undeserved primal fear of science.
You are slipping dangerously between two different lines.
What are their objections to vaccination and how can those be addressed? That is asking why and who can turn it around. That is not the same as blaming unthinking prejudice that will magically evaporate when they see Diane Abbott with a needle in her arm.
There does not appear to be a rational explanation for the refusal of many to have the vaccine. The numbers in the UK as a whole have now gone to 80% saying they will have the vaccine, but barely 50% in certain communitites, especially the south Asian community. It's a very real thing.
There needs to be an urgent understanding of why - and who can turn this around. I'm thinking Boris on the telly saying "get the jab" is going to make fuck all difference to them. But something has to. Or else you are going to be seeing stubbornly high infection levels in those communities into the summer, holding back the wider communities going from Tier 4 to Tier 3 or even 2. And when people start blaming one section of the community for their own Covid restrictions, that is a recipe for disaster.
So what is being done to prevent that, is what I am asking.
It looks like we have turned the corner on people in hospital. However, those on mechanical ventilation still going up slightly.
The lockdown is working, but unlike November we need to stick with it until cases have been brought all the way down.
Yes, reducing the numbers is a good thing, but the absolute numbers are still more important. The number of people getting infected in the UK is still around the same level as it was at Christmas, which was everyone thought shockingly high.
I'm reading the Battle of Singapore at present, which is a campaign that's always fascinated me, particularly as we outnumbered the Japanese so significantly.
At the end of the day Malaya was bottom of the list for men and materials, as we were fighting for survival in Europe, so it got green troops and no tanks, modern fighter or bomber aircraft, or aircraft carriers, few ships, and had to make do with men, armoured cars, field artillery and anti-tank rifles. And a handful of obsolescent aircraft.
It could never have held out forever given that but the reason it fell in 2 months (rather than 5-6 months, with at least the prospect of a stalemate) is due to immense racial prejudice against the Japanese, myth-making about "Fortress Singapore", which was just wishful thinking, and poor officers.
.
He'd have made a good staff officer, but very senior command is far more about character. It's like the difference between a good psephological statistician and a successful gambler.
Thanks - interesting. The ability to recognise that one's a good staff officer rather than a good leader is really rare - nearly everyone wants to get to the top, and then not infrequently regrets it. I've come to see in civilian management that I'm a good, reliable chief of staff but not really a creative leader, but it took a long while before I decided that that's actually OK, and it's better to do a less senior job well than to struggle at the top. Perhaps something to be imparted gently in career advice. just to keep in mind as one discovers one's limits.
In the Army, of course, it's a gross failure at the top if they don't recognise it for you and lose a war because of routine promotion. Does it give Percival's background and how he came to get that role?
Interestingly, Percival had a civilian career first and joined the army quite late in life. He was then considered something of a high flyer, and was promoted largely on merit as opposed to the old school tie like a lot of his compatriots. He was certainly brave, and won the military cross in WW1. However, most of his work was in staff or intelligence roles, where he excelled, rather than senior command of troops in combat.
I know what you mean. One still fears being deemed as a failure unless you reach the top of your business or profession, but it's not for everyone.
Why would it be?
Putting a political/intelligance officer in charge of a large army is unlikely to end well, since the skilsets are so different. Typically, as the former, you're working on your own, or else in charge of small numbers of people, and taking decisions very informally, and often acting well above your pay grade. In the 19th century, lots of Russian and British politicals were people whose formal rank was no higher than captain.
There is a theory that America did so well in ww2 because it would rapidly replace generals but without consigning them to the scrapheap. General X is bogged down there so send in General Y and let X try his luck in a different theatre, rather than recall X to inspect jeeps at the factory. We see this in business or in football where managers or players succeed at one club but not another.
Some balance perhaps...UK doing bloody brilliant on vaccination roll out, nearly 500k / day, which far better than basically every other country in the world. However...they still done shit with x, y, z....its not hard.
Not only it is not giving credit to the UK government, it isn't giving any credit to all the 1000s of people involved in this roll-out.
Balance is, as ever, in the eye of the beholder and as I don't watch any news bulletins I can't really comment.
I do think those involved are getting the credit - cheap jibes about Taunton Racecourse notwithstanding.
I'm not supportive of the vaccination programme for the same reasons the BMA has doubts. We are not following the recommendations of the vaccine manufacturers regarding the timing of a second dose and IF we are currently not providing sufficient immunity through the single dose, trumpeting the numbers vaccinated will be meaningless.
I'm yet to be convinced providing the second dose 12 weeks rather than 3 weeks after the first dose is based on sound scientific methodology and, as I say, I'm not the only one who has doubts.
I hope I'm wrong - we'll see. There are positive signs on both new positive tests and hospitalisations but whether these are directly attributable to the vaccination programme or to the lockdown restrictions I don't know.
I think the liberals need to say much more about the philosophy of liberalism, why it matters and what it stands for.
Sure, it might not get them into Government anytime soon. But when you're on 3-4% polls none of that matters.
What does matter is changing the terms of the debate. Long game.
Oddly enough, that was the Liberal position in the Butskellite years of the 1950s when the Party espoused the classical liberal free market positions but was on the margins.
I don't worry about 5-6% in polls to be honest - I was there in 1988-89 when things were much worse. I could certainly 12-15% next time but you're right in saying the message needs to be clearer and more distinctive.
Like the Tories, I have no idea what the Lib Dems stand for other than reopening the Brexit debate. It's not a party that I could vote for, and while my vote was probably never in play, it does open up the issue that I, as someone who follows politics fairly closely, have got no idea what the Lib Dems want the country to look like in the future. If I can't figure it out, what hope does the average punter have?
I remember when they had some very distinctive policies such as local income tax to replace council tax. The last GE all I remember was STOP BREXIT and getting in a total muddle over trans-genders issues.
It was homosexuality the election before that.
I have suggested before that there is a very real role for the LibDems as a party of local Government, whilst having little aspiration to govern nationally. They aren't going to win a majorty of seats. They got kicked in the nuts when they were part of a coalition. Westminster is a dead end. What is the point of having a great success that takes them to 18 MPs?
Win councils. Govern well. Show what local government under the LibDem s can deliver that national government can't or won't. EU Parliament seats have gone. Westminster seats are a total distraction. Play to your strengths, guys.
"The UK has so far secured access to 367 million doses from 7 vaccine developers across 4 different formats (viral vectored vaccines, recombinant protein-based adjuvanted vaccines, whole inactivated viral vaccines and mRNA vaccines)"
I'm reading the Battle of Singapore at present, which is a campaign that's always fascinated me, particularly as we outnumbered the Japanese so significantly.
At the end of the day Malaya was bottom of the list for men and materials, as we were fighting for survival in Europe, so it got green troops and no tanks, modern fighter or bomber aircraft, or aircraft carriers, few ships, and had to make do with men, armoured cars, field artillery and anti-tank rifles. And a handful of obsolescent aircraft.
It could never have held out forever given that but the reason it fell in 2 months (rather than 5-6 months, with at least the prospect of a stalemate) is due to immense racial prejudice against the Japanese, myth-making about "Fortress Singapore", which was just wishful thinking, and poor officers.
.
He'd have made a good staff officer, but very senior command is far more about character. It's like the difference between a good psephological statistician and a successful gambler.
Thanks - interesting. The ability to recognise that one's a good staff officer rather than a good leader is really rare - nearly everyone wants to get to the top, and then not infrequently regrets it. I've come to see in civilian management that I'm a good, reliable chief of staff but not really a creative leader, but it took a long while before I decided that that's actually OK, and it's better to do a less senior job well than to struggle at the top. Perhaps something to be imparted gently in career advice. just to keep in mind as one discovers one's limits.
In the Army, of course, it's a gross failure at the top if they don't recognise it for you and lose a war because of routine promotion. Does it give Percival's background and how he came to get that role?
Interestingly, Percival had a civilian career first and joined the army quite late in life. He was then considered something of a high flyer, and was promoted largely on merit as opposed to the old school tie like a lot of his compatriots. He was certainly brave, and won the military cross in WW1. However, most of his work was in staff or intelligence roles, where he excelled, rather than senior command of troops in combat.
I know what you mean. One still fears being deemed as a failure unless you reach the top of your business or profession, but it's not for everyone.
Why would it be?
Putting a political/intelligance officer in charge of a large army is unlikely to end well, since the skilsets are so different. Typically, as the former, you're working on your own, or else in charge of small numbers of people, and taking decisions very informally, and often acting well above your pay grade. In the 19th century, lots of Russian and British politicals were people whose formal rank was no higher than captain.
Wikipedia etc suggests that Percival wasn't overly impressed with the troops he had to command, or the general arrangements for defence of Malaya and Singapore.
Many thanks. An awful lot of what we "know" about WWI comes down to Alan Clark's book, The Donkeys. Reading Castastrophe, by Max Hastings, dispelled a lot of the wrong ideas I had about WWI.
Few scholars would take The Donkeys seriously, but OTOH, I do think his Barbarossa has really stood the test of time. It lacked the benefit of much in the way of Russian primary sources, (it was written in the 1960's) and has some odd gaps (little about the Siege of Leningrad, and only two chapters covering the year after Kursk) but I think his judgements about the 1941-43 period are very sound.
He is unsparing in his criticisms of the German High Command, and implicates them (and not just the SS) in atrocities, and offers justified praise for the fighting qualities of the Red Army, all of which would have gone against the grain of popular history in the 1960's.
What shocks me, Sean, is how many people seem to take Blackadder (a comedy show) seriously.
Catastrophe by Max Hastings is excellent. And very readable.
We didn't have much of a choice once Belgium was invaded.
The Germans would have won. Once that had happened they'd have dominated the Channel and the North sea, and our supply lines, and our word as an ally and upholder of the international order would never have been taken seriously again - risking our long-term isolation and a supplicant rather than a world power.
We had to fight.
I love Blackadder, but no one should take it seriously as history.
Far from feasting in chateaux behind the lines, in WWI, 78 British and Empire generals were killed, and 146 injured or taken prisoner.
Yes but that is mainly from the start of the war. By the end, generals had stopped visiting the front lines in full dress uniform. As any viewer of Blackadder will know, the character with the highest casualty risk was Lieutenant George, the subaltern straight out of public school leading the men over the top with a pistol in his hand and whistle to his lips.
If we can get through groups 1 to 9 in 12 weeks, we can then go back round the loop and give them all their second jab asap before moving on to the under 50s.
Disclosure: I'm in Group 9.
Actually, this makes me ask the question: Which has more benefit - giving an 80 year old their second jab or giving a 49 year old their first?
Some balance perhaps...UK doing bloody brilliant on vaccination roll out, nearly 500k / day, which far better than basically every other country in the world. However...they still done shit with x, y, z....its not hard.
Not only it is not giving credit to the UK government, it isn't giving any credit to all the 1000s of people involved in this roll-out.
Balance is, as ever, in the eye of the beholder and as I don't watch any news bulletins I can't really comment.
I do think those involved are getting the credit - cheap jibes about Taunton Racecourse notwithstanding.
I'm not supportive of the vaccination programme for the same reasons the BMA has doubts. We are not following the recommendations of the vaccine manufacturers regarding the timing of a second dose and IF we are currently not providing sufficient immunity through the single dose, trumpeting the numbers vaccinated will be meaningless.
I'm yet to be convinced providing the second dose 12 weeks rather than 3 weeks after the first dose is based on sound scientific methodology and, as I say, I'm not the only one who has doubts.
I hope I'm wrong - we'll see. There are positive signs on both new positive tests and hospitalisations but whether these are directly attributable to the vaccination programme or to the lockdown restrictions I don't know.
It wouldn't be meaningless to have less than the ideal level of protection for more millions. It wouldn't be a mistake to have some doubts, everyone acknowledges the risk taken in that calculation, but it wouldn't be meaningless activity.
Many thanks. An awful lot of what we "know" about WWI comes down to Alan Clark's book, The Donkeys. Reading Castastrophe, by Max Hastings, dispelled a lot of the wrong ideas I had about WWI.
Few scholars would take The Donkeys seriously, but OTOH, I do think his Barbarossa has really stood the test of time. It lacked the benefit of much in the way of Russian primary sources, (it was written in the 1960's) and has some odd gaps (little about the Siege of Leningrad, and only two chapters covering the year after Kursk) but I think his judgements about the 1941-43 period are very sound.
He is unsparing in his criticisms of the German High Command, and implicates them (and not just the SS) in atrocities, and offers justified praise for the fighting qualities of the Red Army, all of which would have gone against the grain of popular history in the 1960's.
What shocks me, Sean, is how many people seem to take Blackadder (a comedy show) seriously.
Catastrophe by Max Hastings is excellent. And very readable.
We didn't have much of a choice once Belgium was invaded.
The Germans would have won. Once that had happened they'd have dominated the Channel and the North sea, and our supply lines, and our word as an ally and upholder of the international order would never have been taken seriously again - risking our long-term isolation and a supplicant rather than a world power.
We had to fight.
I love Blackadder, but no one should take it seriously as history.
Far from feasting in chateaux behind the lines, in WWI, 78 British and Empire generals were killed, and 146 injured or taken prisoner.
I think it's clear that it's definitive in it's appraisal of Oxford.
I have suggested before that there is a very real role for the LibDems as a party of local Government, whilst having little aspiration to govern nationally. They aren't going to win a majorty of seats. They got kicked in the nuts when they were part of a coalition. Westminster is a dead end. What is the point of having a great success that takes them to 18 MPs?
Win councils. Govern well. Show what local government under the LibDem s can deliver that national government can't or won't. EU Parliament seats have gone. Westminster seats are a total distraction. Play to your strengths, guys.
Well, if the LDs don't win some Parliamentary seats, we'll have either Conservative or Labour Governments in perpetuity and the decline of this country will continue unabated.
Where I do agree is the Westminster seats won in 1997 weren't won simply because the Conservatives were crap and everyone as fed up with them (probably the same in 2029 if not 2024) but because of years of local activity including control of local councils such as Sutton was a big help. What really damaged the LDs was losing the local authority power base during the Blair/Brown years and after 2010.
LD and Greens don’t work together - or shouldn’t - because the latter are essentially anti-liberal in their core beliefs.
But the LDs should be trying harder to capture the Green constituency, and environmentalism should be a key plank of their platform.
What environmentalism can the Lib Dems propose that isn't already part of the Labour or Tory party policy? The reason the Greens are a bunch of XR loonies is because the two mainstream parties are both signed up to the net zero pledge, renewable energy, clean air, elimination of petrol and diesel cars and a whole bunch of lower level environmental policy. I'm not sure that there is any mileage in them supporting people who glue themselves to runways and there isn't much else left in that well.
The Lib Dems need to decide what it means to be Liberal in a post-Brexit world, so far they think it means rejoining or reopening the Brexit debate which I'd suggest is not going to win many votes in 2024.
TBH, I had no idea that anyone associated that term with racism. Can you be racist for using a term that you had no idea was racist?
Well in ignorance people can say something very offensive, and treating people doing something offensive in ignorance with those doing it with malice would be wrong.
But it doesn't seem like many people would ever think that term was offensive in the first place.
A brief internet search seems to indicate that there is a retrospective effort now to prove it is, with very little prima facie evidence of its roots in slavery. Suggesting nits were prevalent in slave ships and grits are what poor people in the South eat, hence nitty-gritty came from the slave trade is thin gruel indeed. That nigritique from the French transformed itself into nitty-gritty is a little more convincing, but why is there no printed record of the term contemporaneous to the slave trade itself? Why does it only first appear in the 1930s, and then not in reference to slavery?
I am calling bullshit on this one
The notion that the term "nitty-gritty" is offensive to Black people (in the USA anyway) let alone inherently racist, is indeed total bullshit.
"Spook" is interesting in that was once pretty common as slang for "Black person" very similar to "spade". However, if someone was clearly using "spook" to mean a spy (or using "spade" meaning a kind of shovel) then it is NOT offensive or racist.
"Orientials" used to be an acceptable way of referring to "Asians" but that ended decades ago, now it is regarded as in the same league as "colored person" or (dare I say it) "piccaninny").
"Nigardly" is a special case, as it is not inherently racist HOWEVER the phonetics of the first two syllables make it MOST impolitic to use, in either oral or written communication. Unless you are willing to put up with a LOT of adverse comment (to put it mildly).
Back in the 80's my father worked for BT
He took over a new team and when saying a few words to them he included the phrase "I will call a spade a spade"
Man of afro Caribbean heritage complained - management and union got involved
My father being the type of man he was stood by his guns and told the guy in question he knew what my father meant and no, he would not apologise.
It all went away - nowadays probably would have been sacked......
Apparently 'call a spade a spade' came about from a mistranslation of ancient Greek texts. It should be 'call a canoe a canoe'.
Indeed, it seems Erasmus' poor ability to understand Plutarch * underlies this particular controversy (though it's probably more 'tub' or 'trough' than 'canoe' in this context).
No wonder we left his eponymous programme - what on Earth would the kids have learned?
* I'm being a bit harsh. The Plutarch text has σκάφη ('thing dug out', e.g. tub, tray, boat, etc.); Erasmus confused it with σπάθη ('broad blade' > Eng. spade); the verb σκάπτω means 'I dig', so it's not difficult to jump from that to imagining that σκάφη meant 'thing digging' rather than 'thing dug'; the noun even has a rare oxytone variant σκαφή which means 'the act of digging'. So we can probably forgive Erasmus, just this once.
TBH, I had no idea that anyone associated that term with racism. Can you be racist for using a term that you had no idea was racist?
Don't use the word "spook" on American chat-rooms unless wearing flame-retardent clothing.
Really? I thought it meant spy over there too, as in a CIA spook. Though IIRC the show Spooks was renamed to MI-5 for the american market.
Another one to be careful of is "thug" - through usage it has become associated, in the US, with er.... pejorative, and inaccurate labelling of young black gentlemen.
Wasn't that originally a somewhat 'eccentric' quasi religious group in India? Although I suppose that's just as bad!
Mr Cole, I am sad to say that your history is lagging latest scholarly interpretation. The Thugs were invented by the colonialist Brits as a means of suppression. They did not exist.
Nonsense! The original Thugs were public-spirited progressive indigenous elements dedicated (albeit by rather drastic methods) to solving two problems at once: over-population AND traffic congestion.
For you to try to appropriate credit to the British, is itself evidence of your colonialist, jingo mentality!
I should have added "Thus the term, as a colonialist invention, is inherently racist." Do I qualify for academia now?
LD and Greens don’t work together - or shouldn’t - because the latter are essentially anti-liberal in their core beliefs.
But the LDs should be trying harder to capture the Green constituency, and environmentalism should be a key plank of their platform.
It is. LDs I know talk about that more than any other issue these days.
Baffling that anyone could imagine there's common ground. I guess perhaps because the Green's rather disingenuously call themselves green. Their only green credentials are of course that once they've played their main impoverishment for all card we'll be forced to eat carrots.
TBH, I had no idea that anyone associated that term with racism. Can you be racist for using a term that you had no idea was racist?
Don't use the word "spook" on American chat-rooms unless wearing flame-retardent clothing.
Really? I thought it meant spy over there too, as in a CIA spook. Though IIRC the show Spooks was renamed to MI-5 for the american market.
Another one to be careful of is "thug" - through usage it has become associated, in the US, with er.... pejorative, and inaccurate labelling of young black gentlemen.
Wasn't that originally a somewhat 'eccentric' quasi religious group in India? Although I suppose that's just as bad!
Mr Cole, I am sad to say that your history is lagging latest scholarly interpretation. The Thugs were invented by the colonialist Brits as a means of suppression. They did not exist.
Nonsense! The original Thugs were public-spirited progressive indigenous elements dedicated (albeit by rather drastic methods) to solving two problems at once: over-population AND traffic congestion.
For you to try to appropriate credit to the British, is itself evidence of your colonialist, jingo mentality!
I should have added "Thus the term, as a colonialist invention, is inherently racist." Do I qualify for academia now?
They were, apparently, quite enthusiastic in their wealth redistribution. To themselves.....
There really needs to be a push to have community leaders changing minds on this. Otherwise, race relations are going to be set back hugely, should high levels of Covid in ethnic communities be the reason that areas are staying in high tiers even though the rest of the community has been vaxxed. There's going to be a very vocal element saying "fuck 'em, they had their chance, why should my local stay closed?"
Isn't this "community leaders" thing a bit patronising? As if EMs can't think for themselves. You never hear about white people having to be encouraged to do things via their community leaders, much as the Archbishop of Canterbury might like it to be so.
There's a fine line to tread between paronising and insulting, but when a much larger proportion in ethnic communities are refusing the vaccine, then you have to ask why? And who can turn that around?
Because it looks dangerously like they aren't thinking. Just giving in to some wholly undeserved primal fear of science.
You are slipping dangerously between two different lines.
What are their objections to vaccination and how can those be addressed? That is asking why and who can turn it around. That is not the same as blaming unthinking prejudice that will magically evaporate when they see Diane Abbott with a needle in her arm.
There does not appear to be a rational explanation for the refusal of many to have the vaccine. The numbers in the UK as a whole have now gone to 80% saying they will have the vaccine, but barely 50% in certain communitites, especially the south Asian community. It's a very real thing.
There needs to be an urgent understanding of why - and who can turn this around. I'm thinking Boris on the telly saying "get the jab" is going to make fuck all difference to them. But something has to. Or else you are going to be seeing stubbornly high infection levels in those communities into the summer, holding back the wider communities going from Tier 4 to Tier 3 or even 2. And when people start blaming one section of the community for their own Covid restrictions, that is a recipe for disaster.
So what is being done to prevent that, is what I am asking.
Yes but without knowing what the objections are, and they might be different between communities, it is hard to address them. I cannot see the paywalled Times article, and could not see the question on (the separate) Yougov site.
They might be perfectly rational. Did the clinical trials include all ethnicities, for instance? After all, that lack of testing is the reason we do not propose vaccinating children. Is there a rumour the vaccine is not halal or kosher or whatever? Is it as simple as being unable to read the leaflets? Do some nationalities have experience of governments misusing vaccination programmes?
About those communities reluctant to have a jab, it would be a good idea if the "community leaders" set an example by themselves having jabs with some publicity. Otherwise when it has died down there will still be continuing embers in the fire ready to flare up again.
TBH, I had no idea that anyone associated that term with racism. Can you be racist for using a term that you had no idea was racist?
Well in ignorance people can say something very offensive, and treating people doing something offensive in ignorance with those doing it with malice would be wrong.
But it doesn't seem like many people would ever think that term was offensive in the first place.
A brief internet search seems to indicate that there is a retrospective effort now to prove it is, with very little prima facie evidence of its roots in slavery. Suggesting nits were prevalent in slave ships and grits are what poor people in the South eat, hence nitty-gritty came from the slave trade is thin gruel indeed. That nigritique from the French transformed itself into nitty-gritty is a little more convincing, but why is there no printed record of the term contemporaneous to the slave trade itself? Why does it only first appear in the 1930s, and then not in reference to slavery?
I am calling bullshit on this one
The notion that the term "nitty-gritty" is offensive to Black people (in the USA anyway) let alone inherently racist, is indeed total bullshit.
"Spook" is interesting in that was once pretty common as slang for "Black person" very similar to "spade". However, if someone was clearly using "spook" to mean a spy (or using "spade" meaning a kind of shovel) then it is NOT offensive or racist.
"Orientials" used to be an acceptable way of referring to "Asians" but that ended decades ago, now it is regarded as in the same league as "colored person" or (dare I say it) "piccaninny").
"Nigardly" is a special case, as it is not inherently racist HOWEVER the phonetics of the first two syllables make it MOST impolitic to use, in either oral or written communication. Unless you are willing to put up with a LOT of adverse comment (to put it mildly).
Back in the 80's my father worked for BT
He took over a new team and when saying a few words to them he included the phrase "I will call a spade a spade"
Man of afro Caribbean heritage complained - management and union got involved
My father being the type of man he was stood by his guns and told the guy in question he knew what my father meant and no, he would not apologise.
It all went away - nowadays probably would have been sacked......
Apparently 'call a spade a spade' came about from a mistranslation of ancient Greek texts. It should be 'call a canoe a canoe'.
Indeed, it seems Erasmus' poor ability to understand Plutarch * underlies this particular controversy (though it's probably more 'tub' or 'trough' than 'canoe' in this context).
No wonder we left his eponymous programme - what on Earth would the kids have learned?
* I'm being a bit harsh. The Plutarch text has σκάφη ('thing dug out', e.g. tub, tray, boat, etc.); Erasmus confused it with σπάθη ('broad blade' > Eng. spade); the verb σκάπτω means 'I dig', so it's not difficult to jump from that to imagining that σκάφη meant 'thing digging' rather than 'thing dug'; the noun even has a rare oxytone variant σκαφή which means 'the act of digging'. So we can probably forgive Erasmus, just this once.
Can we get Plutarch or Erasmus for racism? There must be a few statues around.
I know has been mentioned by others but it cannot be emphasised enough, The metric that the government are working by is the optics one, its the trollies in hallways, people in ambulances therefore its all about the admissions. The message has been right there from the start 'Protect the NHS' Hospital admission is an important metric in the whole funnel but it is the one that keeps the politicians worried. People can be sent back to nursing homes to die if necessary but under no circumstances should hospitals be seen to collapse.
There's your entire motivation around the vaccines.
That the health system is under heavy heavy pressure is expected, there is no way around that in the absence of a effective vaccine program. Its a fact, its neither terrible nor tragic, there is no magic wand there. Other health systems have suffered pressures too.
The reality is that it is possible rather than probable that the targets for vaccination will be hit. The government did the right thing in booking every vaccine going early on but they a) do not control production and b) the NHS and wider public health system is a slow beast. If anything can be levelled at the government its the possibility that it could have bought forward production to start it earlier whilst approvals were being sought but I'm not sure how easy that is given the relatively short time between final trials and approvals.
Comments
Couples in the sticks would sell a big house, and get a flat in London, in one of the new blocks.
All the maintenance taken care of in the service charge, no garden to worry about, and a short tube/bus ride to all the theatres, museums etc.Any spare money would go in a investment to fund trips abroad etc.
Yes, granny is getting her jab. But the scale of what is going on, is curiously below the radar. Yes, it is on the BBC etc, but it doesn't seem to have sunk in.
However, it is worth saying the far leftist in Portland and Seattle have been tolerated for too long by local officials. The likes of Ted Wheeler for months kept making wishy washy statements and as I linked below in Seattle a local official was still banging on about not tolerating homophobic hate crimes...when it wasn't the Proud Boys doing the smashing up.
As for the far right lot, I can never get my head around in a modern democratic country you can have these militia. It is somebody you expect in an unstable African country, not pottering around a major US city.
And yes, I'd had a 3 bottle lunch on the 19th with a chap who a few days earlier had had dinner with a mate just back from Wuhan....
I know what you mean. One still fears being deemed as a failure unless you reach the top of your business or profession, but it's not for everyone.
Why would it be?
The lockdown is working, but unlike November we need to stick with it until cases have been brought all the way down.
Very, very impressed
Looks achievable on the face of it, but that's not taking into account the need at some point in the not-too-distant future to get the second doses administered in large numbers. Thus, how quickly we can get to the end of the program will depend very much on how far above that 1.8m per week figure the first shots get between now and early March.
If things go very well, my guess is that the last of the over 50s get their first jab by late April/early May, everyone's had the first shot by the end of August, and the last stragglers have their second doses in October; it will help that the younger the recipients get, the more able they will be to get to mass vaccination centres under their own power and at inconvenient times, though OTOH the sense of urgency in getting all the twentysomethings done will be somewhat lower than for old crocs.
Catastrophe by Max Hastings is excellent. And very readable.
We didn't have much of a choice once Belgium was invaded.
The Germans would have won. Once that had happened they'd have dominated the Channel and the North sea, and our supply lines, and our word as an ally and upholder of the international order would never have been taken seriously again - risking our long-term isolation and a supplicant rather than a world power.
We had to fight.
Unlike during the first wave where we got a chart every night saying look this is how shit the UK is doing vs every other European country on testing, cases, deaths...strangely these graphs on vaccinations, rarely appear.
Instead we are just told Israel doing amazing....far better than the UK.
"Spook" is interesting in that was once pretty common as slang for "Black person" very similar to "spade". However, if someone was clearly using "spook" to mean a spy (or using "spade" meaning a kind of shovel) then it is NOT offensive or racist.
"Orientials" used to be an acceptable way of referring to "Asians" but that ended decades ago, now it is regarded as in the same league as "colored person" or (dare I say it) "piccaninny").
"Nigardly" is a special case, as it is not inherently racist HOWEVER the phonetics of the first two syllables make it MOST impolitic to use, in either oral or written communication. Unless you are willing to put up with a LOT of adverse comment (to put it mildly).
I only see the SDP continuing to decline, as the Green Party continue to strengthen.
There's definitely a space for a traditional liberal party (something I think we've lost) but the Lib Dems seem to be more interested in being a very posh, pompous and obsessive Rejoin party instead.
Seriously, read some the 1900s stuff from there... crazy to us. Imagine that affirmed by a quick victory in WWI.
They were planning on the next war while fighting in 1914 - they wanted to be in a good position when the next one kicked off.
So, imagine, without the destruction of 1914-18 - how many years before the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute gets it's uranium machine up and running?
Probably just in time for the next party.....
He took over a new team and when saying a few words to them he included the phrase "I will call a spade a spade"
Man of afro Caribbean heritage complained - management and union got involved
My father being the type of man he was stood by his guns and told the guy in question he knew what my father meant and no, he would not apologise.
It all went away - nowadays probably would have been sacked......
Because it looks dangerously like they aren't thinking. Just giving in to some wholly undeserved primal fear of science.
Graphs showing international comparisons of deaths were plastered all over those briefings during the first lockdown. There's no reason at all why they couldn't repeat the exercise, only this time with something that's actually positive.
The only good reason I can think of for why they aren't doing this is that perhaps they're afraid that showing day after day of strong vaccination stats will encourage the population to go demob happy, and increase public and political opposition to the seemingly endless Covid restrictions. I continue to suspect that ministers, through a combination of caution born of past experience and the scientific advice they're getting, want to leave as much of lockdown in place for as long as they can possibly get away with this time around.
Always worth a listen
For you to try to appropriate credit to the British, is itself evidence of your colonialist, jingo mentality!
If an evil microbiologist wanted to "design" a worse virus, they would increase the proportion of people who get bad syptoms, and probably lengthen the time before symptoms kick in, making things like track-and-trace even less effective than they are with Corona.
They would also make the age profile younger, so that relatively more people of working age die, but leaving the oldies less affected, as they are already an "economic burden on society"
We couldn't have.
I see some encouraging signs it is moving away from the obsession with the EU and Davey is using the experience he gained in the Coalition to position the Party as an environmentally-sensitive free-market alternative and that's not bad ground to be on though of course the eternal populist Johnson will also seek to be on that ground as well.
I'd like the LDs to be the fiscally conservative option in opposition to the two big spending parties - the Liberal Unionists and the Social Democrats. The cost of fighting Covid may have to be some of the Government's vanity projects though the decision to spend money on improving rail links is welcome.
Otherwise it's back to the pavement politics for the LDs and the County Council elections in particular provide some opportunities for the LDs and other parties to crop some of the Conservative seats won at the height of Theresa May's popularity (those words still don't sit well together).
By case numbers
From hospitalisations
https://twitter.com/officialrus1
Because there are some really shocking scenes allegedly from todays protests in Russia.
Deaths stubbornly, disastrousy high still.
Would you prefer there was no scrutiny and the State media blindly put out whatever propaganda the Government provided?
Sure, it might not get them into Government anytime soon. But when you're on 3-4% polls none of that matters.
What does matter is changing the terms of the debate. Long game.
Not only it is not giving credit to the UK government, it isn't giving any credit to all the 1000s of people involved in this roll-out.
Maybe they will mellow when mum is safe.
Aye, right.....
The Germans were told that if they invaded Belgium, we would honour the guarantee, but in diplomatic language. Which the war hawks in Berlin merrily ignored.
A What-if - supposing that Gray, simply told the German Ambassador "If you invade Belgium, we will go to war."?
What are their objections to vaccination and how can those be addressed? That is asking why and who can turn it around. That is not the same as blaming unthinking prejudice that will magically evaporate when they see Diane Abbott with a needle in her arm.
I don't worry about 5-6% in polls to be honest - I was there in 1988-89 when things were much worse. I could certainly 12-15% next time but you're right in saying the message needs to be clearer and more distinctive.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-covid-19-vaccines-delivery-plan/uk-covid-19-vaccines-delivery-plan
Does "secured access" mean we already have access to that number of vaccines, or does it mean we will do in the future when they've been manufactured?
I love Blackadder, but no one should take it seriously as history.
Far from feasting in chateaux behind the lines, in WWI, 78 British and Empire generals were killed, and 146 injured or taken prisoner.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55779171
So it is either not as worrying as Boris made out, or far more worrying....bloody lying Boris and the eggheads....and Newsnight last night were outraged that they didn't consider the possibly it was more dangerous weeks ago and take action (before any scientific research was available).
There needs to be an urgent understanding of why - and who can turn this around. I'm thinking Boris on the telly saying "get the jab" is going to make fuck all difference to them. But something has to. Or else you are going to be seeing stubbornly high infection levels in those communities into the summer, holding back the wider communities going from Tier 4 to Tier 3 or even 2. And when people start blaming one section of the community for their own Covid restrictions, that is a recipe for disaster.
So what is being done to prevent that, is what I am asking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UPjUH4UeEc
Half the staff at this care home turned down the vaccine....it should be absolutely clear, no jabbie, no workie...
I do think those involved are getting the credit - cheap jibes about Taunton Racecourse notwithstanding.
I'm not supportive of the vaccination programme for the same reasons the BMA has doubts. We are not following the recommendations of the vaccine manufacturers regarding the timing of a second dose and IF we are currently not providing sufficient immunity through the single dose, trumpeting the numbers vaccinated will be meaningless.
I'm yet to be convinced providing the second dose 12 weeks rather than 3 weeks after the first dose is based on sound scientific methodology and, as I say, I'm not the only one who has doubts.
I hope I'm wrong - we'll see. There are positive signs on both new positive tests and hospitalisations but whether these are directly attributable to the vaccination programme or to the lockdown restrictions I don't know.
But the LDs should be trying harder to capture the Green constituency, and environmentalism should be a key plank of their platform.
I have suggested before that there is a very real role for the LibDems as a party of local Government, whilst having little aspiration to govern nationally. They aren't going to win a majorty of seats. They got kicked in the nuts when they were part of a coalition. Westminster is a dead end. What is the point of having a great success that takes them to 18 MPs?
Win councils. Govern well. Show what local government under the LibDem s can deliver that national government can't or won't. EU Parliament seats have gone. Westminster seats are a total distraction. Play to your strengths, guys.
Disclosure: I'm in Group 9.
Actually, this makes me ask the question: Which has more benefit - giving an 80 year old their second jab or giving a 49 year old their first?
Where I do agree is the Westminster seats won in 1997 weren't won simply because the Conservatives were crap and everyone as fed up with them (probably the same in 2029 if not 2024) but because of years of local activity including control of local councils such as Sutton was a big help. What really damaged the LDs was losing the local authority power base during the Blair/Brown years and after 2010.
The Lib Dems need to decide what it means to be Liberal in a post-Brexit world, so far they think it means rejoining or reopening the Brexit debate which I'd suggest is not going to win many votes in 2024.
No wonder we left his eponymous programme - what on Earth would the kids have learned?
* I'm being a bit harsh. The Plutarch text has σκάφη ('thing dug out', e.g. tub, tray, boat, etc.); Erasmus confused it with σπάθη ('broad blade' > Eng. spade); the verb σκάπτω means 'I dig', so it's not difficult to jump from that to imagining that σκάφη meant 'thing digging' rather than 'thing dug'; the noun even has a rare oxytone variant σκαφή which means 'the act of digging'. So we can probably forgive Erasmus, just this once.
Is there perhaps an overlap between the groups accepting the vaccine in lower numbers and care home workers?
LDs are far more green.
They might be perfectly rational. Did the clinical trials include all ethnicities, for instance? After all, that lack of testing is the reason we do not propose vaccinating children. Is there a rumour the vaccine is not halal or kosher or whatever? Is it as simple as being unable to read the leaflets? Do some nationalities have experience of governments misusing vaccination programmes?
There's your entire motivation around the vaccines.
That the health system is under heavy heavy pressure is expected, there is no way around that in the absence of a effective vaccine program. Its a fact, its neither terrible nor tragic, there is no magic wand there. Other health systems have suffered pressures too.
The reality is that it is possible rather than probable that the targets for vaccination will be hit. The government did the right thing in booking every vaccine going early on but they a) do not control production and b) the NHS and wider public health system is a slow beast. If anything can be levelled at the government its the possibility that it could have bought forward production to start it earlier whilst approvals were being sought but I'm not sure how easy that is given the relatively short time between final trials and approvals.