Did Burnham consider any restrictions on flights from India to Manchester in April ?
When Biju Mathew heard that India was going onto the UK's travel red list, he leapt into action.
"I couldn't afford to stay away," he says. "I had to get back to work."
The social services manager from Walsall, UK, who was in India visiting family, began ringing local travel agents in an attempt to beat the Friday deadline.
From Friday 04:00 BST, most travellers who have been to India in the last 10 days will be refused entry to the UK unless they hold UK passports or residence rights. Those that do will be required to quarantine in hotels on arrival, at significant cost and inconvenience.
"Eventually, yesterday, a friend in the UK managed to book me a ticket from Mumbai to Manchester," says Biju. He had just half an hour's notice to pack and go.
"I had to stop everything. I didn't get time to say a proper goodbye to my parents."
It also cost him close to £2,000 for the flight and Covid tests required, when a flight from Mumbai is usually well under £1,000.
He is one of the lucky ones. His flight touched down in Manchester at around 15:00 BST on Thursday to his great relief.
This sounds like a classic Guardian, biased by omission.....you don't get 5 years in prison for just nicking a mobile phone.
Osime Brown was jailed for stealing a friend’s mobile phone, a crime that he and others say he did not commit. He was sentenced to five years for robbery, attempted robbery and perverting the course of justice.
"Osime’s two co-defendants pleaded guilty and did not receive custodial sentences."
So two people got no jail and one got 5 years....I think we can take it, he must have been doing something really bad / have a very long list of crimes. Not as claimed, he is a lovely lad and was just there trying to stop it.
My list of current leaders I have a view on, from serious to lightweight;
1. Merkel 2. Biden 3. Morrison 4. Sturgeon 5. Macron 6. Putin 7. Drakeford 8. Trudeau 9. Von der Leyen 10. Ardern 11. Johnson
Biden can be serious but he is also lightweight and jovial.
I would put Morrison, Macron, Putin, Drakeford and Sturgeon and even Boris as more heavyweight than Biden.
However US Presidents tend to be more charismatic than heavyweight, in my lifetime only Bush Snr and Obama are what I would consider to be heavyweight US Presidents although Bill Clinton could be on occasion too
My list of current leaders I have a view on, from serious to lightweight;
1. Merkel 2. Biden 3. Morrison 4. Sturgeon 5. Macron 6. Putin 7. Drakeford 8. Trudeau 9. Von der Leyen 10. Ardern 11. Johnson
A ludicrous list. Running the devolved region of Wales is not comparable to ruling all of the Russias, or presiding over the global superpower that is USA
Next, ‘why Edwin Poots is a better party leader than Xi Jinping’
It’s a sunny Saturday and no better time for ludicrous lists.
Though - who would you rather have as your PM - Poots or Xi?
Xi
I guess Xi has the distinct advantage in that his name is not literally a synonym for farting.
My Mum used to say of Andy Burnham that he always looked like he needed a "good wash". Which is not good. I haven't heard her say it recently though - so perhaps that particular problem has gone way.
I think he's an ok bet if you think Starmer will fight the next election and lose it badly.
Ha ha really? He seems pretty clean to me, but maybe your mum has a higher bar than I do. He just seems like a lightweight to me. But maybe that's what people are into now.
Yes, true snippet that. It was back in the Brown days when he (Andy) used to look rather swarthy of cheek and also as if he wore eyeliner. As it happens he's one of those (rare) blokes who looks better at 50 than 35 so I think it's a non issue now.
I won't be supporting him for leader (if it comes to it). I can see a touch of the old 'charisma' going on - great - but he's not my idea of where we should be going. He seems to me to be falling for his own hype at the moment. I think he's a bit of a fake and a showboater. Eg that dispute with the govt on lockdown funding. Much Daniel Cohn Bendit and Paris 68 being channeled. Practical outcome, high viz for him, no more money for Manchester. Less, arguably, depending who you believe.
I'm sick of overt showy charisma if you want to know the truth. I find it deeply inauthentic.
My Mum used to say of Andy Burnham that he always looked like he needed a "good wash". Which is not good. I haven't heard her say it recently though - so perhaps that particular problem has gone way.
I think he's an ok bet if you think Starmer will fight the next election and lose it badly.
Ha ha really? He seems pretty clean to me, but maybe your mum has a higher bar than I do. He just seems like a lightweight to me. But maybe that's what people are into now.
It’s the age of the lightweight. Cf: Trudeau, Ardern.
Isn't that a bit harsh on Ardern? Agree on Trudeau though, that guy really grates with me.
Harper was a more heavyweight Canadian PM as was Martin before him but both lacked Trudeau's election winning charisma.
Am interested here. What makes a leader a "heavyweight" or a "lightweight"? Not particularly for you @HYUFD, but generally. Is not winning multiple elections, from seemingly improbable starting points, the very point of democratic politics?
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Why is the Indian variant much more widely seeded in the UK compared to the rest of the EU? Because we allowed in 20,000 travellers from India. Because we kept the borders open
That’s it. @DavidL is, unusually, talking nonsense
We KNEW this was a race between the virus and our vaccine. By keeping the border with India open, we decided to run the final leg of this race with a 100 pound backpack weighing us down, for absolutely no reason at all. You can’t even argue we did it out of human compassion - because we happily closed the border with Pakistan and Bangladesh. Just not India
This is all on Boris and the government. Their decision. Their fuck-up. And monumental it is
I agree the apparent reason for keeping India off the red list was stupid, shocking even. Unfortunately that doesn't remove the need to deal with the circumstances of this ghastly disease as they are, whether those circumstances are due to bad luck or negligence.
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
Isn’t it just our time for our next wave and waves can’t be stopped by humans, just damage limited by vaccines and lockdowns?
Isn’t the problem here not lack of delivery, and the tenuous reasons for lack of delivery you are inventing but over promising? There is no magic wand to make Covid and occasional restrictions/living with it go away? Not vaccines. Vaccines was built up as being a magic Covid free freedom it was never going to be, that is the truth the third wave with some inevitable restrictions has proved isn’t it?
A tiny question. Under Labour's actual rules do you have to be an MP to be leader of the party? I once tried to look it up in Labour's rules and gave up the will to live before finding anything that said you had to be.
Obvs it isn't going to happen but it is still an interesting question. Anyone know?
MP or in HoL as far as i know
Can’t be leader from the Lords. Can’t even lead the Tories from the Lords these days:*
There shall be a Leader of the Party (referred to in this Constitution as “the Leader”) drawn from those elected to the House of Commons, who shall be elected by the Party Members and Scottish Party Members in accordance with the provisions of Schedule 2.
*although in practice since they have only had four overall leaders in the Lords - Derby, Beaconsfield, Salisbury and Home - and three of them were consecutively leader in the nineteenth century, while the fourth was elected on the understanding he would disclaim his peerage, in practice I doubt if this does more than recognise reality.
So definitely over priced then as there are very few winnable Lab seats for KON to stand in.
Plus he would have to resign the mayoralty to stand.
I just do not see a pathway for him.
Not, bluntly, that I see any credible Labour leader at the moment. I know full well how much you despise Starmer but there is a reason why he’s leader.
Did Jacinda Kate Laurell Ardern look stellar in March 2017?
A desperate Labour Party polling at historically low values and looking down the barrel of a terrible defeat in a forthcoming election took a huge gamble.
They had nothing left to lose.
Same with UK Labour. SKS is going to lose in 2024. He is nowhere near where he needs to be to win.
Labour might as well gamble now.
Whoever the new leader is, she is very, very unlikely to do worse than SKS. And she could be a star.
(Same goes for the LibDems, actually).
The only Labour potential leader who would do any better than Starmer is Burnham but he is not even an MP, most of those who are MPs would likely do even worse than Starmer is
Jacinda Ardern had one strategy before she became LotO, which was magazine covers.
She held a series of junior, non-roles in the Shadow Cabinet, but became famous for her flashy teeth and women-friendly photo opps (she targeted women’s lifestyle magazines).
She continued doing this even though it created an ongoing media story about her rising popularity versus her hard-working but plodding leader.
Said plodding leader eventually felt he had no option but to stand down, and the rest is history.
Jacinda did not actually win the following election. However she took power through coalition with a Faragiste party that used xenophobic tropes to appeal to elderly white racists.
Then won the first outright majority since electoral reform.
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Why is the Indian variant much more widely seeded in the UK compared to the rest of the EU? Because we allowed in 20,000 travellers from India. Because we kept the borders open
That’s it. @DavidL is, unusually, talking nonsense
We KNEW this was a race between the virus and our vaccine. By keeping the border with India open, we decided to run the final leg of this race with a 100 pound backpack weighing us down, for absolutely no reason at all. You can’t even argue we did it out of human compassion - because we happily closed the border with Pakistan and Bangladesh. Just not India
This is all on Boris and the government. Their decision. Their fuck-up. And monumental it is
I agree the apparent reason for keeping India off the red list was stupid, shocking even. Unfortunately that doesn't remove the need to deal with the circumstances of this ghastly disease as they are, whether those circumstances are due to bad luck or negligence.
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
Isn’t it just our time for our next wave and waves can’t be stopped by humans, just damage limited by vaccines and lockdowns?
Isn’t the problem here not lack of delivery, and the tenuous reasons for lack of delivery you are inventing but over promising? There is no magic wand to make Covid and occasional restrictions/living with it go away? Not vaccines. Vaccines was built up as being a magic Covid free freedom it was never going to be, that is the truth the third wave with some investable restrictions has proved isn’t it?
A tiny question. Under Labour's actual rules do you have to be an MP to be leader of the party? I once tried to look it up in Labour's rules and gave up the will to live before finding anything that said you had to be.
Obvs it isn't going to happen but it is still an interesting question. Anyone know?
MP or in HoL as far as i know
Can’t be leader from the Lords. Can’t even lead the Tories from the Lords these days:*
There shall be a Leader of the Party (referred to in this Constitution as “the Leader”) drawn from those elected to the House of Commons, who shall be elected by the Party Members and Scottish Party Members in accordance with the provisions of Schedule 2.
*although in practice since they have only had four overall leaders in the Lords - Derby, Beaconsfield, Salisbury and Home - and three of them were consecutively leader in the nineteenth century, while the fourth was elected on the understanding he would disclaim his peerage, in practice I doubt if this does more than recognise reality.
So definitely over priced then as there are very few winnable Lab seats for KON to stand in.
Plus he would have to resign the mayoralty to stand.
I just do not see a pathway for him.
Not, bluntly, that I see any credible Labour leader at the moment. I know full well how much you despise Starmer but there is a reason why he’s leader.
Did Jacinda Kate Laurell Ardern look stellar in March 2017?
A desperate Labour Party polling at historically low values and looking down the barrel of a terrible defeat in a forthcoming election took a huge gamble.
They had nothing left to lose.
Same with UK Labour. SKS is going to lose in 2024. He is nowhere near where he needs to be to win.
Labour might as well gamble now.
Whoever the new leader is, she is very, very unlikely to do worse than SKS. And she could be a star.
(Same goes for the LibDems, actually).
The only Labour potential leader who would do any better than Starmer is Burnham but he is not even an MP, most of those who are MPs would likely do even worse than Starmer is
Jacinda Ardern had one strategy before she became LotO, which was magazine covers.
She held a series of junior, non-roles in the Shadow Cabinet, but became famous for her flashy teeth and women-friendly photo opps (she targeted women’s lifestyle magazines).
She continued doing this even though it created an ongoing media story about her rising popularity versus her hard-working but plodding leader.
Said plodding leader eventually felt he had no option but to stand down, and the rest is history.
Jacinda did not actually win the following election. However she took power through coalition with a Faragiste party that used xenophobic tropes to appeal to elderly white racists.
Then won the first outright majority since electoral reform.
Yes, in her second election. A tremendous achievement (albeit one achieved under Sturgeon-like monopolisation of the news media).
A tiny question. Under Labour's actual rules do you have to be an MP to be leader of the party? I once tried to look it up in Labour's rules and gave up the will to live before finding anything that said you had to be.
Obvs it isn't going to happen but it is still an interesting question. Anyone know?
MP or in HoL as far as i know
Can’t be leader from the Lords. Can’t even lead the Tories from the Lords these days:*
There shall be a Leader of the Party (referred to in this Constitution as “the Leader”) drawn from those elected to the House of Commons, who shall be elected by the Party Members and Scottish Party Members in accordance with the provisions of Schedule 2.
*although in practice since they have only had four overall leaders in the Lords - Derby, Beaconsfield, Salisbury and Home - and three of them were consecutively leader in the nineteenth century, while the fourth was elected on the understanding he would disclaim his peerage, in practice I doubt if this does more than recognise reality.
So definitely over priced then as there are very few winnable Lab seats for KON to stand in.
Plus he would have to resign the mayoralty to stand.
I just do not see a pathway for him.
Not, bluntly, that I see any credible Labour leader at the moment. I know full well how much you despise Starmer but there is a reason why he’s leader.
Did Jacinda Kate Laurell Ardern look stellar in March 2017?
A desperate Labour Party polling at historically low values and looking down the barrel of a terrible defeat in a forthcoming election took a huge gamble.
They had nothing left to lose.
Same with UK Labour. SKS is going to lose in 2024. He is nowhere near where he needs to be to win.
Labour might as well gamble now.
Whoever the new leader is, she is very, very unlikely to do worse than SKS. And she could be a star.
(Same goes for the LibDems, actually).
The only Labour potential leader who would do any better than Starmer is Burnham but he is not even an MP, most of those who are MPs would likely do even worse than Starmer is
Jacinda Ardern had one strategy before she became LotO, which was magazine covers.
She held a series of junior, non-roles in the Shadow Cabinet, but became famous for her flashy teeth and women-friendly photo opps (she targeted women’s lifestyle magazines).
She continued doing this even though it created an ongoing media story about her rising popularity versus her hard-working but plodding leader.
Said plodding leader eventually felt he had no option but to stand down, and the rest is history.
Jacinda did not actually win the following election. However she took power through coalition with a Faragiste party that used xenophobic tropes to appeal to elderly white racists.
Then won the first outright majority since electoral reform.
As the incumbent PM, she did not even win most votes or seats to get the job from opposition let alone a majority
My Mum used to say of Andy Burnham that he always looked like he needed a "good wash". Which is not good. I haven't heard her say it recently though - so perhaps that particular problem has gone way.
I think he's an ok bet if you think Starmer will fight the next election and lose it badly.
Ha ha really? He seems pretty clean to me, but maybe your mum has a higher bar than I do. He just seems like a lightweight to me. But maybe that's what people are into now.
It’s the age of the lightweight. Cf: Trudeau, Ardern.
Isn't that a bit harsh on Ardern? Agree on Trudeau though, that guy really grates with me.
Harper was a more heavyweight Canadian PM as was Martin before him but both lacked Trudeau's election winning charisma.
Am interested here. What makes a leader a "heavyweight" or a "lightweight"? Not particularly for you @HYUFD, but generally. Is not winning multiple elections, from seemingly improbable starting points, the very point of democratic politics?
For me, do you have a serious approach to the country’s challenges, and/or do you have the intellectual apparatus to have a serious approach?
Merkel has both. Biden at least one (and though not an intellectual his decades in service give him an outsized political intelligence).
My Mum used to say of Andy Burnham that he always looked like he needed a "good wash". Which is not good. I haven't heard her say it recently though - so perhaps that particular problem has gone way.
I think he's an ok bet if you think Starmer will fight the next election and lose it badly.
Ha ha really? He seems pretty clean to me, but maybe your mum has a higher bar than I do. He just seems like a lightweight to me. But maybe that's what people are into now.
It’s the age of the lightweight. Cf: Trudeau, Ardern.
Isn't that a bit harsh on Ardern? Agree on Trudeau though, that guy really grates with me.
Harper was a more heavyweight Canadian PM as was Martin before him but both lacked Trudeau's election winning charisma.
Am interested here. What makes a leader a "heavyweight" or a "lightweight"? Not particularly for you @HYUFD, but generally. Is not winning multiple elections, from seemingly improbable starting points, the very point of democratic politics?
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Why is the Indian variant much more widely seeded in the UK compared to the rest of the EU? Because we allowed in 20,000 travellers from India. Because we kept the borders open
That’s it. @DavidL is, unusually, talking nonsense
We KNEW this was a race between the virus and our vaccine. By keeping the border with India open, we decided to run the final leg of this race with a 100 pound backpack weighing us down, for absolutely no reason at all. You can’t even argue we did it out of human compassion - because we happily closed the border with Pakistan and Bangladesh. Just not India
This is all on Boris and the government. Their decision. Their fuck-up. And monumental it is
Absolutely.
It was said at the time.
On here.
These government apologists are nuts. I know Cummings is disingenuous, but his portrayal of inner government as a largely chaotic function of Boris’s “supermarket trolley” instincts ran true.
I remember saying on here at the time, in these words: ‘if keeping the Indian border open means we blow the vaccine bonus, I will never vote Tory again’
And here we are. As you say, many of us on PB knew this was a calamitous mistake, with no justification. Yet they went ahead and did it. It is as absurd as it is tragic
Wasn't it also while you were whining about the weather and demanding more international travel be opened up ?
Probably. I was correct, nonetheless, about the Indian border
All of PB was correct about travel from India.
But some of us have been pointing out the dangers from the lack of border control from the start.
While others have been demanding more international travel when it suits them.
Perhaps if the airlines, airports and holiday obsessives had been less reckless during the last year then we'd have more international travel now.
I’ve been saying since February 2020 ‘close the fucking borders, Boris’
My whining about the weather - and God it was horrible - was not a desire to throw open flights to everywhere. It was just a lamentation about our fate: being stuck on a cold plaguey island with no means of escape
There’s few U.K. restrictions on outbound travel, and loads of flights operating to places all over the world for people who want to leave. The restrictions are around quarantine on people entering the U.K.
My Mum used to say of Andy Burnham that he always looked like he needed a "good wash". Which is not good. I haven't heard her say it recently though - so perhaps that particular problem has gone way.
I think he's an ok bet if you think Starmer will fight the next election and lose it badly.
Ha ha really? He seems pretty clean to me, but maybe your mum has a higher bar than I do. He just seems like a lightweight to me. But maybe that's what people are into now.
It’s the age of the lightweight. Cf: Trudeau, Ardern.
Isn't that a bit harsh on Ardern? Agree on Trudeau though, that guy really grates with me.
Harper was a more heavyweight Canadian PM as was Martin before him but both lacked Trudeau's election winning charisma.
Am interested here. What makes a leader a "heavyweight" or a "lightweight"? Not particularly for you @HYUFD, but generally. Is not winning multiple elections, from seemingly improbable starting points, the very point of democratic politics?
Being intellectual, clever and interested in detailed policy makes you heavyweight, it is completely different from being able to win multiple elections which tends to be more to do with being charismatic in most democracies today.
Occasionally you do get a heavyweight and charismatic leader eg Macron or Obama and Thatcher but the two are separate qualities
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
Agree with point 2. The only difficulty I have with your points 1. and 2. is that I think "vastly fewer" arrivals has to be predicated on the idea that these were visits. But many of these people (indeed most I would wager given where the hotspots ended up) were coming home - who the hell was coming to the UK (to Bolton and Blackburn at that) on holiday in March and April?!??? If you want to come home you will find a way whatever it takes.
To avoid which, that logically brings us to your point 3. - an Australia style no exemptions for residents policy - politically (and indeed legally) very difficult as you are inevitably stopping British citizens of a specific ethnic background returning home. Indeed I think Australia is breaching its own law, not to mention international law, in barring its own citizens.
(It's not part of our law today but there is someting in Magna Carta about it - "In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision ")
The thing to have done was hotel quarantine all 20,000 for two weeks. Difficult but doable.
Hugh Grant @HackedOffHugh · 2h Exactly right. We followed the rules. Our children suffered. And Johnson and his government have now wasted it all. In a vain grab for some political lipstick.
My Mum used to say of Andy Burnham that he always looked like he needed a "good wash". Which is not good. I haven't heard her say it recently though - so perhaps that particular problem has gone way.
I think he's an ok bet if you think Starmer will fight the next election and lose it badly.
Ha ha really? He seems pretty clean to me, but maybe your mum has a higher bar than I do. He just seems like a lightweight to me. But maybe that's what people are into now.
It’s the age of the lightweight. Cf: Trudeau, Ardern.
Isn't that a bit harsh on Ardern? Agree on Trudeau though, that guy really grates with me.
Harper was a more heavyweight Canadian PM as was Martin before him but both lacked Trudeau's election winning charisma.
Am interested here. What makes a leader a "heavyweight" or a "lightweight"? Not particularly for you @HYUFD, but generally. Is not winning multiple elections, from seemingly improbable starting points, the very point of democratic politics?
Being intellectual, clever and interested in detailed policy makes you heavyweight, it is completely different from being able to win multiple elections which tends to be more to do with being charismatic in most democracies today.
Occasionally you do get a heavyweight and charismatic leader eg Macron or Obama and Thatcher but the two are separate qualities
Macron is let down by his (unnecessary) impulse to posture.
My Mum used to say of Andy Burnham that he always looked like he needed a "good wash". Which is not good. I haven't heard her say it recently though - so perhaps that particular problem has gone way.
I think he's an ok bet if you think Starmer will fight the next election and lose it badly.
Ha ha really? He seems pretty clean to me, but maybe your mum has a higher bar than I do. He just seems like a lightweight to me. But maybe that's what people are into now.
It’s the age of the lightweight. Cf: Trudeau, Ardern.
Isn't that a bit harsh on Ardern? Agree on Trudeau though, that guy really grates with me.
Harper was a more heavyweight Canadian PM as was Martin before him but both lacked Trudeau's election winning charisma.
Am interested here. What makes a leader a "heavyweight" or a "lightweight"? Not particularly for you @HYUFD, but generally. Is not winning multiple elections, from seemingly improbable starting points, the very point of democratic politics?
Being intellectual, clever and interested in detailed policy makes you heavyweight, it is completely different from being able to win multiple elections which tends to be more to do with being charismatic in most democracies today.
Occasionally you do get a heavyweight and charismatic leader eg Macron or Obama and Thatcher but the two are separate qualities
Wouldn’t say any of those three fitted your criteria, tbh.
A tiny question. Under Labour's actual rules do you have to be an MP to be leader of the party? I once tried to look it up in Labour's rules and gave up the will to live before finding anything that said you had to be.
Obvs it isn't going to happen but it is still an interesting question. Anyone know?
MP or in HoL as far as i know
Can’t be leader from the Lords. Can’t even lead the Tories from the Lords these days:*
There shall be a Leader of the Party (referred to in this Constitution as “the Leader”) drawn from those elected to the House of Commons, who shall be elected by the Party Members and Scottish Party Members in accordance with the provisions of Schedule 2.
*although in practice since they have only had four overall leaders in the Lords - Derby, Beaconsfield, Salisbury and Home - and three of them were consecutively leader in the nineteenth century, while the fourth was elected on the understanding he would disclaim his peerage, in practice I doubt if this does more than recognise reality.
So definitely over priced then as there are very few winnable Lab seats for KON to stand in.
Plus he would have to resign the mayoralty to stand.
I just do not see a pathway for him.
Not, bluntly, that I see any credible Labour leader at the moment. I know full well how much you despise Starmer but there is a reason why he’s leader.
Did Jacinda Kate Laurell Ardern look stellar in March 2017?
A desperate Labour Party polling at historically low values and looking down the barrel of a terrible defeat in a forthcoming election took a huge gamble.
They had nothing left to lose.
Same with UK Labour. SKS is going to lose in 2024. He is nowhere near where he needs to be to win.
Labour might as well gamble now.
Whoever the new leader is, she is very, very unlikely to do worse than SKS. And she could be a star.
(Same goes for the LibDems, actually).
Enter Daisy Cooper?
I said it before. Will keep saying it in the hope that senior Lib Dems read these threads.
1. Change your name to the Liberal Greens 2. Make Daisy co-leader
Wouldn't the Electoral Commission block that name change?
Well, not if it was the result of a merger. As for if it was just a name change with the Greens still in existence, well, I'm not certain. The Liberals and the Liberal Democrats are allowed to coexist, albeit the former are barely (but legally) in existence. But if you can have Labour Party and the Socialist Labour Party (led by Arthur Scargill), and Socialist (GB), Scottish Socialist, then why not the Greens and the Liberal Greens? I understand other countries have more than one Green party.
They did reject the Independent Socialist Party of GB as confusingly similar to another registered party.
I see from the Commission site that Alliance 4 Unity in 2020 had their name rejected as 'likely to mislead voters as to the effect of their vote' (as did Alliance for Independence, Beyond Politics).
In 2021 they rejected a description for Labour of 'Anas Sarwar - Labour's National Recovery Plan/Get Scotland Back Better'. In fact descriptions seem to get a lot of rejections - some of Alba's rejected were 'The sypermajority for Independence/First vote party, second vote country/For the independence supermajority'
One thing is clear from the site is that they rehect most emblems which contain words in them on the grounds they won't be able to be read on the ballot.
My Mum used to say of Andy Burnham that he always looked like he needed a "good wash". Which is not good. I haven't heard her say it recently though - so perhaps that particular problem has gone way.
I think he's an ok bet if you think Starmer will fight the next election and lose it badly.
Ha ha really? He seems pretty clean to me, but maybe your mum has a higher bar than I do. He just seems like a lightweight to me. But maybe that's what people are into now.
It’s the age of the lightweight. Cf: Trudeau, Ardern.
Isn't that a bit harsh on Ardern? Agree on Trudeau though, that guy really grates with me.
Harper was a more heavyweight Canadian PM as was Martin before him but both lacked Trudeau's election winning charisma.
Am interested here. What makes a leader a "heavyweight" or a "lightweight"? Not particularly for you @HYUFD, but generally. Is not winning multiple elections, from seemingly improbable starting points, the very point of democratic politics?
Being intellectual, clever and interested in detailed policy makes you heavyweight, it is completely different from being able to win multiple elections which tends to be more to do with being charismatic in most democracies today.
Occasionally you do get a heavyweight and charismatic leader eg Macron or Obama and Thatcher but the two are separate qualities
Wouldn’t say any of those three fitted your criteria, tbh.
Well they are the closest to it of recent major western leaders in being able to combine heavyweight qualities with the ability to also win elections, Merkel too though she is rather unique in being able to be heavyweight and win multiple elections without being charismatic (John Howard in Australia maybe too)
This sounds like a classic Guardian, biased by omission.....you don't get 5 years in prison for just nicking a mobile phone.
Osime Brown was jailed for stealing a friend’s mobile phone, a crime that he and others say he did not commit. He was sentenced to five years for robbery, attempted robbery and perverting the course of justice.
"Osime’s two co-defendants pleaded guilty and did not receive custodial sentences."
So two people got no jail and one got 5 years....I think we can take it, he must have been doing something really bad / have a very long list of crimes. Not as claimed, he is a lovely lad and was just there trying to stop it.
I don't know we can merely assume that, but I find the opening bit in quotes including his denial of the crime a strange detail, since whilst convictions certainly happen to innocent people, we also cannot assume him innocent merely because he says he didn't do it.
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Why is the Indian variant much more widely seeded in the UK compared to the rest of the EU? Because we allowed in 20,000 travellers from India. Because we kept the borders open
That’s it. @DavidL is, unusually, talking nonsense
We KNEW this was a race between the virus and our vaccine. By keeping the border with India open, we decided to run the final leg of this race with a 100 pound backpack weighing us down, for absolutely no reason at all. You can’t even argue we did it out of human compassion - because we happily closed the border with Pakistan and Bangladesh. Just not India
This is all on Boris and the government. Their decision. Their fuck-up. And monumental it is
I agree the apparent reason for keeping India off the red list was stupid, shocking even. Unfortunately that doesn't remove the need to deal with the circumstances of this ghastly disease as they are, whether those circumstances are due to bad luck or negligence.
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
Isn’t it just our time for our next wave and waves can’t be stopped by humans, just damage limited by vaccines and lockdowns?
Isn’t the problem here not lack of delivery, and the tenuous reasons for lack of delivery you are inventing but over promising? There is no magic wand to make Covid and occasional restrictions/living with it go away? Not vaccines. Vaccines was built up as being a magic Covid free freedom it was never going to be, that is the truth the third wave with some inevitable restrictions has proved isn’t it?
There was always going to be a third wave when we opened up (see Andrew Lilico's many tweets on this), but the scale was the question and whether we needed to fret because it was cases and not hospital patients.
Allowing a variant that is 60% more transmissible to seed into the country by failing to close border to India when it was clear what would happen has meant the third wave is big enough to cause problems.
A tiny question. Under Labour's actual rules do you have to be an MP to be leader of the party? I once tried to look it up in Labour's rules and gave up the will to live before finding anything that said you had to be.
Obvs it isn't going to happen but it is still an interesting question. Anyone know?
MP or in HoL as far as i know
Can’t be leader from the Lords. Can’t even lead the Tories from the Lords these days:*
There shall be a Leader of the Party (referred to in this Constitution as “the Leader”) drawn from those elected to the House of Commons, who shall be elected by the Party Members and Scottish Party Members in accordance with the provisions of Schedule 2.
*although in practice since they have only had four overall leaders in the Lords - Derby, Beaconsfield, Salisbury and Home - and three of them were consecutively leader in the nineteenth century, while the fourth was elected on the understanding he would disclaim his peerage, in practice I doubt if this does more than recognise reality.
So definitely over priced then as there are very few winnable Lab seats for KON to stand in.
Plus he would have to resign the mayoralty to stand.
I just do not see a pathway for him.
Not, bluntly, that I see any credible Labour leader at the moment. I know full well how much you despise Starmer but there is a reason why he’s leader.
Did Jacinda Kate Laurell Ardern look stellar in March 2017?
A desperate Labour Party polling at historically low values and looking down the barrel of a terrible defeat in a forthcoming election took a huge gamble.
They had nothing left to lose.
Same with UK Labour. SKS is going to lose in 2024. He is nowhere near where he needs to be to win.
Labour might as well gamble now.
Whoever the new leader is, she is very, very unlikely to do worse than SKS. And she could be a star.
(Same goes for the LibDems, actually).
Enter Daisy Cooper?
I said it before. Will keep saying it in the hope that senior Lib Dems read these threads.
1. Change your name to the Liberal Greens 2. Make Daisy co-leader
Wouldn't the Electoral Commission block that name change?
Well, not if it was the result of a merger. As for if it was just a name change with the Greens still in existence, well, I'm not certain. The Liberals and the Liberal Democrats are allowed to coexist, albeit the former are barely (but legally) in existence. But if you can have Labour Party and the Socialist Labour Party (led by Arthur Scargill), and Socialist (GB), Scottish Socialist, then why not the Greens and the Liberal Greens? I understand other countries have more than one Green party.
They did reject the Independent Socialist Party of GB as confusingly similar to another registered party.
I see from the Commission site that Alliance 4 Unity in 2020 had their name rejected as 'likely to mislead voters as to the effect of their vote' (as did Alliance for Independence, Beyond Politics).
In 2021 they rejected a description for Labour of 'Anas Sarwar - Labour's National Recovery Plan/Get Scotland Back Better'. In fact descriptions seem to get a lot of rejections - some of Alba's rejected were 'The sypermajority for Independence/First vote party, second vote country/For the independence supermajority'
One thing is clear from the site is that they rehect most emblems which contain words in them on the grounds they won't be able to be read on the ballot.
If I was Davey, I would encourage the set up of a sister party known as the “Liberal Greens”, and allow candidates to stand under that banner.
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Why is the Indian variant much more widely seeded in the UK compared to the rest of the EU? Because we allowed in 20,000 travellers from India. Because we kept the borders open
That’s it. @DavidL is, unusually, talking nonsense
We KNEW this was a race between the virus and our vaccine. By keeping the border with India open, we decided to run the final leg of this race with a 100 pound backpack weighing us down, for absolutely no reason at all. You can’t even argue we did it out of human compassion - because we happily closed the border with Pakistan and Bangladesh. Just not India
This is all on Boris and the government. Their decision. Their fuck-up. And monumental it is
Absolutely.
It was said at the time.
On here.
These government apologists are nuts. I know Cummings is disingenuous, but his portrayal of inner government as a largely chaotic function of Boris’s “supermarket trolley” instincts ran true.
I remember saying on here at the time, in these words: ‘if keeping the Indian border open means we blow the vaccine bonus, I will never vote Tory again’
And here we are. As you say, many of us on PB knew this was a calamitous mistake, with no justification. Yet they went ahead and did it. It is as absurd as it is tragic
Wasn't it also while you were whining about the weather and demanding more international travel be opened up ?
Probably. I was correct, nonetheless, about the Indian border
All of PB was correct about travel from India.
But some of us have been pointing out the dangers from the lack of border control from the start.
While others have been demanding more international travel when it suits them.
Perhaps if the airlines, airports and holiday obsessives had been less reckless during the last year then we'd have more international travel now.
I’ve been saying since February 2020 ‘close the fucking borders, Boris’
My whining about the weather - and God it was horrible - was not a desire to throw open flights to everywhere. It was just a lamentation about our fate: being stuck on a cold plaguey island with no means of escape
There’s few U.K. restrictions on outbound travel, and loads of flights operating to places all over the world for people who want to leave. The restrictions are around quarantine on people entering the U.K.
And I will be utilizing the opportunity to leave. I’m planning a research trip to Georgia, in the Caucasus, in July. Never been. I hear it’s great. Fingers x’d THEY don’t red list US
However up until now I have been a dutiful citizen. I stayed home as asked. I waited to get vaxxed. I sat through winter. I didn’t even scoot off to Portugal when it was briefly open - tho I was sorely tempted. I have great friends there
Now I am double jabbed and I am done with obeying government advice, because they literally have no clue what they are doing and therefore no clue what I should do. I see no greater risk for me and the world if I travel, as long as I obey the rules in any country I visit. I’m off
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Not really, the Biden administration actually wants to expand the G7 to include India, South Korea and Australia in a D10 of the world's biggest democratic economies to contain China and Russia.
It wants both the UK and EU in that group and is not interested in taking sides between them as long as the UK keeps an open border in Ireland
India is certainly another target for Biden's pitch. A bit of a loose cannon, but has heft. South Korea is interesting because that country has good ties with China and might be amenable to an arrangement with China dealing with North Korea.
I agree that Biden doesn't want to take sides between the EU and the UK on the Northern Ireland issue, although I suspect for three reasons he would side with the EU if forced: (1) the EU and members are collectively more important to his programme than the UK; (2) for cultural reasons he will instinctively adopt the Irish position; (3) he is on the side of people who respect treaties and the rule of law.
In general, though, the effort seems to be in talking the UK off the ledge. The Canadians have even offered counselling services for the NIP, which might be the ultimate humiliation.
This sounds like a classic Guardian, biased by omission.....you don't get 5 years in prison for just nicking a mobile phone.
Osime Brown was jailed for stealing a friend’s mobile phone, a crime that he and others say he did not commit. He was sentenced to five years for robbery, attempted robbery and perverting the course of justice.
"Osime’s two co-defendants pleaded guilty and did not receive custodial sentences."
So two people got no jail and one got 5 years....I think we can take it, he must have been doing something really bad / have a very long list of crimes. Not as claimed, he is a lovely lad and was just there trying to stop it.
I don't know we can merely assume that, but I find the opening bit in quotes including his denial of the crime a strange detail, since whilst convictions certainly happen to innocent people, we also cannot assume him innocent merely because he says he didn't do it.
I think what we can take from it, is the court saw his involvement as being the central player and nobody gets 5 years in the slammer for just running of with a "friends" mobile phone....I am not sure it even gets to court in most instances i.e. parents get involved and say give the phone back....you don't get 5 years in the slammer for swiping a mobile phone full stop if that is the full extent of the crimes you have been found guilty of, especially not a child and one with some sort of disability.
Without the required media access to quiz participants, this G7 is just a spin machine not worthy of the media coverage it is getting.
People (media and public) like a spectacle. Important people hob nobbing is pagentry but it is comforting pagentry. And if you are lucky you get a clip of Trudeau, Boris, Rutte and Macron laughing about Trump.
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Why is the Indian variant much more widely seeded in the UK compared to the rest of the EU? Because we allowed in 20,000 travellers from India. Because we kept the borders open
That’s it. @DavidL is, unusually, talking nonsense
We KNEW this was a race between the virus and our vaccine. By keeping the border with India open, we decided to run the final leg of this race with a 100 pound backpack weighing us down, for absolutely no reason at all. You can’t even argue we did it out of human compassion - because we happily closed the border with Pakistan and Bangladesh. Just not India
This is all on Boris and the government. Their decision. Their fuck-up. And monumental it is
Absolutely.
It was said at the time.
On here.
These government apologists are nuts. I know Cummings is disingenuous, but his portrayal of inner government as a largely chaotic function of Boris’s “supermarket trolley” instincts ran true.
I remember saying on here at the time, in these words: ‘if keeping the Indian border open means we blow the vaccine bonus, I will never vote Tory again’
And here we are. As you say, many of us on PB knew this was a calamitous mistake, with no justification. Yet they went ahead and did it. It is as absurd as it is tragic
Wasn't it also while you were whining about the weather and demanding more international travel be opened up ?
Probably. I was correct, nonetheless, about the Indian border
All of PB was correct about travel from India.
But some of us have been pointing out the dangers from the lack of border control from the start.
While others have been demanding more international travel when it suits them.
Perhaps if the airlines, airports and holiday obsessives had been less reckless during the last year then we'd have more international travel now.
I’ve been saying since February 2020 ‘close the fucking borders, Boris’
My whining about the weather - and God it was horrible - was not a desire to throw open flights to everywhere. It was just a lamentation about our fate: being stuck on a cold plaguey island with no means of escape
It all gives ammunition to the travel industry.
The weather is crap and people deserve a holiday and it will save jobs and Britain has to be open for business.
Repeated endlessly to the politicians until they start spouting it themselves.
The airlines are a classic example of giving them an inch and seeing them take a thousand miles.
My Mum used to say of Andy Burnham that he always looked like he needed a "good wash". Which is not good. I haven't heard her say it recently though - so perhaps that particular problem has gone way.
I think he's an ok bet if you think Starmer will fight the next election and lose it badly.
Ha ha really? He seems pretty clean to me, but maybe your mum has a higher bar than I do. He just seems like a lightweight to me. But maybe that's what people are into now.
It’s the age of the lightweight. Cf: Trudeau, Ardern.
Isn't that a bit harsh on Ardern? Agree on Trudeau though, that guy really grates with me.
Harper was a more heavyweight Canadian PM as was Martin before him but both lacked Trudeau's election winning charisma.
Am interested here. What makes a leader a "heavyweight" or a "lightweight"? Not particularly for you @HYUFD, but generally. Is not winning multiple elections, from seemingly improbable starting points, the very point of democratic politics?
For me, do you have a serious approach to the country’s challenges, and/or do you have the intellectual apparatus to have a serious approach?
Merkel has both. Biden at least one (and though not an intellectual his decades in service give him an outsized political intelligence).
By those criteria Starmer is more a heavyweight than the PM. Fat lot of use that is.
Appalling week for UK vaccination numbers. Driven by a weakness in 2nd doses: critical against Delta, and we know we have supply (mostly AZ). Absolutely accept a delay to re-opening may be needed to give more time for vaccination ... but how to justify wasting the time we have?
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Why is the Indian variant much more widely seeded in the UK compared to the rest of the EU? Because we allowed in 20,000 travellers from India. Because we kept the borders open
That’s it. @DavidL is, unusually, talking nonsense
We KNEW this was a race between the virus and our vaccine. By keeping the border with India open, we decided to run the final leg of this race with a 100 pound backpack weighing us down, for absolutely no reason at all. You can’t even argue we did it out of human compassion - because we happily closed the border with Pakistan and Bangladesh. Just not India
This is all on Boris and the government. Their decision. Their fuck-up. And monumental it is
I agree the apparent reason for keeping India off the red list was stupid, shocking even. Unfortunately that doesn't remove the need to deal with the circumstances of this ghastly disease as they are, whether those circumstances are due to bad luck or negligence.
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
Isn’t it just our time for our next wave and waves can’t be stopped by humans, just damage limited by vaccines and lockdowns?
Isn’t the problem here not lack of delivery, and the tenuous reasons for lack of delivery you are inventing but over promising? There is no magic wand to make Covid and occasional restrictions/living with it go away? Not vaccines. Vaccines was built up as being a magic Covid free freedom it was never going to be, that is the truth the third wave with some investable restrictions has proved isn’t it?
This is incomprehensible, sorry
Vaccines were not going to give us Covid free 2021 or 2022, merely allow us to remove restrictions and live with what was left.
Everyone who led us to believe vaccines would quickly get us living freely again, lied.
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Not really, the Biden administration actually wants to expand the G7 to include India, South Korea and Australia in a D10 of the world's biggest democratic economies to contain China and Russia.
It wants both the UK and EU in that group and is not interested in taking sides between them as long as the UK keeps an open border in Ireland
India is certainly another target for Biden's pitch. A bit of a loose cannon, but has heft. South Korea is interesting because that country has good ties with China and might be amenable to an arrangement with China dealing with North Korea.
I agree that Biden doesn't want to take sides between the EU and the UK on the Northern Ireland issue, although I suspect for three reasons he would side with the EU if forced: (1) the EU and members are collectively more important to his programme than the UK; (2) for cultural reasons he will instinctively adopt the Irish position; (3) he is on the side of people who respect treaties and the rule of law.
In general, though, the effort seems to be in talking the UK off the ledge. The Canadians have even offered counselling services for the NIP, which might be the ultimate humiliation.
Asia is the Biden administration's focus because that is where economic power is shifting and because China is more of a threat than Russia is, though Biden still needs Europe to come together with him to contain Putin.
Biden has a personal interest in Ireland yes and will not accept a hard border in Ireland though Boris is more focused on minimising the border in the Irish Sea while still avoiding a hard border in Ireland anyway
Lecturing and hectoring in a skirt or a different accent is not going to make a difference.
Yes, whoever leads Labour should adopt your mellow and discursive style.
And wear a skirt just for the hell of it. Beckham’s manskirt thing never really took off did it?
No it didn't. You don't see many men in skirts even here in Hampstead. We meet up for coffee and muffins, put this deeply sub-optimal world to rights in best sneery manner, but we do it wearing proper trousers.
My Mum used to say of Andy Burnham that he always looked like he needed a "good wash". Which is not good. I haven't heard her say it recently though - so perhaps that particular problem has gone way.
I think he's an ok bet if you think Starmer will fight the next election and lose it badly.
Ha ha really? He seems pretty clean to me, but maybe your mum has a higher bar than I do. He just seems like a lightweight to me. But maybe that's what people are into now.
It’s the age of the lightweight. Cf: Trudeau, Ardern.
Isn't that a bit harsh on Ardern? Agree on Trudeau though, that guy really grates with me.
Harper was a more heavyweight Canadian PM as was Martin before him but both lacked Trudeau's election winning charisma.
Am interested here. What makes a leader a "heavyweight" or a "lightweight"? Not particularly for you @HYUFD, but generally. Is not winning multiple elections, from seemingly improbable starting points, the very point of democratic politics?
Being intellectual, clever and interested in detailed policy makes you heavyweight, it is completely different from being able to win multiple elections which tends to be more to do with being charismatic in most democracies today.
Occasionally you do get a heavyweight and charismatic leader eg Macron or Obama and Thatcher but the two are separate qualities
Macron is let down by his (unnecessary) impulse to posture.
In fairness you stick people likely to have strong egos in a blooming great palace, call them Excellency, and surround them with flags, symbols an guards, and the urge to posture must be pretty strong.
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
Agree with point 2. The only difficulty I have with your points 1. and 2. is that I think "vastly fewer" arrivals has to be predicated on the idea that these were visits. But many of these people (indeed most I would wager given where the hotspots ended up) were coming home - who the hell was coming to the UK (to Bolton and Blackburn at that) on holiday in March and April?!??? If you want to come home you will find a way whatever it takes.
To avoid which, that logically brings us to your point 3. - an Australia style no exemptions for residents policy - politically (and indeed legally) very difficult as you are inevitably stopping British citizens of a specific ethnic background returning home. Indeed I think Australia is breaching its own law, not to mention international law, in barring its own citizens.
(It's not part of our law today but there is someting in Magna Carta about it - "In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision ")
The thing to have done was hotel quarantine all 20,000 for two weeks. Difficult but doable.
Yet we closed the border with Pakistan and no one sued us in The Hague?
This is egregious sophistry. We should have closed the border with India. As we did with Pakistan. Tough shit if you get stuck there. I imagine 80% of the country agrees with me
That’s it. We didn’t do it. The government royally fucked it up
My Mum used to say of Andy Burnham that he always looked like he needed a "good wash". Which is not good. I haven't heard her say it recently though - so perhaps that particular problem has gone way.
I think he's an ok bet if you think Starmer will fight the next election and lose it badly.
Ha ha really? He seems pretty clean to me, but maybe your mum has a higher bar than I do. He just seems like a lightweight to me. But maybe that's what people are into now.
It’s the age of the lightweight. Cf: Trudeau, Ardern.
Isn't that a bit harsh on Ardern? Agree on Trudeau though, that guy really grates with me.
Harper was a more heavyweight Canadian PM as was Martin before him but both lacked Trudeau's election winning charisma.
Am interested here. What makes a leader a "heavyweight" or a "lightweight"? Not particularly for you @HYUFD, but generally. Is not winning multiple elections, from seemingly improbable starting points, the very point of democratic politics?
For me, do you have a serious approach to the country’s challenges, and/or do you have the intellectual apparatus to have a serious approach?
Merkel has both. Biden at least one (and though not an intellectual his decades in service give him an outsized political intelligence).
By those criteria Starmer is more a heavyweight than the PM. Fat lot of use that is.
He probably is, as May was more heavyweight than Corbyn and Brown was more heavyweight than Cameron and Howard was more heavyweight than Blair but it is charisma that tends to win elections not being heavyweight.
See also Nixon v JFK or Bush v Gore or Trump v Clinton in the US when the more charismatic candidate narrowly beat the more heavyweight candidate
My Mum used to say of Andy Burnham that he always looked like he needed a "good wash". Which is not good. I haven't heard her say it recently though - so perhaps that particular problem has gone way.
I think he's an ok bet if you think Starmer will fight the next election and lose it badly.
Ha ha really? He seems pretty clean to me, but maybe your mum has a higher bar than I do. He just seems like a lightweight to me. But maybe that's what people are into now.
It’s the age of the lightweight. Cf: Trudeau, Ardern.
Isn't that a bit harsh on Ardern? Agree on Trudeau though, that guy really grates with me.
Harper was a more heavyweight Canadian PM as was Martin before him but both lacked Trudeau's election winning charisma.
Am interested here. What makes a leader a "heavyweight" or a "lightweight"? Not particularly for you @HYUFD, but generally. Is not winning multiple elections, from seemingly improbable starting points, the very point of democratic politics?
For me, do you have a serious approach to the country’s challenges, and/or do you have the intellectual apparatus to have a serious approach?
Merkel has both. Biden at least one (and though not an intellectual his decades in service give him an outsized political intelligence).
Isn't it what marketing types call "using the sizzle to sell the sausage"? Great leaders (Thatcher, Blair) has sizzle and sausage. Brown and May were all sausage no sizzle. Johnson is all sizzle no sausage, which is the problem.
Without the required media access to quiz participants, this G7 is just a spin machine not worthy of the media coverage it is getting.
People (media and public) like a spectacle. Important people hob nobbing is pagentry but it is comforting pagentry. And if you are lucky you get a clip of Trudeau, Boris, Rutte and Macron laughing about Trump.
I can’t have a clip of Trudeau without knowing with a few seconds of makeup he can do the Black and White Minstrel show. He already has turned up with the hair.
Appalling week for UK vaccination numbers. Driven by a weakness in 2nd doses: critical against Delta, and we know we have supply (mostly AZ). Absolutely accept a delay to re-opening may be needed to give more time for vaccination ... but how to justify wasting the time we have?
My Mum used to say of Andy Burnham that he always looked like he needed a "good wash". Which is not good. I haven't heard her say it recently though - so perhaps that particular problem has gone way.
I think he's an ok bet if you think Starmer will fight the next election and lose it badly.
Ha ha really? He seems pretty clean to me, but maybe your mum has a higher bar than I do. He just seems like a lightweight to me. But maybe that's what people are into now.
It’s the age of the lightweight. Cf: Trudeau, Ardern.
Isn't that a bit harsh on Ardern? Agree on Trudeau though, that guy really grates with me.
Harper was a more heavyweight Canadian PM as was Martin before him but both lacked Trudeau's election winning charisma.
Am interested here. What makes a leader a "heavyweight" or a "lightweight"? Not particularly for you @HYUFD, but generally. Is not winning multiple elections, from seemingly improbable starting points, the very point of democratic politics?
For me, do you have a serious approach to the country’s challenges, and/or do you have the intellectual apparatus to have a serious approach?
Merkel has both. Biden at least one (and though not an intellectual his decades in service give him an outsized political intelligence).
Isn't it what marketing types call "using the sizzle to sell the sausage"? Great leaders (Thatcher, Blair) has sizzle and sausage. Brown and May were all sausage no sizzle. Johnson is all sizzle no sausage, which is the problem.
Johnson's sausage has played a prominent role in his life.
Appalling week for UK vaccination numbers. Driven by a weakness in 2nd doses: critical against Delta, and we know we have supply (mostly AZ). Absolutely accept a delay to re-opening may be needed to give more time for vaccination ... but how to justify wasting the time we have?
The government has tended to lapse into lethargy unless pushed hard.
I'd guess that the current rate of vaccination was part of a plan drawn up months ago and nobody has tried to alter it.
They got to a max 600k a day quite quickly and it seemed like well that's job done.
It is like the testing, they got to 100k, with lots of gusto (and a bit of fudging the numbers), it did expand a bit further, then it seemed to ease up and they got caught out when schools went back.
While poor Sid in the warehouse is running out of room to stash AZN vaccines....he is now having to take them home and store them in his own fridge.
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
Agree with point 2. The only difficulty I have with your points 1. and 2. is that I think "vastly fewer" arrivals has to be predicated on the idea that these were visits. But many of these people (indeed most I would wager given where the hotspots ended up) were coming home - who the hell was coming to the UK (to Bolton and Blackburn at that) on holiday in March and April?!??? If you want to come home you will find a way whatever it takes.
To avoid which, that logically brings us to your point 3. - an Australia style no exemptions for residents policy - politically (and indeed legally) very difficult as you are inevitably stopping British citizens of a specific ethnic background returning home. Indeed I think Australia is breaching its own law, not to mention international law, in barring its own citizens.
(It's not part of our law today but there is someting in Magna Carta about it - "In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision ")
The thing to have done was hotel quarantine all 20,000 for two weeks. Difficult but doable.
Yet we closed the border with Pakistan and no one sued us in The Hague?
This is egregious sophistry. We should have closed the border with India. As we did with Pakistan. Tough shit if you get stuck there. I imagine 80% of the country agrees with me
That’s it. We didn’t do it. The government royally fucked it up
We *didn’t* close the border with anyone. We have no border with those countries People from Pakistan and Bangladesh just caught connecting flights and came through another border or accepted quarantine. If India had been treated the same that’s what people from there would have done too. Only way would be to close the borders with everywhere. Which we should have done.
My Mum used to say of Andy Burnham that he always looked like he needed a "good wash". Which is not good. I haven't heard her say it recently though - so perhaps that particular problem has gone way.
I think he's an ok bet if you think Starmer will fight the next election and lose it badly.
Ha ha really? He seems pretty clean to me, but maybe your mum has a higher bar than I do. He just seems like a lightweight to me. But maybe that's what people are into now.
It’s the age of the lightweight. Cf: Trudeau, Ardern.
Isn't that a bit harsh on Ardern? Agree on Trudeau though, that guy really grates with me.
Harper was a more heavyweight Canadian PM as was Martin before him but both lacked Trudeau's election winning charisma.
Am interested here. What makes a leader a "heavyweight" or a "lightweight"? Not particularly for you @HYUFD, but generally. Is not winning multiple elections, from seemingly improbable starting points, the very point of democratic politics?
For me, do you have a serious approach to the country’s challenges, and/or do you have the intellectual apparatus to have a serious approach?
Merkel has both. Biden at least one (and though not an intellectual his decades in service give him an outsized political intelligence).
Isn't it what marketing types call "using the sizzle to sell the sausage"? Great leaders (Thatcher, Blair) has sizzle and sausage. Brown and May were all sausage no sizzle. Johnson is all sizzle no sausage, which is the problem.
Greatly simplified, yes.
Brown and May were all sausage but neither seemed actually good at managing the sausage factory.
The best combination is “much sausage and some sizzle”, with the sizzle deployed in aid of the sausage.
Johnson deploys the sizzle in aid of the sizzle. And hands you the stick.
Without the required media access to quiz participants, this G7 is just a spin machine not worthy of the media coverage it is getting.
People (media and public) like a spectacle. Important people hob nobbing is pagentry but it is comforting pagentry. And if you are lucky you get a clip of Trudeau, Boris, Rutte and Macron laughing about Trump.
I can’t have a clip of Trudeau without knowing with a few seconds of makeup he can do the Black and White Minstrel show. He already has turned up with the hair.
And yet. He continues to win. Looks likely to win again. Same with Ardern. It is the sine qua non of politics.
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Why is the Indian variant much more widely seeded in the UK compared to the rest of the EU? Because we allowed in 20,000 travellers from India. Because we kept the borders open
That’s it. @DavidL is, unusually, talking nonsense
We KNEW this was a race between the virus and our vaccine. By keeping the border with India open, we decided to run the final leg of this race with a 100 pound backpack weighing us down, for absolutely no reason at all. You can’t even argue we did it out of human compassion - because we happily closed the border with Pakistan and Bangladesh. Just not India
This is all on Boris and the government. Their decision. Their fuck-up. And monumental it is
I agree the apparent reason for keeping India off the red list was stupid, shocking even. Unfortunately that doesn't remove the need to deal with the circumstances of this ghastly disease as they are, whether those circumstances are due to bad luck or negligence.
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
I don’t understand the basis for thinking that vastly fewer would have come here (however we treated them when they got here). These weren’t Indian “traveller”. They were British citizens with family links in India. Anyway they could find to get back, they were going to get back. If they were just coming on holiday the ten day quarantine would have been enough deterrent. That isn’t to say that it couldn’t have been managed differently/better.
Australia have “managed it” by effectively denying a chunk of their own population the right to go home. There are Australians around the world who are temporarily (they hope) stateless.
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Why is the Indian variant much more widely seeded in the UK compared to the rest of the EU? Because we allowed in 20,000 travellers from India. Because we kept the borders open
That’s it. @DavidL is, unusually, talking nonsense
We KNEW this was a race between the virus and our vaccine. By keeping the border with India open, we decided to run the final leg of this race with a 100 pound backpack weighing us down, for absolutely no reason at all. You can’t even argue we did it out of human compassion - because we happily closed the border with Pakistan and Bangladesh. Just not India
This is all on Boris and the government. Their decision. Their fuck-up. And monumental it is
I agree the apparent reason for keeping India off the red list was stupid, shocking even. Unfortunately that doesn't remove the need to deal with the circumstances of this ghastly disease as they are, whether those circumstances are due to bad luck or negligence.
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
Isn’t it just our time for our next wave and waves can’t be stopped by humans, just damage limited by vaccines and lockdowns?
Isn’t the problem here not lack of delivery, and the tenuous reasons for lack of delivery you are inventing but over promising? There is no magic wand to make Covid and occasional restrictions/living with it go away? Not vaccines. Vaccines was built up as being a magic Covid free freedom it was never going to be, that is the truth the third wave with some inevitable restrictions has proved isn’t it?
There was always going to be a third wave when we opened up (see Andrew Lilico's many tweets on this), but the scale was the question and whether we needed to fret because it was cases and not hospital patients.
Allowing a variant that is 60% more transmissible to seed into the country by failing to close border to India when it was clear what would happen has meant the third wave is big enough to cause problems.
No.
You are scape goating Boris unfairly.
Where we are now was always inevitable, those promising this couldn’t happen built false hope by pontificating without real knowledge or foresight
They said with the vaccinations programme it couldn’t come to this. They lied.
And they are notably absent from this forum today!
My Mum used to say of Andy Burnham that he always looked like he needed a "good wash". Which is not good. I haven't heard her say it recently though - so perhaps that particular problem has gone way.
I think he's an ok bet if you think Starmer will fight the next election and lose it badly.
Ha ha really? He seems pretty clean to me, but maybe your mum has a higher bar than I do. He just seems like a lightweight to me. But maybe that's what people are into now.
It’s the age of the lightweight. Cf: Trudeau, Ardern.
Isn't that a bit harsh on Ardern? Agree on Trudeau though, that guy really grates with me.
Harper was a more heavyweight Canadian PM as was Martin before him but both lacked Trudeau's election winning charisma.
Am interested here. What makes a leader a "heavyweight" or a "lightweight"? Not particularly for you @HYUFD, but generally. Is not winning multiple elections, from seemingly improbable starting points, the very point of democratic politics?
For me, do you have a serious approach to the country’s challenges, and/or do you have the intellectual apparatus to have a serious approach?
Merkel has both. Biden at least one (and though not an intellectual his decades in service give him an outsized political intelligence).
Isn't it what marketing types call "using the sizzle to sell the sausage"? Great leaders (Thatcher, Blair) has sizzle and sausage. Brown and May were all sausage no sizzle. Johnson is all sizzle no sausage, which is the problem.
Greatly simplified, yes.
Brown and May were all sausage but neither seemed actually good at managing the sausage factory.
The best combination is “much sausage and some sizzle”, with the sizzle deployed in aid of the sausage.
Johnson deploys the sizzle in aid of the sizzle. And hands you the stick.
Boris reminds me somewhat of the boss in Dilbert...
My wife and I had a long chat this morning and we're both of the same mind, if the UK falls into permanent measures we're going to leave the country even if we have to sell the house we've just bought and leave people behind. The life that the government and scientists have planned for us isn't real life, it's a facsimile of it.
Without the required media access to quiz participants, this G7 is just a spin machine not worthy of the media coverage it is getting.
People (media and public) like a spectacle. Important people hob nobbing is pagentry but it is comforting pagentry. And if you are lucky you get a clip of Trudeau, Boris, Rutte and Macron laughing about Trump.
I can’t have a clip of Trudeau without knowing with a few seconds of makeup he can do the Black and White Minstrel show. He already has turned up with the hair.
And yet. He continues to win. Looks likely to win again. Same with Ardern. It is the sine qua non of politics.
What I think is new is that it’s possible to reach the top and stay at the top without any “sausage” at all.
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Not really, the Biden administration actually wants to expand the G7 to include India, South Korea and Australia in a D10 of the world's biggest democratic economies to contain China and Russia.
It wants both the UK and EU in that group and is not interested in taking sides between them as long as the UK keeps an open border in Ireland
India is certainly another target for Biden's pitch. A bit of a loose cannon, but has heft. South Korea is interesting because that country has good ties with China and might be amenable to an arrangement with China dealing with North Korea.
I agree that Biden doesn't want to take sides between the EU and the UK on the Northern Ireland issue, although I suspect for three reasons he would side with the EU if forced: (1) the EU and members are collectively more important to his programme than the UK; (2) for cultural reasons he will instinctively adopt the Irish position; (3) he is on the side of people who respect treaties and the rule of law.
In general, though, the effort seems to be in talking the UK off the ledge. The Canadians have even offered counselling services for the NIP, which might be the ultimate humiliation.
Asia is the Biden administration's focus because that is where economic power is shifting and because China is more of a threat than Russia is, though Biden still needs Europe to come together with him to contain Putin.
Biden has a personal interest in Ireland yes and will not accept a hard border in Ireland though Boris is more focused on minimising the border in the Irish Sea while still avoiding a hard border in Ireland anyway
That's not quite my understanding of Biden's thinking. To adopt an old UK adage, he wants to keep China out, Europe in and Russia down* He sees China's power and growth as an existential threat to the US that the US can no longer contain on its own and needs allies. He expects those allies to do heavy lifting vis a vis China. Whether they do, remains to be seen.
* Was "Keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down" for UK foreign policy objectives, but that's irrelevant now.
Incidentally, Biden's foreign policy objectives aren't massively different from Trump's. He is going about it in a much co-operative way.
My wife and I had a long chat this morning and we're both of the same mind, if the UK falls into permanent measures we're going to leave the country even if we have to sell the house we've just bought and leave people behind. The life that the government and scientists have planned for us isn't real life, it's a facsimile of it.
Which is why it won't happen. FOMO. Ultimately the country will turn on the TV and see how the rest of the world is living and want some of that.
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
Agree with point 2. The only difficulty I have with your points 1. and 2. is that I think "vastly fewer" arrivals has to be predicated on the idea that these were visits. But many of these people (indeed most I would wager given where the hotspots ended up) were coming home - who the hell was coming to the UK (to Bolton and Blackburn at that) on holiday in March and April?!??? If you want to come home you will find a way whatever it takes.
To avoid which, that logically brings us to your point 3. - an Australia style no exemptions for residents policy - politically (and indeed legally) very difficult as you are inevitably stopping British citizens of a specific ethnic background returning home. Indeed I think Australia is breaching its own law, not to mention international law, in barring its own citizens.
(It's not part of our law today but there is someting in Magna Carta about it - "In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision ")
The thing to have done was hotel quarantine all 20,000 for two weeks. Difficult but doable.
Yet we closed the border with Pakistan and no one sued us in The Hague?
This is egregious sophistry. We should have closed the border with India. As we did with Pakistan. Tough shit if you get stuck there. I imagine 80% of the country agrees with me
That’s it. We didn’t do it. The government royally fucked it up
We *didn’t* close the border with anyone. We have no border with those countries People from Pakistan and Bangladesh just caught connecting flights and came through another border or accepted quarantine. If India had been treated the same that’s what people from there would have done too. Only way would be to close the borders with everywhere. Which we should have done.
Yes. I understand we don’t have a land frontier with Pakistan. FFS
We could have just checked flight records to see where people have recently been. Jesus it’s not hard. If you were recently in Pakistan or India, then nope, you can’t come in. Countries do this all the time
It would have meant looooong waits at airports. Tough. It’s a plague
Why are you so resistant to the simple idea of red listing India earlier? As we red listed Pakistan and Portugal? Is it some silly fear of “racism”?
Without the required media access to quiz participants, this G7 is just a spin machine not worthy of the media coverage it is getting.
People (media and public) like a spectacle. Important people hob nobbing is pagentry but it is comforting pagentry. And if you are lucky you get a clip of Trudeau, Boris, Rutte and Macron laughing about Trump.
I can’t have a clip of Trudeau without knowing with a few seconds of makeup he can do the Black and White Minstrel show. He already has turned up with the hair.
And yet. He continues to win. Looks likely to win again. Same with Ardern. It is the sine qua non of politics.
Andrew Scheer and the Canadian Conservatives actually came out ahead in votes at the 2019 federal election, but Trudeau still won.
Funny... I don't remember too many compliants from the Left about the unfairness of the electoral system at the time.
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Not really, the Biden administration actually wants to expand the G7 to include India, South Korea and Australia in a D10 of the world's biggest democratic economies to contain China and Russia.
It wants both the UK and EU in that group and is not interested in taking sides between them as long as the UK keeps an open border in Ireland
India is certainly another target for Biden's pitch. A bit of a loose cannon, but has heft. South Korea is interesting because that country has good ties with China and might be amenable to an arrangement with China dealing with North Korea.
I agree that Biden doesn't want to take sides between the EU and the UK on the Northern Ireland issue, although I suspect for three reasons he would side with the EU if forced: (1) the EU and members are collectively more important to his programme than the UK; (2) for cultural reasons he will instinctively adopt the Irish position; (3) he is on the side of people who respect treaties and the rule of law.
In general, though, the effort seems to be in talking the UK off the ledge. The Canadians have even offered counselling services for the NIP, which might be the ultimate humiliation.
Asia is the Biden administration's focus because that is where economic power is shifting and because China is more of a threat than Russia is, though Biden still needs Europe to come together with him to contain Putin.
Biden has a personal interest in Ireland yes and will not accept a hard border in Ireland though Boris is more focused on minimising the border in the Irish Sea while still avoiding a hard border in Ireland anyway
That's not quite my understanding of Biden's thinking. To adopt an old UK adage, he wants to keep China out, Europe in and Russia down* He sees China's power and growth as an existential threat to the US that the US can no longer contain on its own and needs allies. He expects those allies to do heavy lifting. Whether they do, remains to be seen.
* Was "Keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down" for UK foreign policy objectives, but that's irrelevant now.
Yes, agree on this. But that’s also why the U.K. is not irrelevant. We’re still the most reliable support act.
He simply wants us to stop fucking about and make it up with the EU, and his preference will be not to take sides.
My wife and I had a long chat this morning and we're both of the same mind, if the UK falls into permanent measures we're going to leave the country even if we have to sell the house we've just bought and leave people behind. The life that the government and scientists have planned for us isn't real life, it's a facsimile of it.
We probably would do a variation - spend several months a year somewhere else and come back to the UK for various things but I share your views.
Driving back from Sainsburys at Beckton, I drove into the Barking Road by the Town Hall to see a crowd of people - a wedding? Free Palestine rally? Group come to sing the praises of Mayor Fiaz?
No.
The queue was for the vaccination centre in the leisure centre which has opened on a Saturday for the first time - the queue was massive, hundreds of people of all ages.
The questions are a) why this centre wasn't open before and b) should we not realise vaccine "refusal" isn't always based on high or low principle but simply on the fact people are too busy working Monday-Friday to come for a vaccine appointment?
I can only hope this will continue and we'll start to see Newham catching up other parts of London and the country in terms of vaccinations.
Without the required media access to quiz participants, this G7 is just a spin machine not worthy of the media coverage it is getting.
People (media and public) like a spectacle. Important people hob nobbing is pagentry but it is comforting pagentry. And if you are lucky you get a clip of Trudeau, Boris, Rutte and Macron laughing about Trump.
I can’t have a clip of Trudeau without knowing with a few seconds of makeup he can do the Black and White Minstrel show. He already has turned up with the hair.
And yet. He continues to win. Looks likely to win again. Same with Ardern. It is the sine qua non of politics.
Andrew Scheer and the Canadian Conservatives actually came out ahead in votes at the 2019 federal election, but Trudeau still won.
Funny... I don't remember too many compliants from the Left about the unfairness of the electoral system at the time.
Well Trudeau himself had belatedly 'discovered' changing the voting system was hard after he won the first time, how fortunate for him.
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
Agree with point 2. The only difficulty I have with your points 1. and 2. is that I think "vastly fewer" arrivals has to be predicated on the idea that these were visits. But many of these people (indeed most I would wager given where the hotspots ended up) were coming home - who the hell was coming to the UK (to Bolton and Blackburn at that) on holiday in March and April?!??? If you want to come home you will find a way whatever it takes.
To avoid which, that logically brings us to your point 3. - an Australia style no exemptions for residents policy - politically (and indeed legally) very difficult as you are inevitably stopping British citizens of a specific ethnic background returning home. Indeed I think Australia is breaching its own law, not to mention international law, in barring its own citizens.
(It's not part of our law today but there is someting in Magna Carta about it - "In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision ")
The thing to have done was hotel quarantine all 20,000 for two weeks. Difficult but doable.
Yet we closed the border with Pakistan and no one sued us in The Hague?
This is egregious sophistry. We should have closed the border with India. As we did with Pakistan. Tough shit if you get stuck there. I imagine 80% of the country agrees with me
That’s it. We didn’t do it. The government royally fucked it up
We *didn’t* close the border with anyone. We have no border with those countries People from Pakistan and Bangladesh just caught connecting flights and came through another border or accepted quarantine. If India had been treated the same that’s what people from there would have done too. Only way would be to close the borders with everywhere. Which we should have done.
Yes. I understand we don’t have a land frontier with Pakistan. FFS
We could have just checked flight records to see where people have recently been. Jesus it’s not hard. If you were recently in Pakistan or India, then nope, you can’t come in. Countries do this all the time
It would have meant looooong waits at airports. Tough. It’s a plague
Why are you so resistant to the simple idea of red listing India earlier? As we red listed Pakistan and Portugal? Is it some silly fear of “racism”?
I am getting increasingly irate with DougSeal’s contention that it was just “U.K. citizens returning home”.
What the hell were they doing in India - aka PLAGUE CENTRAL - in the first place? Well, we know what; they were visiting relatives and getting a bit of sun. @Foxy called them “Gujarati snowbirds” or some such.
We watched it all happen in real time and many of us called it out at the time.
It is likely Boris will still announce he will allow 50 wedding guests at receptions indoors, 100 outdoors from June 21st on Monday, just there will still not be unlimited wedding guests allowed
He has to! He can’t open up football and cricket and not Weddings!
True, though football and cricket stadiums are also still not allowed full capacity either
That means nothing, how often are they at capacity? Xxx thousands of people getting drunk together, dancing, singing their heads off and partying versus you can’t have your wedding will make a dangerous laughing stock of the government guidance.
They would normally be at full capacity for the big England matches in the Euros, they won't be allowed full capacity this tournament.
You can also still have a wedding, just not with 150, 200+ guests. Large weddings are likely a thing of the past for the foreseeable future anyway, I would imagine the current limit of 30 wedding guests will be increased to 50-100 from June 21st, the rest can either watch on livestream or attend a separate reception event later
you appreciate the hard sell with the mass drunken revelry allowed elsewhere for something more ephemeral?
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Why is the Indian variant much more widely seeded in the UK compared to the rest of the EU? Because we allowed in 20,000 travellers from India. Because we kept the borders open
That’s it. @DavidL is, unusually, talking nonsense
We KNEW this was a race between the virus and our vaccine. By keeping the border with India open, we decided to run the final leg of this race with a 100 pound backpack weighing us down, for absolutely no reason at all. You can’t even argue we did it out of human compassion - because we happily closed the border with Pakistan and Bangladesh. Just not India
This is all on Boris and the government. Their decision. Their fuck-up. And monumental it is
I agree the apparent reason for keeping India off the red list was stupid, shocking even. Unfortunately that doesn't remove the need to deal with the circumstances of this ghastly disease as they are, whether those circumstances are due to bad luck or negligence.
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
I don’t understand the basis for thinking that vastly fewer would have come here (however we treated them when they got here). These weren’t Indian “traveller”. They were British citizens with family links in India. Anyway they could find to get back, they were going to get back. If they were just coming on holiday the ten day quarantine would have been enough deterrent. That isn’t to say that it couldn’t have been managed differently/better.
Australia have “managed it” by effectively denying a chunk of their own population the right to go home. There are Australians around the world who are temporarily (they hope) stateless.
Pathetic. So they have to wait a few weeks in the Indian sun. It’s not a jail sentence. People around the world have been separated from family and friends for many months, it is sad but it’s a plague
Now, because of our feeble government, many more more will die of the Indian variant, many more businesses will go bust, many more people will topple into depression, the country will sink even further into debt
As for Australia, I have lots of close family there (that I have not seen since 2019). They are all delighted they can live normal lives and they are very glad the borders are tightly shut
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Why is the Indian variant much more widely seeded in the UK compared to the rest of the EU? Because we allowed in 20,000 travellers from India. Because we kept the borders open
That’s it. @DavidL is, unusually, talking nonsense
We KNEW this was a race between the virus and our vaccine. By keeping the border with India open, we decided to run the final leg of this race with a 100 pound backpack weighing us down, for absolutely no reason at all. You can’t even argue we did it out of human compassion - because we happily closed the border with Pakistan and Bangladesh. Just not India
This is all on Boris and the government. Their decision. Their fuck-up. And monumental it is
I agree the apparent reason for keeping India off the red list was stupid, shocking even. Unfortunately that doesn't remove the need to deal with the circumstances of this ghastly disease as they are, whether those circumstances are due to bad luck or negligence.
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
I don’t understand the basis for thinking that vastly fewer would have come here (however we treated them when they got here). These weren’t Indian “traveller”. They were British citizens with family links in India. Anyway they could find to get back, they were going to get back. If they were just coming on holiday the ten day quarantine would have been enough deterrent. That isn’t to say that it couldn’t have been managed differently/better.
Australia have “managed it” by effectively denying a chunk of their own population the right to go home. There are Australians around the world who are temporarily (they hope) stateless.
Pathetic. So they have to wait a few weeks in the Indian sun.
My wife and I had a long chat this morning and we're both of the same mind, if the UK falls into permanent measures we're going to leave the country even if we have to sell the house we've just bought and leave people behind. The life that the government and scientists have planned for us isn't real life, it's a facsimile of it.
Which is why it won't happen. FOMO. Ultimately the country will turn on the TV and see how the rest of the world is living and want some of that.
Unless the rest of the world turns into us. Canada still terrible europe pretty bad for restrictions Asia not great either and australia prison island. There may be nowhere to escape
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
Agree with point 2. The only difficulty I have with your points 1. and 2. is that I think "vastly fewer" arrivals has to be predicated on the idea that these were visits. But many of these people (indeed most I would wager given where the hotspots ended up) were coming home - who the hell was coming to the UK (to Bolton and Blackburn at that) on holiday in March and April?!??? If you want to come home you will find a way whatever it takes.
To avoid which, that logically brings us to your point 3. - an Australia style no exemptions for residents policy - politically (and indeed legally) very difficult as you are inevitably stopping British citizens of a specific ethnic background returning home. Indeed I think Australia is breaching its own law, not to mention international law, in barring its own citizens.
(It's not part of our law today but there is someting in Magna Carta about it - "In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision ")
The thing to have done was hotel quarantine all 20,000 for two weeks. Difficult but doable.
Yet we closed the border with Pakistan and no one sued us in The Hague?
This is egregious sophistry. We should have closed the border with India. As we did with Pakistan. Tough shit if you get stuck there. I imagine 80% of the country agrees with me
That’s it. We didn’t do it. The government royally fucked it up
We *didn’t* close the border with anyone. We have no border with those countries People from Pakistan and Bangladesh just caught connecting flights and came through another border or accepted quarantine. If India had been treated the same that’s what people from there would have done too. Only way would be to close the borders with everywhere. Which we should have done.
Yes. I understand we don’t have a land frontier with Pakistan. FFS
We could have just checked flight records to see where people have recently been. Jesus it’s not hard. If you were recently in Pakistan or India, then nope, you can’t come in. Countries do this all the time
It would have meant looooong waits at airports. Tough. It’s a plague
Why are you so resistant to the simple idea of red listing India earlier? As we red listed Pakistan and Portugal? Is it some silly fear of “racism”?
I am getting increasingly irate with DougSeal’s contention that it was just “U.K. citizens returning home”.
What the hell were they doing in India - aka PLAGUE CENTRAL - in the first place? Well, we know what; they were visiting relatives and getting a bit of sun. @Foxy called them “Gujarati snowbirds” or some such.
We watched it all happen in real time and many of us called it out at the time.
My wife and I had a long chat this morning and we're both of the same mind, if the UK falls into permanent measures we're going to leave the country even if we have to sell the house we've just bought and leave people behind. The life that the government and scientists have planned for us isn't real life, it's a facsimile of it.
We probably would do a variation - spend several months a year somewhere else and come back to the UK for various things but I share your views.
We still have 3 of 4 elderly parents left or we would certainly be looking at it.
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Why is the Indian variant much more widely seeded in the UK compared to the rest of the EU? Because we allowed in 20,000 travellers from India. Because we kept the borders open
That’s it. @DavidL is, unusually, talking nonsense
We KNEW this was a race between the virus and our vaccine. By keeping the border with India open, we decided to run the final leg of this race with a 100 pound backpack weighing us down, for absolutely no reason at all. You can’t even argue we did it out of human compassion - because we happily closed the border with Pakistan and Bangladesh. Just not India
This is all on Boris and the government. Their decision. Their fuck-up. And monumental it is
I agree the apparent reason for keeping India off the red list was stupid, shocking even. Unfortunately that doesn't remove the need to deal with the circumstances of this ghastly disease as they are, whether those circumstances are due to bad luck or negligence.
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
I don’t understand the basis for thinking that vastly fewer would have come here (however we treated them when they got here). These weren’t Indian “traveller”. They were British citizens with family links in India. Anyway they could find to get back, they were going to get back. If they were just coming on holiday the ten day quarantine would have been enough deterrent. That isn’t to say that it couldn’t have been managed differently/better.
Australia have “managed it” by effectively denying a chunk of their own population the right to go home. There are Australians around the world who are temporarily (they hope) stateless.
Pathetic. So they have to wait a few weeks in the Indian sun.
I am in the unusual situation on here of saying something nice about Boris Johnson when everyone else is castigating him, but I think he is doing a good job of genial host at G7 in Cornwall.
In diplomatic terms the G7 is a missed opportunity for the UK, but the issues there go beyond event management. The really significant diplomatic shift, the biggest for some years, is Biden's move to establish a new American world order and to bring the remaining liberal democracies into it. His scope is ambitious. A Transatlantic settlement would have been music to the ears of a previous UK administration but the UK burnt the transatlantic bridge role with Brexit. The key prospect for Biden's pitch is the EU with the UK somewhat sidelined.
On Covid measures, I mostly agree with @DavidL. We have to deal with the virus situation as it is, and not as we might hope it to be. I do think the vaccine risk assessments are sound, from what I have seen, and the UK vaccine rollout remains pretty good.
Dealing with the virus isn’t really a competition but many of us pointed out that the UK’s vaccine rollout was much better than others. The assumption was we’d get out of lockdown ahead of them. But the delay in restricting travel from India means that this now won’t happen. https://twitter.com/DavidGauke/status/1403617838972248065
This is complete nonsense. The idea that we were going to stop the delta variant catching hold in this country is a fantasy unless we turn ourselves into NZ. What has stopped us from going ahead on 21st June is the poor effort with vaccines over the last month. That in turn has been driven by a failure to make the best use of the available resources, specifically AZ. That in turn has been driven by very poor risk assessments and a peculiar lack of urgency in maximising vaccination.
There is plenty to criticise the government for but failing to stop a more transmissible variant of a virus in broad circulation is not one of them. Something like 90%+ of cases are now delta. If we had started with a lower base by reducing the number of cases imported we would still have got there pretty rapidly.
Not really, the Biden administration actually wants to expand the G7 to include India, South Korea and Australia in a D10 of the world's biggest democratic economies to contain China and Russia.
It wants both the UK and EU in that group and is not interested in taking sides between them as long as the UK keeps an open border in Ireland
India is certainly another target for Biden's pitch. A bit of a loose cannon, but has heft. South Korea is interesting because that country has good ties with China and might be amenable to an arrangement with China dealing with North Korea.
I agree that Biden doesn't want to take sides between the EU and the UK on the Northern Ireland issue, although I suspect for three reasons he would side with the EU if forced: (1) the EU and members are collectively more important to his programme than the UK; (2) for cultural reasons he will instinctively adopt the Irish position; (3) he is on the side of people who respect treaties and the rule of law.
In general, though, the effort seems to be in talking the UK off the ledge. The Canadians have even offered counselling services for the NIP, which might be the ultimate humiliation.
Asia is the Biden administration's focus because that is where economic power is shifting and because China is more of a threat than Russia is, though Biden still needs Europe to come together with him to contain Putin.
Biden has a personal interest in Ireland yes and will not accept a hard border in Ireland though Boris is more focused on minimising the border in the Irish Sea while still avoiding a hard border in Ireland anyway
That's not quite my understanding of Biden's thinking. To adopt an old UK adage, he wants to keep China out, Europe in and Russia down* He sees China's power and growth as an existential threat to the US that the US can no longer contain on its own and needs allies. He expects those allies to do heavy lifting vis a vis China. Whether they do, remains to be seen.
* Was "Keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down" for UK foreign policy objectives, but that's irrelevant now.
Incidentally, Biden's foreign policy objectives aren't massively different from Trump's. He is going about it in a much co-operative way.
As far as China is concerned Biden needs India and Japan and South Korea in more than Europe, Europe is more useful to the US to contain Russia.
Biden is much more wary of Putin than Trump was, both are China sceptics but Biden is better able to build the alliances the US needs
And one of those is funded by a suspected murderer of 8 African porters...
So flipping what? All the Telegraph has done is provide a handy list of the next statues to fall. How long does it take to edit a web page so the SlaveMaster Professor of Sums becomes the Professor of Sums?
Bringing this back to politics, odds are that this fuckup will end up haunting Boris. For the simple reason that our memories and judgement on any event or story are overwhelmingly dominated by "how it ended."
Up until Delta, Boris was golden. Yes, he'd fucked up at the start, messed up with PPE, got the test and trace screwed up, and dilly-dallied in the autumn and cost us a supercharged second wave.
But the vaccine procurement and rollout rode to his rescue and we were ending the pandemic with a perfect narrative. And that's what dominates our memories.
And now this. The dominant narrative will now be: "he screwed up, and we ended up with an extra four weeks of restrictions and a third wave."
Yes, we were always looking at an exit wave - but not like this and not this soon. It was supposed to come after the exit and be smaller than this. Not be swelling weeks in advance of the exit, and with the expected exit wave then very likely to cause an anticipated wavelet to be a full-on wave.
He's caught himself in a cleft stick. He can't risk opening up with the rising hospitalisations in the younger echelons. That's a pretty bad narrative for him. Delaying is also a bad narrative for him.
All because of the cock-up in April with the red-list.
(And it's why the conspiracy theories that "He loves doing this," and "It's all to show off his power," and "There's no risk, it's all made up," don't hold much water. He and his closest advisers will have been desperately combing through all the facts to try to find a way out that didn't involve that cleft stick)
Without the required media access to quiz participants, this G7 is just a spin machine not worthy of the media coverage it is getting.
People (media and public) like a spectacle. Important people hob nobbing is pagentry but it is comforting pagentry. And if you are lucky you get a clip of Trudeau, Boris, Rutte and Macron laughing about Trump.
I can’t have a clip of Trudeau without knowing with a few seconds of makeup he can do the Black and White Minstrel show. He already has turned up with the hair.
And yet. He continues to win. Looks likely to win again. Same with Ardern. It is the sine qua non of politics.
Andrew Scheer and the Canadian Conservatives actually came out ahead in votes at the 2019 federal election, but Trudeau still won.
Funny... I don't remember too many compliants from the Left about the unfairness of the electoral system at the time.
Actually the Left in Canada were incandescent. Particularly as electoral reform was one of the major prongs Trudeau won the previous election on. The system hugely benefits the centre. Which is where Trudeau sits.
And one of those is funded by a suspected murderer of 8 African porters...
So flipping what? All the Telegraph has done is provide a handy list of the next statues to fall. How long does it take to edit a web page so the SlaveMaster Professor of Sums becomes the Professor of Sums?
The funding for their job is coming from funds setup by these people....so they are happy to take it to keep themselves employed, but also boycotting teaching those at another college, because it is funded by a similar problematic individual.
That's rank hypocrisy. They could always go and teach at New F##ksticks Metropolitan University of Wokery, but perhaps that doesn't pay as well, give them access to the same world class facilities (not insignificantly funded by these problematic individuals) or the status they desire.
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
Agree with point 2. The only difficulty I have with your points 1. and 2. is that I think "vastly fewer" arrivals has to be predicated on the idea that these were visits. But many of these people (indeed most I would wager given where the hotspots ended up) were coming home - who the hell was coming to the UK (to Bolton and Blackburn at that) on holiday in March and April?!??? If you want to come home you will find a way whatever it takes.
To avoid which, that logically brings us to your point 3. - an Australia style no exemptions for residents policy - politically (and indeed legally) very difficult as you are inevitably stopping British citizens of a specific ethnic background returning home. Indeed I think Australia is breaching its own law, not to mention international law, in barring its own citizens.
(It's not part of our law today but there is someting in Magna Carta about it - "In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision ")
The thing to have done was hotel quarantine all 20,000 for two weeks. Difficult but doable.
Yet we closed the border with Pakistan and no one sued us in The Hague?
This is egregious sophistry. We should have closed the border with India. As we did with Pakistan. Tough shit if you get stuck there. I imagine 80% of the country agrees with me
That’s it. We didn’t do it. The government royally fucked it up
We *didn’t* close the border with anyone. We have no border with those countries People from Pakistan and Bangladesh just caught connecting flights and came through another border or accepted quarantine. If India had been treated the same that’s what people from there would have done too. Only way would be to close the borders with everywhere. Which we should have done.
Yes. I understand we don’t have a land frontier with Pakistan. FFS
We could have just checked flight records to see where people have recently been. Jesus it’s not hard. If you were recently in Pakistan or India, then nope, you can’t come in. Countries do this all the time
It would have meant looooong waits at airports. Tough. It’s a plague
Why are you so resistant to the simple idea of red listing India earlier? As we red listed Pakistan and Portugal? Is it some silly fear of “racism”?
I am getting increasingly irate with DougSeal’s contention that it was just “U.K. citizens returning home”.
What the hell were they doing in India - aka PLAGUE CENTRAL - in the first place? Well, we know what; they were visiting relatives and getting a bit of sun. @Foxy called them “Gujarati snowbirds” or some such.
We watched it all happen in real time and many of us called it out at the time.
I imagine it was a real mix. Some going over for COVID funerals, some just on a jolly, some with business, some Brits, some Indians, who cares
Once it was clear India was enduring a new variant, we should have closed the borders. To all of them. No excuses, no exceptions. Ruthless but fair
I do not understand those that demur. They don’t seem to be HYUFD-type Tory apologists. I’m guessing they might be scared of the racism angle. Which is unutterably spineless
And with that, I’m out into the sun. At least we have some sun
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
Agree with point 2. The only difficulty I have with your points 1. and 2. is that I think "vastly fewer" arrivals has to be predicated on the idea that these were visits. But many of these people (indeed most I would wager given where the hotspots ended up) were coming home - who the hell was coming to the UK (to Bolton and Blackburn at that) on holiday in March and April?!??? If you want to come home you will find a way whatever it takes.
To avoid which, that logically brings us to your point 3. - an Australia style no exemptions for residents policy - politically (and indeed legally) very difficult as you are inevitably stopping British citizens of a specific ethnic background returning home. Indeed I think Australia is breaching its own law, not to mention international law, in barring its own citizens.
(It's not part of our law today but there is someting in Magna Carta about it - "In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision ")
The thing to have done was hotel quarantine all 20,000 for two weeks. Difficult but doable.
Yet we closed the border with Pakistan and no one sued us in The Hague?
This is egregious sophistry. We should have closed the border with India. As we did with Pakistan. Tough shit if you get stuck there. I imagine 80% of the country agrees with me
That’s it. We didn’t do it. The government royally fucked it up
We *didn’t* close the border with anyone. We have no border with those countries People from Pakistan and Bangladesh just caught connecting flights and came through another border or accepted quarantine. If India had been treated the same that’s what people from there would have done too. Only way would be to close the borders with everywhere. Which we should have done.
Yes. I understand we don’t have a land frontier with Pakistan. FFS
We could have just checked flight records to see where people have recently been. Jesus it’s not hard. If you were recently in Pakistan or India, then nope, you can’t come in. Countries do this all the time
It would have meant looooong waits at airports. Tough. It’s a plague
Why are you so resistant to the simple idea of red listing India earlier? As we red listed Pakistan and Portugal? Is it some silly fear of “racism”?
I am getting increasingly irate with DougSeal’s contention that it was just “U.K. citizens returning home”.
What the hell were they doing in India - aka PLAGUE CENTRAL - in the first place? Well, we know what; they were visiting relatives and getting a bit of sun. @Foxy called them “Gujarati snowbirds” or some such.
We watched it all happen in real time and many of us called it out at the time.
I imagine it was a real mix. Some going over for COVID funerals, some just on a jolly, some with business, some Brits, some Indians, who cares
Once it was clear India was enduring a new variant, we should have closed the borders. To all of them. No excuses, no exceptions. Ruthless but fair
I do not understand those that demur. They don’t seem to be HYUFD-type Tory apologists. I’m guessing they might be scared of the racism angle. Which is unutterably spineless
And with that, I’m out into the sun. At least we have some sun
Ha ha, this government would cross the road to start a war on woke, the idea they would do anything to avoid looking racist is laughable.
And now this. The dominant narrative will now be: "he screwed up, and we ended up with an extra four weeks of restrictions and a third wave. back in lockdown for eight months."
Fixed it for you.
I mean come on, we know it's coming. The catastrophist wing of the scientist lobby are going to completely take over now.
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
Agree with point 2. The only difficulty I have with your points 1. and 2. is that I think "vastly fewer" arrivals has to be predicated on the idea that these were visits. But many of these people (indeed most I would wager given where the hotspots ended up) were coming home - who the hell was coming to the UK (to Bolton and Blackburn at that) on holiday in March and April?!??? If you want to come home you will find a way whatever it takes.
To avoid which, that logically brings us to your point 3. - an Australia style no exemptions for residents policy - politically (and indeed legally) very difficult as you are inevitably stopping British citizens of a specific ethnic background returning home. Indeed I think Australia is breaching its own law, not to mention international law, in barring its own citizens.
(It's not part of our law today but there is someting in Magna Carta about it - "In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision ")
The thing to have done was hotel quarantine all 20,000 for two weeks. Difficult but doable.
Yet we closed the border with Pakistan and no one sued us in The Hague?
This is egregious sophistry. We should have closed the border with India. As we did with Pakistan. Tough shit if you get stuck there. I imagine 80% of the country agrees with me
That’s it. We didn’t do it. The government royally fucked it up
We *didn’t* close the border with anyone. We have no border with those countries People from Pakistan and Bangladesh just caught connecting flights and came through another border or accepted quarantine. If India had been treated the same that’s what people from there would have done too. Only way would be to close the borders with everywhere. Which we should have done.
Yes. I understand we don’t have a land frontier with Pakistan. FFS
We could have just checked flight records to see where people have recently been. Jesus it’s not hard. If you were recently in Pakistan or India, then nope, you can’t come in. Countries do this all the time
It would have meant looooong waits at airports. Tough. It’s a plague
Why are you so resistant to the simple idea of red listing India earlier? As we red listed Pakistan and Portugal? Is it some silly fear of “racism”?
I am getting increasingly irate with DougSeal’s contention that it was just “U.K. citizens returning home”.
What the hell were they doing in India - aka PLAGUE CENTRAL - in the first place? Well, we know what; they were visiting relatives and getting a bit of sun. @Foxy called them “Gujarati snowbirds” or some such.
We watched it all happen in real time and many of us called it out at the time.
I imagine it was a real mix. Some going over for COVID funerals, some just on a jolly, some with business, some Brits, some Indians, who cares
Once it was clear India was enduring a new variant, we should have closed the borders. To all of them. No excuses, no exceptions. Ruthless but fair
I do not understand those that demur. They don’t seem to be HYUFD-type Tory apologists. I’m guessing they might be scared of the racism angle. Which is unutterably spineless
And with that, I’m out into the sun. At least we have some sun
It’s hotting up. Johnson interview with Sky: Says UK will do “whatever it takes” to resolve NI issues & “won’t hesitate” to invoke Art 16 of protocol if EU continues apply it in this way. Some in EU don't understand UK is now a single country & need to “get that into their heads”
It’s hotting up. Johnson interview with Sky: Says UK will do “whatever it takes” to resolve NI issues & “won’t hesitate” to invoke Art 16 of protocol if EU continues apply it in this way. Some in EU don't understand UK is now a single country & need to “get that into their heads”
It’s hotting up. Johnson interview with Sky: Says UK will do “whatever it takes” to resolve NI issues & “won’t hesitate” to invoke Art 16 of protocol if EU continues apply it in this way. Some in EU don't understand UK is now a single country & need to “get that into their heads”
Re: the women in sport argument. Another thing to consider is that extremely rare, even in men’s sports, for different requirements for sporting excellence at the highest level to combine in one individual. Tennis players/golfers/cricketers who base themselves around a “power game” don’t tend to excel at “touch”/finesse. Sprinters with long strides aren’t explosive out of the blocks. Very big rugby players aren’t particularly quick runners etc etc. Where you do see these features combined you get once in a generation stars.
To even hope to get close to competing in high level men’s sport, women would need this. Men can succeed in men’s sport by excelling in one area, whilst surviving with average male characteristics (and some hard work/training) in others. For women it wouldn’t be enough to just excel in one. Average women characteristics plus training would be enough in all the other areas.
Snooker will be interesting next season. Apart from reach and power, there is no particular reason why women shouldn't be just as good. Unfortunately, there is insufficient prize money available. So they can't do the 8 hours a day practice. Now they have been given 2 places on Tour. Will see how they go. Darts should be similar. I understand females do compete with occasional success there.
An enterprising girls school would surely place darts boards and snooker tables in every common room. There must be a lot of women who'd be professional standard if only they'd had the chance to find out. Boys too, come to that. Look at how snooker standards shot up after the 1980s.
Horseracing is another sport where women compete against men on equal terms. Hollie Doyle was rated the fifth or sixth best jockey in Britain, and Rachael Blackmore was top jockey at Cheltenham this year, but they are exceptions, and it is still the case that most women jockeys struggle for mounts and ride mainly for their own relatives.
It’s hotting up. Johnson interview with Sky: Says UK will do “whatever it takes” to resolve NI issues & “won’t hesitate” to invoke Art 16 of protocol if EU continues apply it in this way. Some in EU don't understand UK is now a single country & need to “get that into their heads”
Sure. But @DavidL was exonerating HMG. That will not do
I also reject the argument that ‘Indian travellers would have made it here anyway, using circuitous routes’
1. Some might, but vastly fewer = fewer seeds, thus buying us precious time
2. We could have been much stricter with those that did arrive from anywhere
3. Australia managed it. It can be done. We didn’t do it
Agree with point 2. The only difficulty I have with your points 1. and 2. is that I think "vastly fewer" arrivals has to be predicated on the idea that these were visits. But many of these people (indeed most I would wager given where the hotspots ended up) were coming home - who the hell was coming to the UK (to Bolton and Blackburn at that) on holiday in March and April?!??? If you want to come home you will find a way whatever it takes.
To avoid which, that logically brings us to your point 3. - an Australia style no exemptions for residents policy - politically (and indeed legally) very difficult as you are inevitably stopping British citizens of a specific ethnic background returning home. Indeed I think Australia is breaching its own law, not to mention international law, in barring its own citizens.
(It's not part of our law today but there is someting in Magna Carta about it - "In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision ")
The thing to have done was hotel quarantine all 20,000 for two weeks. Difficult but doable.
Yet we closed the border with Pakistan and no one sued us in The Hague?
This is egregious sophistry. We should have closed the border with India. As we did with Pakistan. Tough shit if you get stuck there. I imagine 80% of the country agrees with me
That’s it. We didn’t do it. The government royally fucked it up
We *didn’t* close the border with anyone. We have no border with those countries People from Pakistan and Bangladesh just caught connecting flights and came through another border or accepted quarantine. If India had been treated the same that’s what people from there would have done too. Only way would be to close the borders with everywhere. Which we should have done.
Yes. I understand we don’t have a land frontier with Pakistan. FFS
We could have just checked flight records to see where people have recently been. Jesus it’s not hard. If you were recently in Pakistan or India, then nope, you can’t come in. Countries do this all the time
It would have meant looooong waits at airports. Tough. It’s a plague
Why are you so resistant to the simple idea of red listing India earlier? As we red listed Pakistan and Portugal? Is it some silly fear of “racism”?
I am getting increasingly irate with DougSeal’s contention that it was just “U.K. citizens returning home”.
What the hell were they doing in India - aka PLAGUE CENTRAL - in the first place? Well, we know what; they were visiting relatives and getting a bit of sun. @Foxy called them “Gujarati snowbirds” or some such.
We watched it all happen in real time and many of us called it out at the time.
I imagine it was a real mix. Some going over for COVID funerals, some just on a jolly, some with business, some Brits, some Indians, who cares
Once it was clear India was enduring a new variant, we should have closed the borders. To all of them. No excuses, no exceptions. Ruthless but fair
I do not understand those that demur. They don’t seem to be HYUFD-type Tory apologists. I’m guessing they might be scared of the racism angle. Which is unutterably spineless
And with that, I’m out into the sun. At least we have some sun
Ha ha, this government would cross the road to start a war on woke, the idea they would do anything to avoid looking racist is laughable.
Those two things are not the same. Surely one reason they feel comfortable engaging in culture wars on woke is because they do so in matters where they believe the public are on side, that is they are not seen as racist/sexist by the majority. Whereas if they worried, rightly or not, that peopel would think another act would appear racist that would be avoided.
It’s hotting up. Johnson interview with Sky: Says UK will do “whatever it takes” to resolve NI issues & “won’t hesitate” to invoke Art 16 of protocol if EU continues apply it in this way. Some in EU don't understand UK is now a single country & need to “get that into their heads”
I am getting increasingly irate with DougSeal’s contention that it was just “U.K. citizens returning home”.
What the hell were they doing in India - aka PLAGUE CENTRAL - in the first place? Well, we know what; they were visiting relatives and getting a bit of sun. @Foxy called them “Gujarati snowbirds” or some such.
We watched it all happen in real time and many of us called it out at the time.
The reason they were in India was that, until quite late March, it was considered to have turned the Covid corner and was a safe place to go. It had apparently low Covid prevalence and lockdown restrictions were significantly fewer than the UK's. This was what the world's press was saying about India in February and March -
"Coronavirus: Is the epidemic finally coming to an end in India?"
"India suffers highest daily coronavirus infections in five months"
"India has been reporting a spike in cases - above the 60,000 mark - for three consecutive days, though Monday’s rise was still below September’s peak of more than 90,000 cases a day."
India had, for several months, been held up as some sort of Covid miracle, people were going round openly asking whether they had reached herd immunity, or had some mysterous antibody protection, The test series with England was in front of nearly full stadia. Things were going great. Until, bang, they were not.
As cases exploded, quite suddenly, in India over three weeks in early April people came home. It's as simple as that.
Comments
When Biju Mathew heard that India was going onto the UK's travel red list, he leapt into action.
"I couldn't afford to stay away," he says. "I had to get back to work."
The social services manager from Walsall, UK, who was in India visiting family, began ringing local travel agents in an attempt to beat the Friday deadline.
From Friday 04:00 BST, most travellers who have been to India in the last 10 days will be refused entry to the UK unless they hold UK passports or residence rights. Those that do will be required to quarantine in hotels on arrival, at significant cost and inconvenience.
"Eventually, yesterday, a friend in the UK managed to book me a ticket from Mumbai to Manchester," says Biju. He had just half an hour's notice to pack and go.
"I had to stop everything. I didn't get time to say a proper goodbye to my parents."
It also cost him close to £2,000 for the flight and Covid tests required, when a flight from Mumbai is usually well under £1,000.
He is one of the lucky ones. His flight touched down in Manchester at around 15:00 BST on Thursday to his great relief.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56846968
Also I wonder how much home quarantine that bloke did considering he 'had to get back to work'.
So two people got no jail and one got 5 years....I think we can take it, he must have been doing something really bad / have a very long list of crimes. Not as claimed, he is a lovely lad and was just there trying to stop it.
I won't be supporting him for leader (if it comes to it). I can see a touch of the old 'charisma' going on - great - but he's not my idea of where we should be going. He seems to me to be falling for his own hype at the moment. I think he's a bit of a fake and a showboater. Eg that dispute with the govt on lockdown funding. Much Daniel Cohn Bendit and Paris 68 being channeled. Practical outcome, high viz for him, no more money for Manchester. Less, arguably, depending who you believe.
I'm sick of overt showy charisma if you want to know the truth. I find it deeply inauthentic.
Not particularly for you @HYUFD, but generally.
Is not winning multiple elections, from seemingly improbable starting points, the very point of democratic politics?
Isn’t the problem here not lack of delivery, and the tenuous reasons for lack of delivery you are inventing but over promising? There is no magic wand to make Covid and occasional restrictions/living with it go away? Not vaccines. Vaccines was built up as being a magic Covid free freedom it was never going to be, that is the truth the third wave with some inevitable restrictions has proved isn’t it?
A tremendous achievement (albeit one achieved under Sturgeon-like monopolisation of the news media).
Merkel has both.
Biden at least one (and though not an intellectual his decades in service give him an outsized political intelligence).
Probably how conservative they are.
Occasionally you do get a heavyweight and charismatic leader eg Macron or Obama and Thatcher but the two are separate qualities
To avoid which, that logically brings us to your point 3. - an Australia style no exemptions for residents policy - politically (and indeed legally) very difficult as you are inevitably stopping British citizens of a specific ethnic background returning home. Indeed I think Australia is breaching its own law, not to mention international law, in barring its own citizens.
(It's not part of our law today but there is someting in Magna Carta about it - "In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision ")
The thing to have done was hotel quarantine all 20,000 for two weeks. Difficult but doable.
@HackedOffHugh
·
2h
Exactly right. We followed the rules. Our children suffered. And Johnson and his government have now wasted it all. In a vain grab for some political lipstick.
They did reject the Independent Socialist Party of GB as confusingly similar to another registered party.
I see from the Commission site that Alliance 4 Unity in 2020 had their name rejected as 'likely to mislead voters as to the effect of their vote' (as did Alliance for Independence, Beyond Politics).
In 2021 they rejected a description for Labour of 'Anas Sarwar - Labour's National Recovery Plan/Get Scotland Back Better'. In fact descriptions seem to get a lot of rejections - some of Alba's rejected were 'The sypermajority for Independence/First vote party, second vote country/For the independence supermajority'
One thing is clear from the site is that they rehect most emblems which contain words in them on the grounds they won't be able to be read on the ballot.
Allowing a variant that is 60% more transmissible to seed into the country by failing to close border to India when it was clear what would happen has meant the third wave is big enough to cause problems.
See “Labour and Co-operative” for details.
However up until now I have been a dutiful citizen. I stayed home as asked. I waited to get vaxxed. I sat through winter. I didn’t even scoot off to Portugal when it was briefly open - tho I was sorely tempted. I have great friends there
Now I am double jabbed and I am done with obeying government advice, because they literally have no clue what they are doing and therefore no clue what I should do. I see no greater risk for me and the world if I travel, as long as I obey the rules in any country I visit. I’m off
I agree that Biden doesn't want to take sides between the EU and the UK on the Northern Ireland issue, although I suspect for three reasons he would side with the EU if forced: (1) the EU and members are collectively more important to his programme than the UK; (2) for cultural reasons he will instinctively adopt the Irish position; (3) he is on the side of people who respect treaties and the rule of law.
In general, though, the effort seems to be in talking the UK off the ledge. The Canadians have even offered counselling services for the NIP, which might be the ultimate humiliation.
Something doesn't add up.
The weather is crap and people deserve a holiday and it will save jobs and Britain has to be open for business.
Repeated endlessly to the politicians until they start spouting it themselves.
The airlines are a classic example of giving them an inch and seeing them take a thousand miles.
Fat lot of use that is.
Driven by a weakness in 2nd doses: critical against Delta, and we know we have supply (mostly AZ).
Absolutely accept a delay to re-opening may be needed to give more time for vaccination ... but how to justify wasting the time we have?
https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1403676278717399040?s=20
Everyone who led us to believe vaccines would quickly get us living freely again, lied.
Biden has a personal interest in Ireland yes and will not accept a hard border in Ireland though Boris is more focused on minimising the border in the Irish Sea while still avoiding a hard border in Ireland anyway
This is egregious sophistry. We should have closed the border with India. As we did with Pakistan. Tough shit if you get stuck there. I imagine 80% of the country agrees with me
That’s it. We didn’t do it. The government royally fucked it up
See also Nixon v JFK or Bush v Gore or Trump v Clinton in the US when the more charismatic candidate narrowly beat the more heavyweight candidate
I'd guess that the current rate of vaccination was part of a plan drawn up months ago and nobody has tried to alter it.
It is like the testing, they got to 100k, with lots of gusto (and a bit of fudging the numbers), it did expand a bit further, then it seemed to ease up and they got caught out when schools went back.
While poor Sid in the warehouse is running out of room to stash AZN vaccines....he is now having to take them home and store them in his own fridge.
Brown and May were all sausage but neither seemed actually good at managing the sausage factory.
The best combination is “much sausage and some sizzle”, with the sizzle deployed in aid of the sausage.
Johnson deploys the sizzle in aid of the sizzle.
And hands you the stick.
It is the sine qua non of politics.
Australia have “managed it” by effectively denying a chunk of their own population the right to go home. There are Australians around the world who are temporarily (they hope) stateless.
You are scape goating Boris unfairly.
Where we are now was always inevitable, those promising this couldn’t happen built false hope by pontificating without real knowledge or foresight
They said with the vaccinations programme it couldn’t come to this. They lied.
And they are notably absent from this forum today!
There used to be various gates to prevent that.
* Was "Keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down" for UK foreign policy objectives, but that's irrelevant now.
Incidentally, Biden's foreign policy objectives aren't massively different from Trump's. He is going about it in a much co-operative way.
We could have just checked flight records to see where people have recently been. Jesus it’s not hard. If you were recently in Pakistan or India, then nope, you can’t come in. Countries do this all the time
It would have meant looooong waits at airports. Tough. It’s a plague
Why are you so resistant to the simple idea of red listing India earlier? As we red listed Pakistan and Portugal? Is it some silly fear of “racism”?
Funny... I don't remember too many compliants from the Left about the unfairness of the electoral system at the time.
But that’s also why the U.K. is not irrelevant.
We’re still the most reliable support act.
He simply wants us to stop fucking about and make it up with the EU, and his preference will be not to take sides.
File this under "if it's obvious, do it!"
Driving back from Sainsburys at Beckton, I drove into the Barking Road by the Town Hall to see a crowd of people - a wedding? Free Palestine rally? Group come to sing the praises of Mayor Fiaz?
No.
The queue was for the vaccination centre in the leisure centre which has opened on a Saturday for the first time - the queue was massive, hundreds of people of all ages.
The questions are a) why this centre wasn't open before and b) should we not realise vaccine "refusal" isn't always based on high or low principle but simply on the fact people are too busy working Monday-Friday to come for a vaccine appointment?
I can only hope this will continue and we'll start to see Newham catching up other parts of London and the country in terms of vaccinations.
"SIT ON WHAAAT?!!" (baton snaps)
Probably the best scene in the whole movie.
https://youtu.be/xrggI-ISIQc
What the hell were they doing in India - aka PLAGUE CENTRAL - in the first place? Well, we know what; they were visiting relatives and getting a bit of sun. @Foxy called them “Gujarati snowbirds” or some such.
We watched it all happen in real time and many of us called it out at the time.
Now, because of our feeble government, many more more will die of the Indian variant, many more businesses will go bust, many more people will topple into depression, the country will sink even further into debt
As for Australia, I have lots of close family there (that I have not seen since 2019). They are all delighted they can live normal lives and they are very glad the borders are tightly shut
Mustn't stigmatise.
Was cackling as I imagined BigG nodding enthusiastically to that speech over the “wireless”.
Biden is much more wary of Putin than Trump was, both are China sceptics but Biden is better able to build the alliances the US needs
For the simple reason that our memories and judgement on any event or story are overwhelmingly dominated by "how it ended."
Up until Delta, Boris was golden. Yes, he'd fucked up at the start, messed up with PPE, got the test and trace screwed up, and dilly-dallied in the autumn and cost us a supercharged second wave.
But the vaccine procurement and rollout rode to his rescue and we were ending the pandemic with a perfect narrative. And that's what dominates our memories.
And now this. The dominant narrative will now be: "he screwed up, and we ended up with an extra four weeks of restrictions and a third wave."
Yes, we were always looking at an exit wave - but not like this and not this soon. It was supposed to come after the exit and be smaller than this. Not be swelling weeks in advance of the exit, and with the expected exit wave then very likely to cause an anticipated wavelet to be a full-on wave.
He's caught himself in a cleft stick. He can't risk opening up with the rising hospitalisations in the younger echelons. That's a pretty bad narrative for him. Delaying is also a bad narrative for him.
All because of the cock-up in April with the red-list.
(And it's why the conspiracy theories that "He loves doing this," and "It's all to show off his power," and "There's no risk, it's all made up," don't hold much water. He and his closest advisers will have been desperately combing through all the facts to try to find a way out that didn't involve that cleft stick)
Quite cheering to see someone so evidently enjoying themselves.
https://twitter.com/BenBanks01/status/1403651656647127051?s=20
Liberals 33.1% 157 seats.
Tories 34.3% 121 seats.
Left 30.2% 59 seats.
That's rank hypocrisy. They could always go and teach at New F##ksticks Metropolitan University of Wokery, but perhaps that doesn't pay as well, give them access to the same world class facilities
(not insignificantly funded by these problematic individuals) or the status they desire.
Once it was clear India was enduring a new variant, we should have closed the borders. To all of them. No excuses, no exceptions. Ruthless but fair
I do not understand those that demur. They don’t seem to be HYUFD-type Tory apologists. I’m guessing they might be scared of the racism angle. Which is unutterably spineless
And with that, I’m out into the sun. At least we have some sun
I mean come on, we know it's coming. The catastrophist wing of the scientist lobby are going to completely take over now.
With our luck it’ll then be autumn.
https://twitter.com/Mij_Europe/status/1403688830469804039?s=20
Horseracing is another sport where women compete against men on equal terms. Hollie Doyle was rated the fifth or sixth best jockey in Britain, and Rachael Blackmore was top jockey at Cheltenham this year, but they are exceptions, and it is still the case that most women jockeys struggle for mounts and ride mainly for their own relatives.
https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1403688556674101251?s=20
"Coronavirus: Is the epidemic finally coming to an end in India?"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-56037565
"Experts puzzled by dramatic fall in coronavirus cases in India" (16 February)
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/16/india-sees-dramatic-fall-in-virus-cases-experts-stumped
India reports less than 10,000 new COVID-19 cases for second time in February (9 February)
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/covid-19-new-cases-fall-below-10000-for-second-time-in-february/article33789288.ece
"February Covid Cases at 9 Month Low - weekly tally up" (1 March)
"https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/february-covid-cases-at-9-month-low-weekly-tally-up/articleshow/81264730.cms"
Then, on 29 March -
"India suffers highest daily coronavirus infections in five months"
"India has been reporting a spike in cases - above the 60,000 mark - for three consecutive days, though Monday’s rise was still below September’s peak of more than 90,000 cases a day."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavuirus-india-cases-idUSKBN2BL0I6
As late as 6 April the outbreak was reported to be concentrated in Maharashtra
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2021-04-04/indias-richest-state-says-to-impose-new-covid-19-restrictions-weekend-lockdown
India had, for several months, been held up as some sort of Covid miracle, people were going round openly asking whether they had reached herd immunity, or had some mysterous antibody protection, The test series with England was in front of nearly full stadia. Things were going great. Until, bang, they were not.
As cases exploded, quite suddenly, in India over three weeks in early April people came home. It's as simple as that.