As far as punters are concerned the Tories are strong odds-on to win the Batley and Spen by-election
As far as punters are concerned the Tories are strong odds-on to win the Batley and Spen by-election – politicalbetting.com
On July 1st LAB go into their second difficult northern by-election defence at Batley & Spen and following the loss of Hartlepool on May 6th the Tories are strong favourites to take the seat.
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Adam Brooks
@EssexPR
·
2h
Many businesses are back on full rent, but still at reduced capacities, their bounce back loan payments have now started.
Many in Hospitality sold tickets to events after June 21st, many have stocked up and staffed for it.
Many are now finished for good.
SLOW CLAP
@GOVUK
Or not.
'Cry Freedom' my arse as Jim Royle would have said.
Being slightly less woeful than all the alternatives will probably see the wretched man through the rest of this term and another election victory, but it doesn't mean that we cannot hold him in contempt.
I don't know how he can be persuasive on the reasoning, and while departing from scientific advice is always a risky move for a politician in these events, he cannot act like they are making the decision and he is just reporting it.
We need huge numbers of businesses to go to the wall through this. Mass unemployment. The money markets to see that Britain's a turkey and stop lending Sunak the money.
National bankruptcy and a trip to the Gnomes of Zurich, holding out the begging bowl. It's the only way we're ever getting out of this.
Bring it on.
I can go to the cinema, meet up with friends, visit restaurants, holidays, and see the other half.
Even dogging is now back on the menu.
I can't see the backbenchers taking much more of this government by SAGE and Warwick Uni.
The man's immovable. We're stuck with him.
Diversification is key for many businesses.
The sooner the edifice collapses, and buries Johnson under the rubble, the better. We can only start to rebuild once he, and the threat or reality of eternal lockdown, are gone.
There are a lot of people in the country who have spent 15 months understandably very scared, and who are now institutionalised in their own homes. They will need coaxing out again. They need a leader who can reassure them that, once double-dosed, they have nothing particularly to fear. They need a leader to project confidence.
If Johnson comes out on Monday and delays the 21st June ending of legal restrictions, then he will fail completely to be that leader, and instead he will reinforce the worst fears of those in the country who need the opposite message. What it will mean is that, later on, even when restrictions are finally lifted, and people are double-dosed - even booster-dosed against variants - there will be many people too scared to leave their homes.
I think Johnson has flunked pretty much every test of leadership that he has ever faced, so perhaps it shouldn't come as so much of a surprise to me that he's going to flunk another one, but I really thought the test this time fit his essential happy-go-lucky character that he would see it through.
What. A. Mess.
"A little of the worst of all the worlds cultures"
Cases are not flat they are going down.
Cases aren't increasing, they are flat.
Cases are only increasing a bit.
Case increases don't matter.
Hospitalisations aren't flat they are going down.
Hospitalisations aren't increasing, they are flat.
Hospitalisations are only increasing a bit.
etc.
Funny old world.
https://youtu.be/VK_dzNatq2o
As for those who are saying “cases don’t matter”, hospitalisations do matter, and in the North West they are rising alarmingly.
We are paying the price for Johnson’s failures in respect of the border because he wanted a bloody trade deal.
I’m just resigned to this farrago of incompetence. I can’t even get angry anymore. Hopefully the slowdown in rate of case growth means that we are closer to the peak than feared but I’m not betting the house on that. I’m just praying this, in terms of restrictions, is as bad as it gets.
They're not interested in "herd immunity". In their minds it doesn't even exist. They keep wibbling on about "the vaccines not offering 100% protection." They want Zero Covid. They want Zero Death.
No level of vaccination will ever be good enough. There'll always be an excuse for more restrictions. There'll always be an excuse for more delay.
Lockdown only ends with the destruction of this Government. And I can't see how that happens any other way but broad scale economic ruin.
Negative equity and 15% interest rates killed off John Major. We may need something worse to shift Johnson. Whatever it takes. We need to get rid of him.
This may have sealed B+S. Although Labour is still value.
That's what we should focus on.
When is Parliament going to debate what level of hospitalisations is acceptable rather than the country being run by two people neither of whom is the PM and an unelected committee?
Essex and London accents deemed less intelligent, researchers find
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-57071805
Is this what years of studying PPE at Oxford gives us as a political class?
Just keep the non fully vaccinated under lockdown until 2/3 weeks after they've had their jabs.
Final post on design.
For anyone who remembers the Homeworld 1981 exhibition about houses of the future, in Milton Keynes - it is interesting to go back to Coleshill Place in Milton Keynes to see how it has got on.
36 homes built by a varied selection of developers.
Here on Google:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bradwell+Common,+Milton+Keynes/@52.047297,-0.7734721,111m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x48770073f58d2fc5:0xfb61386b5fb2c14!8m2!3d52.0448117!4d-0.7707599
The programmes about the Money Programme house:
https://vimeo.com/454408400
There's a current documentary here, but you'll want to scan through bits of it.
But an interesting conversation about WFH, and also timber frame house structure built in one day, and others.
https://vimeo.com/540791219
Who will wait on them? Who will pull their pints? Who will unlock the garden centres?
It's like Zeno's paradox. The end always jumps out of reach every time we think we've reached it. At some point surely we've reached "good enough" and can stop waiting for perfection?
Mark Harper
@Mark_J_Harper
·
13m
Just 48 hours ago, Govt sources briefed The Times that weddings were going to be spared from guest limits after 21 June, giving hope to approx 50,000 couples due to get married in the coming weeks.
The Department for Health is now reported to have killed that idea. So very cruel
And yet, here we are, with an outbreak of collective wetting amongst the Government and its advisers about caseload.
Once Johnson caves to the pressure the direction of travel is obvious. One excuse after another. We'll be made to wait until all adults have been vaccinated. Then until they've been done twice. Then until all the secondary school kids have. Then there'll be a panic over the cold weather, and the flu. and waning immunity (real or alleged) amongst the old, and boosters, and probably more variants along the way.
The cases will keep growing. Regardless of the hospital situation (which evidence to date suggests won't be serious,) the panic will increase. Measures will be demanded to bring R back below one. SAGE will issue doomsday models insisting that we do it. The Government will cave, and once we're back in lockdown we'll be in it for the entire Winter, just as we were from January through to early April this year.
Let's put it another way: is it irrational to conclude that this is probably what's coming? If so, why? The success of the vaccines has done nothing to stop the panic, the prevarication, the delay. The Government kept making positive noises right up until about 48 hours ago, and now it turns out it has changed its mind. Of course it has. It lies. Johnson lies. He lies about everything. Why should anybody trust him NOT to lock us up for another seven, eight, nine months?
It's patently fucking obvious that there's no danger to the NHS the virus is running into a wall of vaccinated people among vulnerable groups and young people carry very low individual risk and are still being vaccinated.
The scientists are pursuing a zero COVID strategy which is impossible in the UK. Our economy just falls over and we haven't secured the border. The same wanker scientists that said we should keep the border open for ideological reasons for the last year have decided keeping domestic restrictions isn't a problem.
Honestly, if whitty and the rest of them also got hit by the presidential motorcade I'd probably celebrate. They're all wankers and they're ruining this country. Lockdown needs to end on the 21st. That's what they said to the nation. It's time to make them stick to it. We accepted lockdown on the basis that it would be gone by the 21st and vaccines would do the heavy lifting. Well the vaccines are doing heavy lifting. We've got places where cases are at 500/100k and no real rise in hospitalisations. The hospitalisation rate for vaccinated people is 0.2%, the implied efficacy of vaccines against Delta is between 98.5% and 99.5%.
4 weeks buys us nothing. And four weeks from now the same drum beat about extending lockdown will be ongoing and the government will buckle. It will continue until all of the c***s are removed from he levers of power.
I'm genuinely seething with rage. The government and the c*** scientists missold us on the third lockdown. And now they're moving the goalposts to cases after being told for a year that the only reason we have these awful NPIs is to protect the NHS. They're all contemptible.
All the shops are open. You can eat out, have a drink. Visit friends and family. Take a holiday. It's hardly like being locked up in Durham Gaol.
There was over 4k in hospital in the Northwest in the peak, there's currently 271.
There were hundreds in hospital in Warrington in the peak, there's currently 3. Not 300, 3.
Liverpool University Hospitals had over 500 in the peak, there's currently 9.
Wirral University Teaching Hospital had nearly 300 in the peak, there's currently 3.
Single digits in hospital Trusts when it was hundreds in hospital most of the pandemic is not awful.
See here is where I part company with you. I think laws should be flagrantly disobeyed when they are bad laws. Often we are in a position where there is no viable party to get a law changed and the only way it gets dropped is via mass civil disobedience. Yes I may get punished but frankly I don't care what johnson says from the 21st I regard no lockdown laws to be worth obeying and I expect to break them flagrantly and frequently
Delaying the final stage of unlocking will be rubbish. But all the graphs are starting on the same trends as the last time and the time before. Slower, and with a better cases-to-deaths ratio, because the vaccines work. But as of today, there are enough people out there who aren't fully immune to make further opening up an act of insanity. We're so close to herd immunity that we can almost touch it. Even a poor month would be another 15 million jabs. But almost isn't good enough.
And yes, government heads should roll for this. The PM should be invited to sit in a giant Venus Flytrap at the Eden project and await further instructions. But the failure was the mismanagement of travel from India a few months ago. The decision being leaked now and announced Monday is just working out the consequences of that.
Call for Johnson's head on a platter and we might believe you give a shit.
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Some dingbats are projecting as if there will be ongoing exponential growth from here, but there can't be, there aren't sufficient people left to infect. 80% of adults already have antibodies by now. The exit wave is just the virus burning out in the final areas and then that's it, over. Just as happened in Israel when they had much less immunity than we do now.
The in-hospital figures now are about 1% in many hospital trusts in the Northwest (supposedly the epicentre) compared to what they were in the past.
The reality is that in the first and second waves the heatmap of cases started in the young, then spread to the elderly groups who got hospitalised and died. That won't happen this time. The elderly groups are double-vaccinated already. That's the difference.
To lose your nerve and panic here is chickenshit bollocks that will lead to devastation in the economy. Businesses need the summer, more than we need to remain locked down.
If Boris loses his nerve now he is not fit to be Prime Minister and needs to go.
If the vaccines work we can unlock
If the vaccines dont work we may as well unlock but we cannot afford to put the country on hold much longer anyway
Wouldn't he?