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If Gareth Southgate was a party leader his ratings would ensure his party won a landslide – politica

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  • NorthofStokeNorthofStoke Posts: 1,758

    Leon said:

    Indeed, I suspect we could all be wearing masks, on crowded public transport, for the rest of our lives

    No we won't. I don't and won't. So you do what you feel you need to in your fear-laden life but I'm living free, ta.

    You only get one of these things. Enjoy it.
    It's not really a point of principle is it, your opposition to voluntary good manners for the collective good?
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Marr interviewing labour's Kate Green commented that

    'by and large you are in the same place as the Government apart from ventilation and masks'

    By and large that is where I would be BigG

    Johnson's narrative of "freedom Day" may send his ratings skyward, which suits him. As a result however the cat is out of the bag there is no going back on anything now, the voters aren't listening to anything else, other than the war is over.

    Yesterday in that bastion of Welsh RedWallers, Aldi, my wife pointed out to me that half were no longer masked up.

    I hope Johnson and the anti-maskers are right and the rest of us, our caution unfounded.
    In reality Freedom Day will not be July 19th, it will be when you have been double vaccinated.

    So for most of the over 50s they have already had their Freedom Day, for most of the under 40s however they will have to wait several weeks even after July 19th for their Freedom Day
    Freedom Day my arm! My issue is Johnson's lack of caution and candour means many people, as on here, are celebrating Johnson winning the war already.

    Now I have been accused of over-caution, and if I want to self-isolate, I should f*** off and die in my bunker, by the very people who seem safely esconsed in theirs.

    Now economic necessity means I am out hunter gathering, and have been for a while, and all the dangers that throws up, despite being double vaccinated. I am of an age where if the Delta variant creeps through the double-Pfizered I could be in a spot of bother*. If someone wearing a mask reduces my risk, I'll take it.

    * Personal anecdota backs up my concerns. I thank Johnson for inventing the vaccines, and getting them into my arm, but I won't thank him if in the unlikely event I become rather poorly as a result of his next election campaigning strategy.
    I do think July 19th is a month too early, August 19th by when the vast majority, rather than a small majority as per this month, will have been double vaccinated would be more realistic
    I think there might be some method in the madness. Get the exit wave over while the hospitals are relatively quiet, and hope that the vulnerable Covidians have passed through the system before the higher annual autumn demand consumes the NHS.

    In reality that makes perfect sense, but some candour from Government would be appreciated.
    Andrew Lilico
    @andrew_lilico
    ·
    1h
    I confess that events in the Netherlands have shaken my confidence. A fortnight of 800% growth before we'd even detected the surge wld leave us in terrible trouble. Not committing either way but maybe there's a case for seeing the Step 3 wave peak & drop before enacting Step 4?
    Happily it looks like we're very shortly heading for the step 3 peak. Loads of places that have seen local peaks are now seeing cases start to decline or growth in cases has halted. The only major part of the country where there hasn't been a delta peak is London but I think acquired immunity in London is probably a fair bit higher than is currently realised.
  • jonny83jonny83 Posts: 1,261

    Pulpstar said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi reveals the Govt will publish new covid guidelines this week to wear masks on busy trains. "There will be very clear guidance that you'll be expected to wear masks on crowded carriages". This appears to be a change of plan.
    @TimesRadio

    Except it’s not a “change of plan” at all.

    It’s re-affirming what the government actually said last week - as opposed to how the media reported it - that the plan was to replace legislation with guidance from 19th July.
    Did Boris mention replacing legislation with guidance in his press conference at all a week ago ?
    I don't remember it
    To be fair he did say he would continue to wear a mask
    And then got photographed not wearing one.
    'Apparently' he put one on a second after that photograph was taken. Yeah right...
  • felixfelix Posts: 15,124
    DougSeal said:



    My solution was simple - leave the country. I dislike the regressive "fuck you" nature of the English psyche, decided I wanted better for my kids, and moved north. You always get the correct result in any given election because that is what people vote for. And in England, this is what you want.

    An absurdly, stupidly, shamefully reductive post and deeply deeply selfish. Are you suggesting you were the only anti Tory in England. Your “solution” involves 55% of England (the proportion who didn’t vote Tory) moving to Scotland. Should we all do that? As welcoming as they are north of the border, the hospitality would undoubtedly be strained by a sudden influx of over 20 million people. As for the “English psyche” that is just mad ethnic stereotyping, and I know you’re English.

    An idiotic self-centred sanctimonious “I’m better than you” post and I hope you reflect on it.
    I do not agree with your anti-Tory stance one bit but you nailed RP with that post to the letter - sadly he is too stupid and blindly prejudiced to take any notice but I hope you feel better for the exercise!
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    DougSeal said:


    Must be annoying. They've done two pre-announcements now and there's a 3rd coming on Monday when (hopefully) England is basking in having put away those demons and won a tournament. 2 shots at it and there's still half the country who think like me and won't comply with FREEDOM DAY we're all safe pandemic over go back to your dreary lives.

    Perhaps - and its just an idea - there's actually not a majority or anything close to it out there of people who think like PB Clowm Apologists like you and Charles and Big G? I know we're going to hear "but we have a majority of 80" and so what - when the alternative choice was a lunatic voting for a clown makes sense.

    But the clown is supposed to be a populist. Can instinctively feel what people think and give it to them. So why is he so badly wrong and out of touch on this one? Philip on here yesterday reduced to imploring that he ignores public opinion and leads regardless of what people think.

    When the desired outcome is to change the way that people act and behave, you can't command them to do something that self-evidently feels like a risk. Some of you complain about people like me wanting to control people forever. Far from it, yet it is you and yours trying to instruct people to do something they don't believe is safe or sensible.

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Apologies if this is obvious and I’m preaching to the converted but British politics at the moment is divided into Tory and Anti-Tory. We Anti-Tories take comfort in our shared ground of hating Johnson and his myriad and obvious flaws. However, that’s all we’ve got in common and all those converted by that line have now been converted. What are we offering as an alternative to convert more?

    At first look it’s hopeful. The Anti-Tories are easily the majority, even in England alone, but accross the U.K. we are split into Lab, LD, SNP, Green and PC. Lab is itself split into Corbynite Tendancy and Continuity Blairite. Each of these Anti-Tory factions hate each other as much as they do Johnson - if not more. To justify this we paint each other as some alternate form of Tory. The Corbynite Tendancy call the Continuity Blairites “Red Tories”, many Lab and LD peeps call the SNP “Tartan Tories”, everyone calls the LD’s the “Tories little helpers”. I’ve yet to see the Greens and PC painted that way admittedly but I’m sure it’s done.

    So, while I agree with everything the Johnson haters on here and elsewhere post about him, such posts annoy me as they’re not so much preaching to the converted as screaming into the void. We need an alternative. What? A “Progressive Alliance”??? What policies would such an alliance have? The Labour Party can’t seem to come up with a cohesive set of policies. The SNP has one big policy that applies the Scotland with ripple effects on the rUK and a lot of smaller polices that effect Scotland alone. The LD’s can’t hope to have a significant impact in such an alliance. The Greens have might some that could form common ground, I suppose, and perhaps provide cover for the others, but it’s a big “might”.

    The bottom line is that I agree with 90% of what RP says but it’s not enough anymore. Those of us who don’t like this shower need to start thinking about what we can give up to work with the others that don’t. I personally don’t even know who to vote for anymore. Simply not liking Johnson and criticising his government isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. Yet even the main opposition party can’t come up with an alternate programme.
    My solution was simple - leave the country. I dislike the regressive "fuck you" nature of the English psyche, decided I wanted better for my kids, and moved north. You always get the correct result in any given election because that is what people vote for. And in England, this is what you want.
    Not always, in 1950, 1964 and February 1974 England voted Tory and got a Labour government. In 2010 and 2017 the Tories had a majority in England but it was a hung parliament UK wide.

    On current polling the Tories will almost certainly win a majority in England in 2024 again but there is a chance Starmer could become UK PM with SNP and LD support in a hung parliament even if the Tories win most seats
    The elections you speak of were not elections in England. Which is why the correct result was gained in the UK-wide election.
    I don't disagree but in 1974 there was no devolution, so it did not matter if England did not get the UK government it did not vote for.

    Now however if Scotland or Wales get a UK Tory government they did not vote for they still have an SNP Holyrood or Labour Senedd government for much of their domestic policy.

    If England gets a UK Labour-SNP government it did not vote for however it will just have to grin and bear it with no English Parliament and now it seems no longer even EVEL

    A Labour/SNP government (which would never happen in a million years, but we'll let that one go) could just legislate to end EVEL if it chose to. Or it could frame legislation in such a way as to make it UK-wide. Or it could continue with this government's strategy of bypassing Parliament altogether. EVEL is not a magic bullet to protect the minority of people who vote Tory in England. It is merely a headline.

    Indeed, so why should the Tories fail to leave it in position, but positively remove it? They'd have something to howl about if the mythical Labour gmt cancelled EVEL, so why lose that brownie point?
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 14,089
    Leon said:

    DavidL said:

    Leon said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi reveals the Govt will publish new covid guidelines this week to wear masks on busy trains. "There will be very clear guidance that you'll be expected to wear masks on crowded carriages". This appears to be a change of plan.
    @TimesRadio

    They are so useless. This was obviously an error
    Useless to whom? Does wearing a paper mask in a crowded train carriage give you any protection? Almost certainly not. You still need to inhale and the virus will be in the air you breath, subject to good ventilation. Does it protect others? Possibly, indeed probably, because if you happen to be exhaling virus much of it will get caught in the mask and not be in the air for others to breath in. The coughing that the virus brings on is utilised by it to allow virus to be expelled more vigorously improving the prospect of infecting others. A mask will at the least significantly reduce that effect.

    I also think we need to recognise that last winter was one of our best flu seasons ever. That is probably because many of the useless precautions against Covid, such as washing hands frequently, stopped us catching other things. That significantly reduced pressure on the NHS. We really should try to do the same this winter because there will still be a lot of Covid cases in hospital.

    So to me this guidance makes sense and I for one will comply with it whether it is guidance or regulation.
    I mean the GOVERNMENT is useless. Apols. Not clear

    Masks obviously help to protect others. Crowded public transport is one place we should all wear them for a few months yet, I have no idea why they decided it was time to get rid
    Possibility One: If the collapse of the NHS is the only failure criterion, we might as well make the exit wave a biggun, in the hope of getting it all over.

    Possibility Two: Symbols matter, and for most of us, the masks are the main symbol that things aren't OK.

    Possibility Three: A decisive slice of government support comes from people who think they're libertarians, but are mainly just selfish.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149

    Leon said:

    Indeed, I suspect we could all be wearing masks, on crowded public transport, for the rest of our lives

    No we won't. I don't and won't. So you do what you feel you need to in your fear-laden life but I'm living free, ta.

    You only get one of these things. Enjoy it.
    It's not really a point of principle is it, your opposition to voluntary good manners for the collective good?
    I'd certainlu be "fear-laden" if I met him on the street ...
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,772
    alex_ said:

    RobD said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi reveals the Govt will publish new covid guidelines this week to wear masks on busy trains. "There will be very clear guidance that you'll be expected to wear masks on crowded carriages". This appears to be a change of plan.
    @TimesRadio

    Except it’s not a “change of plan” at all.

    It’s re-affirming what the government actually said last week - as opposed to how the media reported it - that the plan was to replace legislation with guidance from 19th July.
    Did Boris mention replacing legislation with guidance in his press conference at all a week ago ?
    I don't remember it
    Yep:

    We will end the 1 metre plus rule on social distancing, and the legal obligation to wear a face covering, although guidance will suggest where you might choose to do so, especially when cases are rising, and where you come into contact with people you don’t normally meet in enclosed places, such as obviously crowded public transport.

    https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-statement-at-coronavirus-press-conference-5-july-2021
    That’s not quite the same thing is it?

    There is a difference between “everyone should continue to wear masks” and “people may decide they wish to continue to wear masks”.
    Not really. The only difference might be the extent to which Govt advertising campaigns and societal pressure encourages it. There are lots of things which the Govt says you shouldn’t do, but ultimately come down to personal choice.
    Smoking is the obvious example. Government advice is don't smoke: its very bad for you. That advice is now backed up by regulation where others are put at vicarious risk such as pubs, restaurants, public buildings etc. The list grows ever longer. Taxes are also used as a nudge not to smoke and advertising is banned. But it is still legal.

    Someone on a tube not wearing a mask who is not ostentatiously showing their medical exemption with one of those passes can probably expect some social opprobrium too in the same way smokers often do these days. But they shouldn't be arrested. That is the freedom part.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,266

    Leon said:

    Indeed, I suspect we could all be wearing masks, on crowded public transport, for the rest of our lives

    No we won't. I don't and won't. So you do what you feel you need to in your fear-laden life but I'm living free, ta.

    You only get one of these things. Enjoy it.
    Interesting.

    Thought experiment: it’s November 2021 and you a mild sore throat and you’re occasionally sneezing, but you need to get to work on the Northern Line. You might have a cold or even Covid - or it might be nothing at all, it really isn’t that bad

    When you get on the Tube, do you wear a mask out of care and concern for others? For me, post pandemic, the answer is obviously Yes

    You?
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 39,749

    Just been looking at the ratings for GB News.

    On average they are doing worse than Sky News and the BBC.

    If only someone had warned them about there being no profit in TV news.

    It is a shame, I loved the calls and texts from Mikes Oxlong and Hunt et al.

    Andrew Neil needs to get Calista Hebburn as their Scotch correspondent, that would get the viewers flocking in.
  • Leon said:

    Indeed, I suspect we could all be wearing masks, on crowded public transport, for the rest of our lives

    No we won't. I don't and won't. So you do what you feel you need to in your fear-laden life but I'm living free, ta.

    You only get one of these things. Enjoy it.
    It's not really a point of principle is it, your opposition to voluntary good manners for the collective good?
    The collective good is to get vaccinated.

    I wear glasses and find wearing a mask claustrophobic and unpleasant. And my chances of infecting someone else to the point where they die because they too have omitted to wear their mask when they were vulnerable is so vanishingly small as to be absurd.


    The ludicrous hypocritical absurdity of all of this.

    Anyone who drives over the limit in a 30mph built up area has lost all right to lecture me. etc. etc.
  • alex_alex_ Posts: 7,518

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Marr interviewing labour's Kate Green commented that

    'by and large you are in the same place as the Government apart from ventilation and masks'

    By and large that is where I would be BigG

    Johnson's narrative of "freedom Day" may send his ratings skyward, which suits him. As a result however the cat is out of the bag there is no going back on anything now, the voters aren't listening to anything else, other than the war is over.

    Yesterday in that bastion of Welsh RedWallers, Aldi, my wife pointed out to me that half were no longer masked up.

    I hope Johnson and the anti-maskers are right and the rest of us, our caution unfounded.
    In reality Freedom Day will not be July 19th, it will be when you have been double vaccinated.

    So for most of the over 50s they have already had their Freedom Day, for most of the under 40s however they will have to wait several weeks even after July 19th for their Freedom Day
    Freedom Day my arm! My issue is Johnson's lack of caution and candour means many people, as on here, are celebrating Johnson winning the war already.

    Now I have been accused of over-caution, and if I want to self-isolate, I should f*** off and die in my bunker, by the very people who seem safely esconsed in theirs.

    Now economic necessity means I am out hunter gathering, and have been for a while, and all the dangers that throws up, despite being double vaccinated. I am of an age where if the Delta variant creeps through the double-Pfizered I could be in a spot of bother*. If someone wearing a mask reduces my risk, I'll take it.

    * Personal anecdota backs up my concerns. I thank Johnson for inventing the vaccines, and getting them into my arm, but I won't thank him if in the unlikely event I become rather poorly as a result of his next election campaigning strategy.
    I do think July 19th is a month too early, August 19th by when the vast majority, rather than a small majority as per this month, will have been double vaccinated would be more realistic
    I think there might be some method in the madness. Get the exit wave over while the hospitals are relatively quiet, and hope that the vulnerable Covidians have passed through the system before the higher annual autumn demand consumes the NHS.

    In reality that makes perfect sense, but some candour from Government would be appreciated.
    Andrew Lilico
    @andrew_lilico
    ·
    1h
    I confess that events in the Netherlands have shaken my confidence. A fortnight of 800% growth before we'd even detected the surge wld leave us in terrible trouble. Not committing either way but maybe there's a case for seeing the Step 3 wave peak & drop before enacting Step 4?
    It would bring the pandemic to an end in a hurry, certainly.
  • justin124justin124 Posts: 11,527
    alex_ said:

    I just hope that we don't get the stories about abuse of opposition supporters that we had after the Denmark game. Must be difficult being in a 10-1 minority.
    Also that any booing is confined to when Boris Johnson stands up. Not when the Italian anthem is played.

    England is after all, the host for this game.

    Of course we will get the stories. There will be boo-ing. By the usual minority. And the press will write about it. And UEFA will issue a larger fine than they are already going to do.

    The thing is there's no good way to drown out boo-ing during a national anthem*. Short of doing so by singing the national anthem louder. Which isn't really an option given that you can't expect England fans to sing the Italian anthem, or at least not since they don't know the words.

    *Normally it can be drowned out (or at least the disapproval of the majority can be expressed) by applause or something - but drowning out during an anthem with applause isn't really a solution. Because it still drowns out the anthem. Which is the point of the boo-ing.

    I don't recall the West German national anthem beeing booed at the 1966 World Cup Final.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059

    DougSeal said:



    My solution was simple - leave the country. I dislike the regressive "fuck you" nature of the English psyche, decided I wanted better for my kids, and moved north. You always get the correct result in any given election because that is what people vote for. And in England, this is what you want.

    An absurdly, stupidly, shamefully reductive post and deeply deeply selfish. Are you suggesting you were the only anti Tory in England. Your “solution” involves 55% of England (the proportion who didn’t vote Tory) moving to Scotland. Should we all do that? As welcoming as they are north of the border, the hospitality would undoubtedly be strained by a sudden influx of over 20 million people. As for the “English psyche” that is just mad ethnic stereotyping, and I know you’re English.

    An idiotic self-centred sanctimonious “I’m better than you” post and I hope you reflect on it.
    The 55% of the country who don't vote Tory are not all "anti-Tory" though.

    If I vote LD that doesn't make me anti-Tory.
    It does RP
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    Gadfly said:

    Looks like our Pfizer induced immunity is about to be tested. Our double AZ jabbed eldest son visited Mrs Gadfly and I on Thursday evening then tested positive at the school where he teaches on Friday morning. We were minding his 2 young children throughout the week, so we've probably had plenty of exposure. None of us currently have any symptoms. We had our second jabs back in April.

    Transmission from a doubled jabbed individual to another double jabbed individual is incredibly low.
  • Cocky_cockneyCocky_cockney Posts: 760
    edited July 2021
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Indeed, I suspect we could all be wearing masks, on crowded public transport, for the rest of our lives

    No we won't. I don't and won't. So you do what you feel you need to in your fear-laden life but I'm living free, ta.

    You only get one of these things. Enjoy it.
    Interesting.

    Thought experiment: it’s November 2021 and you a mild sore throat and you’re occasionally sneezing, but you need to get to work on the Northern Line. You might have a cold or even Covid - or it might be nothing at all, it really isn’t that bad

    When you get on the Tube, do you wear a mask out of care and concern for others? For me, post pandemic, the answer is obviously Yes

    You?
    If I'm coughing and sneezing? Yes.

    Otherwise? No.

    It's pretty straightforward.

    The real message the Gov't should drive home and home and home is get jabbed and get fit.

  • SouthamObserverSouthamObserver Posts: 38,879
    Robert Jenrick, a member of the government, has stated that he will no longer be following government advice after 19th July. Is his position tenable?
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Indeed, I suspect we could all be wearing masks, on crowded public transport, for the rest of our lives

    No we won't. I don't and won't. So you do what you feel you need to in your fear-laden life but I'm living free, ta.

    You only get one of these things. Enjoy it.
    Interesting.

    Thought experiment: it’s November 2021 and you a mild sore throat and you’re occasionally sneezing, but you need to get to work on the Northern Line. You might have a cold or even Covid - or it might be nothing at all, it really isn’t that bad

    When you get on the Tube, do you wear a mask out of care and concern for others? For me, post pandemic, the answer is obviously Yes

    You?
    If you think you might have covid, or even a bad cold, you shouldn’t be thinking about going to work.

    Surely that’s one thing the pandemic has taught us?
  • felixfelix Posts: 15,124

    HYUFD said:

    Zahawi confirms government guidance will still be to wear masks on trains even after July 19th

    https://twitter.com/tnewtondunn/status/1414159186661871616?s=20

    Will there be guidance to wear masks in nightclubs?
    Only the S & M ones where you get whipped for failure to comply!
  • Robert Jenrick, a member of the government, has stated that he will no longer be following government advice after 19th July. Is his position tenable?

    After this morning's farce it'd be helpful if he could enlighten us on what 'government advice is'. Anyone got a clue? Or can you see this going the way of telling us all still to wear masks?

    Boris is such a lily-livered incompetent buffoon.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941

    Robert Jenrick, a member of the government, has stated that he will no longer be following government advice after 19th July. Is his position tenable?

    QTWTAIY? I suspect lots of members of the government ignore lots of government advice.
  • Gadfly said:

    Looks like our Pfizer induced immunity is about to be tested. Our double AZ jabbed eldest son visited Mrs Gadfly and I on Thursday evening then tested positive at the school where he teaches on Friday morning. We were minding his 2 young children throughout the week, so we've probably had plenty of exposure. None of us currently have any symptoms. We had our second jabs back in April.

    Transmission from a doubled jabbed individual to another double jabbed individual is incredibly low.
    The kind of message that very few people seem to grasp.
  • GadflyGadfly Posts: 1,191

    Gadfly said:

    Looks like our Pfizer induced immunity is about to be tested. Our double AZ jabbed eldest son visited Mrs Gadfly and I on Thursday evening then tested positive at the school where he teaches on Friday morning. We were minding his 2 young children throughout the week, so we've probably had plenty of exposure. None of us currently have any symptoms. We had our second jabs back in April.

    Transmission from a doubled jabbed individual to another double jabbed individual is incredibly low.
    Thank you - that is reassuring.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059
    MaxPB said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Marr interviewing labour's Kate Green commented that

    'by and large you are in the same place as the Government apart from ventilation and masks'

    By and large that is where I would be BigG

    Johnson's narrative of "freedom Day" may send his ratings skyward, which suits him. As a result however the cat is out of the bag there is no going back on anything now, the voters aren't listening to anything else, other than the war is over.

    Yesterday in that bastion of Welsh RedWallers, Aldi, my wife pointed out to me that half were no longer masked up.

    I hope Johnson and the anti-maskers are right and the rest of us, our caution unfounded.
    In reality Freedom Day will not be July 19th, it will be when you have been double vaccinated.

    So for most of the over 50s they have already had their Freedom Day, for most of the under 40s however they will have to wait several weeks even after July 19th for their Freedom Day
    Freedom Day my arm! My issue is Johnson's lack of caution and candour means many people, as on here, are celebrating Johnson winning the war already.

    Now I have been accused of over-caution, and if I want to self-isolate, I should f*** off and die in my bunker, by the very people who seem safely esconsed in theirs.

    Now economic necessity means I am out hunter gathering, and have been for a while, and all the dangers that throws up, despite being double vaccinated. I am of an age where if the Delta variant creeps through the double-Pfizered I could be in a spot of bother*. If someone wearing a mask reduces my risk, I'll take it.

    * Personal anecdota backs up my concerns. I thank Johnson for inventing the vaccines, and getting them into my arm, but I won't thank him if in the unlikely event I become rather poorly as a result of his next election campaigning strategy.
    I do think July 19th is a month too early, August 19th by when the vast majority, rather than a small majority as per this month, will have been double vaccinated would be more realistic
    I think there might be some method in the madness. Get the exit wave over while the hospitals are relatively quiet, and hope that the vulnerable Covidians have passed through the system before the higher annual autumn demand consumes the NHS.

    In reality that makes perfect sense, but some candour from Government would be appreciated.
    Andrew Lilico
    @andrew_lilico
    ·
    1h
    I confess that events in the Netherlands have shaken my confidence. A fortnight of 800% growth before we'd even detected the surge wld leave us in terrible trouble. Not committing either way but maybe there's a case for seeing the Step 3 wave peak & drop before enacting Step 4?
    Happily it looks like we're very shortly heading for the step 3 peak. Loads of places that have seen local peaks are now seeing cases start to decline or growth in cases has halted. The only major part of the country where there hasn't been a delta peak is London but I think acquired immunity in London is probably a fair bit higher than is currently realised.
    Those of us whom worship at the altar of Zoe and St Tim Spector will have seen signs of a peak already.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,266

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Indeed, I suspect we could all be wearing masks, on crowded public transport, for the rest of our lives

    No we won't. I don't and won't. So you do what you feel you need to in your fear-laden life but I'm living free, ta.

    You only get one of these things. Enjoy it.
    Interesting.

    Thought experiment: it’s November 2021 and you a mild sore throat and you’re occasionally sneezing, but you need to get to work on the Northern Line. You might have a cold or even Covid - or it might be nothing at all, it really isn’t that bad

    When you get on the Tube, do you wear a mask out of care and concern for others? For me, post pandemic, the answer is obviously Yes

    You?
    If I'm coughing and sneezing? Yes.

    Otherwise? No.

    It's pretty straightforward.

    The real message the Gov't should drive home and home and home is get jabbed and get fit.

    So you will wear a mask on public transport. Good
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,772

    Robert Jenrick, a member of the government, has stated that he will no longer be following government advice after 19th July. Is his position tenable?

    There are so many good reasons for removing Jenrick that I think making him a martyr to the ideologues on the let it rip side seems unnecessary and possibly unhelpful but if he doesn't support government policy he probably should not be a member of the government.
  • Big_G_NorthWalesBig_G_NorthWales Posts: 60,004
    edited July 2021
    DougSeal said:



    Its all that and more - entirely selfish on the basis of I don't think England will vote to enact the kind of policies and the kind of society that I suspect you and I both want. The current "English psyche" is based on centuries of actualite and reflected by the likes of the PM saying "lets scrap devolution because they disagree with us" - a policy actually carried out by Thatcher scrapping the Metropolitan County Councils.

    As I had the means to leave I opted to do so. The alternative was to stay and fight and meanwhile sit in an environment that frankly wasn't good for my mental health and not good for my kids. Selfish yes, absolutely. Less so though than the people who are about to aggressively take their masks off and get in the faces of the "woke" who oppose their freedom to do whatever the fuck they like regardless of the impact on anyone else.

    Polling on this very board says that such people are a minority in England. The Scots are not some genetically kinder superheroes. Your essentialist insistence that it’s the English voters fault because they are English, rather than the left coming up with a credible alternative is deeply sinister.

    We won’t win here because people like you and I keep bickering around the edges and bitching about Johnson, and in your case slagging off the whole electorate on ethnic grounds, rather than coming up with a plan to replace him. We both left Labour and joined the LDs. That’s evidence of the underlying problem. That kind of purity of thinking goes on through the country, Even in England BJ got less than 50% of the vote in 2019.

    It’s the fact that we in the centre and left of centre can’t get our shit together that makes this happen. The SNP’s current monopoly in Scotland came largely from (1) the collapse of the Lib Dem vote in 2011 and (2) the collapse of the Labour vote in 2015. Both sets of defectors went to the SNP. It’s not the underlying “goodness” in the DNA of the average Scot over the evil mendacious deviant English of your imagination but a coherent left of centre party that can attract voters from accross the left and, indeed, beyond. That’s the only thing missing in England. That’s what Blair, for all his many many faults, managed.
    Your comments this morning have been so succinct and why I voted for Blair twice
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274

    Gadfly said:

    Looks like our Pfizer induced immunity is about to be tested. Our double AZ jabbed eldest son visited Mrs Gadfly and I on Thursday evening then tested positive at the school where he teaches on Friday morning. We were minding his 2 young children throughout the week, so we've probably had plenty of exposure. None of us currently have any symptoms. We had our second jabs back in April.

    Transmission from a doubled jabbed individual to another double jabbed individual is incredibly low.
    The kind of message that very few people seem to grasp.
    I think the PHE estimate was 1 in 200k chance (i might be wrong on this, willing to be corrected).
  • SouthamObserverSouthamObserver Posts: 38,879
    RobD said:

    Robert Jenrick, a member of the government, has stated that he will no longer be following government advice after 19th July. Is his position tenable?

    QTWTAIY? I suspect lots of members of the government ignore lots of government advice.

    If a cabinet minister will not follow government advice on something so important, the government cannot expect others to either. That tells us all we really need to know about how serious the government is about facemask wearing after 19th July.

  • Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Indeed, I suspect we could all be wearing masks, on crowded public transport, for the rest of our lives

    No we won't. I don't and won't. So you do what you feel you need to in your fear-laden life but I'm living free, ta.

    You only get one of these things. Enjoy it.
    Interesting.

    Thought experiment: it’s November 2021 and you a mild sore throat and you’re occasionally sneezing, but you need to get to work on the Northern Line. You might have a cold or even Covid - or it might be nothing at all, it really isn’t that bad

    When you get on the Tube, do you wear a mask out of care and concern for others? For me, post pandemic, the answer is obviously Yes

    You?
    If I'm coughing and sneezing? Yes.

    Otherwise? No.

    It's pretty straightforward.

    The real message the Gov't should drive home and home and home is get jabbed and get fit.

    So you will wear a mask on public transport. Good
    No I won't. And I don't. I thought you were a bright lad, Sean? I said I'd only wear one if I was coughing and sneezing and if there was a chance it was covid.

    99.9% of the time I will not wear a mask, just as I haven't been for the past 3 weeks.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,043
    Oliver Johnson
    @BristOliver
    ·
    1h
    Going forward, I'd like to see a weekly lottery with big cash prizes, where everyone who is already double jabbed or has registered two LFDs that week can enter.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    edited July 2021

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    DougSeal said:


    Must be annoying. They've done two pre-announcements now and there's a 3rd coming on Monday when (hopefully) England is basking in having put away those demons and won a tournament. 2 shots at it and there's still half the country who think like me and won't comply with FREEDOM DAY we're all safe pandemic over go back to your dreary lives.

    Perhaps - and its just an idea - there's actually not a majority or anything close to it out there of people who think like PB Clowm Apologists like you and Charles and Big G? I know we're going to hear "but we have a majority of 80" and so what - when the alternative choice was a lunatic voting for a clown makes sense.

    But the clown is supposed to be a populist. Can instinctively feel what people think and give it to them. So why is he so badly wrong and out of touch on this one? Philip on here yesterday reduced to imploring that he ignores public opinion and leads regardless of what people think.

    When the desired outcome is to change the way that people act and behave, you can't command them to do something that self-evidently feels like a risk. Some of you complain about people like me wanting to control people forever. Far from it, yet it is you and yours trying to instruct people to do something they don't believe is safe or sensible.

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Apologies if this is obvious and I’m preaching to the converted but British politics at the moment is divided into Tory and Anti-Tory. We Anti-Tories take comfort in our shared ground of hating Johnson and his myriad and obvious flaws. However, that’s all we’ve got in common and all those converted by that line have now been converted. What are we offering as an alternative to convert more?

    At first look it’s hopeful. The Anti-Tories are easily the majority, even in England alone, but accross the U.K. we are split into Lab, LD, SNP, Green and PC. Lab is itself split into Corbynite Tendancy and Continuity Blairite. Each of these Anti-Tory factions hate each other as much as they do Johnson - if not more. To justify this we paint each other as some alternate form of Tory. The Corbynite Tendancy call the Continuity Blairites “Red Tories”, many Lab and LD peeps call the SNP “Tartan Tories”, everyone calls the LD’s the “Tories little helpers”. I’ve yet to see the Greens and PC painted that way admittedly but I’m sure it’s done.

    So, while I agree with everything the Johnson haters on here and elsewhere post about him, such posts annoy me as they’re not so much preaching to the converted as screaming into the void. We need an alternative. What? A “Progressive Alliance”??? What policies would such an alliance have? The Labour Party can’t seem to come up with a cohesive set of policies. The SNP has one big policy that applies the Scotland with ripple effects on the rUK and a lot of smaller polices that effect Scotland alone. The LD’s can’t hope to have a significant impact in such an alliance. The Greens have might some that could form common ground, I suppose, and perhaps provide cover for the others, but it’s a big “might”.

    The bottom line is that I agree with 90% of what RP says but it’s not enough anymore. Those of us who don’t like this shower need to start thinking about what we can give up to work with the others that don’t. I personally don’t even know who to vote for anymore. Simply not liking Johnson and criticising his government isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. Yet even the main opposition party can’t come up with an alternate programme.
    My solution was simple - leave the country. I dislike the regressive "fuck you" nature of the English psyche, decided I wanted better for my kids, and moved north. You always get the correct result in any given election because that is what people vote for. And in England, this is what you want.
    Not always, in 1950, 1964 and February 1974 England voted Tory and got a Labour government. In 2010 and 2017 the Tories had a majority in England but it was a hung parliament UK wide.

    On current polling the Tories will almost certainly win a majority in England in 2024 again but there is a chance Starmer could become UK PM with SNP and LD support in a hung parliament even if the Tories win most seats
    The elections you speak of were not elections in England. Which is why the correct result was gained in the UK-wide election.
    I don't disagree but in 1974 there was no devolution, so it did not matter if England did not get the UK government it did not vote for.

    Now however if Scotland or Wales get a UK Tory government they did not vote for they still have an SNP Holyrood or Labour Senedd government for much of their domestic policy.

    If England gets a UK Labour-SNP government it did not vote for however it will just have to grin and bear it with no English Parliament and now it seems no longer even EVEL

    A Labour/SNP government (which would never happen in a million years, but we'll let that one go) could just legislate to end EVEL if it chose to. Or it could frame legislation in such a way as to make it UK-wide. Or it could continue with this government's strategy of bypassing Parliament altogether. EVEL is not a magic bullet to protect the minority of people who vote Tory in England. It is merely a headline.

    There may not be a Labour SNP coalition government, there would however be a strong chance of a Labour minority government with SNP confidence and supply in a hung parliament.

    If that were the case it would depend on what the SNP chose to do, even if the SNP decided to stick to not voting on English domestic legislation they might vote to end EVEL, in which case Welsh Labour MPs and Scottish LD MPs and Murray could still vote on English domestic legislation even if the SNP abstained.

    However the SNP might decide on principle not to vote to repeal EVEL, either way having EVEL as a standing order at least ensures protection for English domestic legislation and forces a new government to proactively try and legislate to end it.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059

    Just been looking at the ratings for GB News.

    On average they are doing worse than Sky News and the BBC.

    If only someone had warned them about there being no profit in TV news.

    It is a shame, I loved the calls and texts from Mikes Oxlong and Hunt et al.

    Andrew Neil needs to get Calista Hebburn as their Scotch correspondent, that would get the viewers flocking in.
    Do you have a theory as to the motives behind that account? One minute I’m thinking Unionist troll, the next I’m thinking Russian Bot. Very very odd. As I say I’ve seen similar on Covid Twitter, Zero Coviders so extreme that they have to be working for the other side (whoever that might be).
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146

    Fishing said:

    I'll cheekily repost this as it was lost in injury time of the last thread. With regard to half the population still wanting to be restricted:

    Have we become so risk-averse that we want to reduce life to cowering reeks?* All of life contains risk. When you step out of the shower or walk down the stairs or when you cross the road or eat a peanut. Unless we want to void the meaning of life in a dystopian vacuum pack then we have to embrace some risks.

    Is either group competent to assess the risks to which they expose themselves and, crucially, others? This is not bungee jumping. It might be Typhoid Mary.
    I'm sure this isn't you but the sneering, supercilious, attitude that someone knows better than me about how I should be free, or even if I should be, is the kind of thing that sends a shudder down my spine.

    It's the worst kind of dystopian brave new world. Something straight out of A Handmaiden's Tale.

    It's Starmerism. A man so convinced in the fundamental Goodness of Government, at least the government led by him, that his only solution to every problem is more taxes, more spending, more rules, more regulations, more nannying, less freedom ...

    And of course rather too many in today's Conservative Party aren't much better. But that's the main reason why Starmer has found it so difficult to oppose the bossiest, most bullying government in my lifetime.
    The Conservative Party solution to every problem is more taxes, more spending, more rules, more regulations, more nannying and less freedom. It’s what the (English) people voted for.

    https://www.statista.com/chart/24330/uk-tax-burden-as-share-gdp-timeline/
    From looking at that the Thatcher/Major government's look pretty dry to me?

    It's c.2000 when the tax burden went into reverse.
    All three principal Unionist parties have been in government during those two decades. They’re all just different sides of the same old coin.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,772

    Leon said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    RobD said:

    Leon said:

    From the Times (££)


    Death toll of a million?
    So she says

    She doesn’t give a time-span however. If she means a million dead in a year, that’s horrific. It implies a global death toll of 70 million, for a start. Possibly way more than that, if you factor in inferior health systems, general chaos. 100 million? 300 million?

    However is she means an extra million dead over 10-15 years that’s very nasty but not apocalyptic. 600,000 die every year. So if this is her take, we will have 10% more deaths every year. Life expectancy will shrink, but not catastrophically
    I doubt that 60k will die from COVID per year. Post vaccination if we get more than 5k deaths it would be a surprise. The virus would need to mutate quite significantly to start killing off 60k per year in a vaccinated population.
    I have no real idea. Tho I note that this virus has already mutated faster and more perniciously than many virologists expected.
    No it hasn't.

    It has mutated far less effectively than most virologists were predicting. To the point where now, despite people's disbelief in the actual stats, it's a vanishingly minor illness and cause of death in the UK. For those healthy double vaccinated people in the UK the chances of dying from covid are next to zero.

    Of 125 deaths in the UK fewer than 1 will bear any relation to covid and that's despite mass testing for it to the point of absurdity.

    It's over. The people just need to be retrained.
    The number of people admitted to hospital with Covid was up 56% yesterday week on week. Its really not over, not by a long shot. But the balance of risks has changed and so should our response.
  • SouthamObserverSouthamObserver Posts: 38,879
    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    DougSeal said:


    Must be annoying. They've done two pre-announcements now and there's a 3rd coming on Monday when (hopefully) England is basking in having put away those demons and won a tournament. 2 shots at it and there's still half the country who think like me and won't comply with FREEDOM DAY we're all safe pandemic over go back to your dreary lives.

    Perhaps - and its just an idea - there's actually not a majority or anything close to it out there of people who think like PB Clowm Apologists like you and Charles and Big G? I know we're going to hear "but we have a majority of 80" and so what - when the alternative choice was a lunatic voting for a clown makes sense.

    But the clown is supposed to be a populist. Can instinctively feel what people think and give it to them. So why is he so badly wrong and out of touch on this one? Philip on here yesterday reduced to imploring that he ignores public opinion and leads regardless of what people think.

    When the desired outcome is to change the way that people act and behave, you can't command them to do something that self-evidently feels like a risk. Some of you complain about people like me wanting to control people forever. Far from it, yet it is you and yours trying to instruct people to do something they don't believe is safe or sensible.

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Apologies if this is obvious and I’m preaching to the converted but British politics at the moment is divided into Tory and Anti-Tory. We Anti-Tories take comfort in our shared ground of hating Johnson and his myriad and obvious flaws. However, that’s all we’ve got in common and all those converted by that line have now been converted. What are we offering as an alternative to convert more?

    At first look it’s hopeful. The Anti-Tories are easily the majority, even in England alone, but accross the U.K. we are split into Lab, LD, SNP, Green and PC. Lab is itself split into Corbynite Tendancy and Continuity Blairite. Each of these Anti-Tory factions hate each other as much as they do Johnson - if not more. To justify this we paint each other as some alternate form of Tory. The Corbynite Tendancy call the Continuity Blairites “Red Tories”, many Lab and LD peeps call the SNP “Tartan Tories”, everyone calls the LD’s the “Tories little helpers”. I’ve yet to see the Greens and PC painted that way admittedly but I’m sure it’s done.

    So, while I agree with everything the Johnson haters on here and elsewhere post about him, such posts annoy me as they’re not so much preaching to the converted as screaming into the void. We need an alternative. What? A “Progressive Alliance”??? What policies would such an alliance have? The Labour Party can’t seem to come up with a cohesive set of policies. The SNP has one big policy that applies the Scotland with ripple effects on the rUK and a lot of smaller polices that effect Scotland alone. The LD’s can’t hope to have a significant impact in such an alliance. The Greens have might some that could form common ground, I suppose, and perhaps provide cover for the others, but it’s a big “might”.

    The bottom line is that I agree with 90% of what RP says but it’s not enough anymore. Those of us who don’t like this shower need to start thinking about what we can give up to work with the others that don’t. I personally don’t even know who to vote for anymore. Simply not liking Johnson and criticising his government isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. Yet even the main opposition party can’t come up with an alternate programme.
    My solution was simple - leave the country. I dislike the regressive "fuck you" nature of the English psyche, decided I wanted better for my kids, and moved north. You always get the correct result in any given election because that is what people vote for. And in England, this is what you want.
    Not always, in 1950, 1964 and February 1974 England voted Tory and got a Labour government. In 2010 and 2017 the Tories had a majority in England but it was a hung parliament UK wide.

    On current polling the Tories will almost certainly win a majority in England in 2024 again but there is a chance Starmer could become UK PM with SNP and LD support in a hung parliament even if the Tories win most seats
    The elections you speak of were not elections in England. Which is why the correct result was gained in the UK-wide election.
    I don't disagree but in 1974 there was no devolution, so it did not matter if England did not get the UK government it did not vote for.

    Now however if Scotland or Wales get a UK Tory government they did not vote for they still have an SNP Holyrood or Labour Senedd government for much of their domestic policy.

    If England gets a UK Labour-SNP government it did not vote for however it will just have to grin and bear it with no English Parliament and now it seems no longer even EVEL

    A Labour/SNP government (which would never happen in a million years, but we'll let that one go) could just legislate to end EVEL if it chose to. Or it could frame legislation in such a way as to make it UK-wide. Or it could continue with this government's strategy of bypassing Parliament altogether. EVEL is not a magic bullet to protect the minority of people who vote Tory in England. It is merely a headline.

    Indeed, so why should the Tories fail to leave it in position, but positively remove it? They'd have something to howl about if the mythical Labour gmt cancelled EVEL, so why lose that brownie point?

    I think that, for obvious reasons, Gove is one of the few Tories who actually cares about the Union and he believes that getting rid of EVEL may have some kind of appeal in Scotland. I can't see it myself, though. The damage was done in Cameron's reaction to the referendum result in 2014 and in the Brexit vote. It will take more than gestures to undo it.

  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,266
    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Indeed, I suspect we could all be wearing masks, on crowded public transport, for the rest of our lives

    No we won't. I don't and won't. So you do what you feel you need to in your fear-laden life but I'm living free, ta.

    You only get one of these things. Enjoy it.
    Interesting.

    Thought experiment: it’s November 2021 and you a mild sore throat and you’re occasionally sneezing, but you need to get to work on the Northern Line. You might have a cold or even Covid - or it might be nothing at all, it really isn’t that bad

    When you get on the Tube, do you wear a mask out of care and concern for others? For me, post pandemic, the answer is obviously Yes

    You?
    If you think you might have covid, or even a bad cold, you shouldn’t be thinking about going to work.

    Surely that’s one thing the pandemic has taught us?
    That wasn’t my example. Mine was - a mild sore throat, maybe a sniffle, sneezing. This happens to millions several times in a winter. Mostly it turns out to be nothing, and we carry on working (otherwise the economy would seize up)

    What do you do in THOSE circumstances? In Japan, or Thailand, the answer is obvious: wear a mask to protect others, just in case. It’s basic good manners. Like sneezing into a tissue rather than all over the next commuter

    We will import this practice
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    RobD said:

    RobD said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi reveals the Govt will publish new covid guidelines this week to wear masks on busy trains. "There will be very clear guidance that you'll be expected to wear masks on crowded carriages". This appears to be a change of plan.
    @TimesRadio

    Except it’s not a “change of plan” at all.

    It’s re-affirming what the government actually said last week - as opposed to how the media reported it - that the plan was to replace legislation with guidance from 19th July.
    Did Boris mention replacing legislation with guidance in his press conference at all a week ago ?
    I don't remember it
    Yep:

    We will end the 1 metre plus rule on social distancing, and the legal obligation to wear a face covering, although guidance will suggest where you might choose to do so, especially when cases are rising, and where you come into contact with people you don’t normally meet in enclosed places, such as obviously crowded public transport.

    https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-statement-at-coronavirus-press-conference-5-july-2021
    That’s not quite the same thing is it?

    There is a difference between “everyone should continue to wear masks” and “people may decide they wish to continue to wear masks”.
    The distinction is between a legal requirement and guidance. They are now describing that guidance in more detail.
    There's a big difference between personal choice and guidance. Personal choice is well, personal choice. Guidance is something businesses have to pay attention to.
  • DavidL said:

    Leon said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    RobD said:

    Leon said:

    From the Times (££)


    Death toll of a million?
    So she says

    She doesn’t give a time-span however. If she means a million dead in a year, that’s horrific. It implies a global death toll of 70 million, for a start. Possibly way more than that, if you factor in inferior health systems, general chaos. 100 million? 300 million?

    However is she means an extra million dead over 10-15 years that’s very nasty but not apocalyptic. 600,000 die every year. So if this is her take, we will have 10% more deaths every year. Life expectancy will shrink, but not catastrophically
    I doubt that 60k will die from COVID per year. Post vaccination if we get more than 5k deaths it would be a surprise. The virus would need to mutate quite significantly to start killing off 60k per year in a vaccinated population.
    I have no real idea. Tho I note that this virus has already mutated faster and more perniciously than many virologists expected.
    No it hasn't.

    It has mutated far less effectively than most virologists were predicting. To the point where now, despite people's disbelief in the actual stats, it's a vanishingly minor illness and cause of death in the UK. For those healthy double vaccinated people in the UK the chances of dying from covid are next to zero.

    Of 125 deaths in the UK fewer than 1 will bear any relation to covid and that's despite mass testing for it to the point of absurdity.

    It's over. The people just need to be retrained.
    The number of people admitted to hospital with Covid was up 56% yesterday week on week. Its really not over, not by a long shot. But the balance of risks has changed and so should our response.
    It is over. 20 or 30 deaths a day is pifflingly small. 450 people die every day from cancer.

    Perspective now urgently required.

    Get jabbed, live your life. Period.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 39,749
    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    DougSeal said:


    Must be annoying. They've done two pre-announcements now and there's a 3rd coming on Monday when (hopefully) England is basking in having put away those demons and won a tournament. 2 shots at it and there's still half the country who think like me and won't comply with FREEDOM DAY we're all safe pandemic over go back to your dreary lives.

    Perhaps - and its just an idea - there's actually not a majority or anything close to it out there of people who think like PB Clowm Apologists like you and Charles and Big G? I know we're going to hear "but we have a majority of 80" and so what - when the alternative choice was a lunatic voting for a clown makes sense.

    But the clown is supposed to be a populist. Can instinctively feel what people think and give it to them. So why is he so badly wrong and out of touch on this one? Philip on here yesterday reduced to imploring that he ignores public opinion and leads regardless of what people think.

    When the desired outcome is to change the way that people act and behave, you can't command them to do something that self-evidently feels like a risk. Some of you complain about people like me wanting to control people forever. Far from it, yet it is you and yours trying to instruct people to do something they don't believe is safe or sensible.

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Apologies if this is obvious and I’m preaching to the converted but British politics at the moment is divided into Tory and Anti-Tory. We Anti-Tories take comfort in our shared ground of hating Johnson and his myriad and obvious flaws. However, that’s all we’ve got in common and all those converted by that line have now been converted. What are we offering as an alternative to convert more?

    At first look it’s hopeful. The Anti-Tories are easily the majority, even in England alone, but accross the U.K. we are split into Lab, LD, SNP, Green and PC. Lab is itself split into Corbynite Tendancy and Continuity Blairite. Each of these Anti-Tory factions hate each other as much as they do Johnson - if not more. To justify this we paint each other as some alternate form of Tory. The Corbynite Tendancy call the Continuity Blairites “Red Tories”, many Lab and LD peeps call the SNP “Tartan Tories”, everyone calls the LD’s the “Tories little helpers”. I’ve yet to see the Greens and PC painted that way admittedly but I’m sure it’s done.

    So, while I agree with everything the Johnson haters on here and elsewhere post about him, such posts annoy me as they’re not so much preaching to the converted as screaming into the void. We need an alternative. What? A “Progressive Alliance”??? What policies would such an alliance have? The Labour Party can’t seem to come up with a cohesive set of policies. The SNP has one big policy that applies the Scotland with ripple effects on the rUK and a lot of smaller polices that effect Scotland alone. The LD’s can’t hope to have a significant impact in such an alliance. The Greens have might some that could form common ground, I suppose, and perhaps provide cover for the others, but it’s a big “might”.

    The bottom line is that I agree with 90% of what RP says but it’s not enough anymore. Those of us who don’t like this shower need to start thinking about what we can give up to work with the others that don’t. I personally don’t even know who to vote for anymore. Simply not liking Johnson and criticising his government isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. Yet even the main opposition party can’t come up with an alternate programme.
    My solution was simple - leave the country. I dislike the regressive "fuck you" nature of the English psyche, decided I wanted better for my kids, and moved north. You always get the correct result in any given election because that is what people vote for. And in England, this is what you want.
    Not always, in 1950, 1964 and February 1974 England voted Tory and got a Labour government. In 2010 and 2017 the Tories had a majority in England but it was a hung parliament UK wide.

    On current polling the Tories will almost certainly win a majority in England in 2024 again but there is a chance Starmer could become UK PM with SNP and LD support in a hung parliament even if the Tories win most seats
    The elections you speak of were not elections in England. Which is why the correct result was gained in the UK-wide election.
    I don't disagree but in 1974 there was no devolution, so it did not matter if England did not get the UK government it did not vote for.

    Now however if Scotland or Wales get a UK Tory government they did not vote for they still have an SNP Holyrood or Labour Senedd government for much of their domestic policy.

    If England gets a UK Labour government it did not vote for however it will just have to grin and bear it with no English Parliament and now it seems no longer even EVEL
    You still haven't explained why the Tories are allowing such an atrocious grievance to develop by themselves actively cancelling EVEL that was their solution to this problem.
    I don't disagree, I think it is madness for Gove to suggest abolishing EVEL, especially with no English Parliament proposed instead.

    It does not matter now as the Tories have a UK majority as well as an English majority, it wlll matter in 2023/24 however if the Tories still have an English majority but not a UK majority
    Thanks for that! Nobody seems to be able to offer any up front and non-Machiavellian explanation.

    There is of course the possibility that Mr Gove intends to stand for a Scottish seat - maybe Peterborough and Fraserhead? - at the next GE (or someome will apply to the Chiltern Hundreds and make way for a by election) and he doesn't want to lose the chance of becoming Prime Minister of the UK. Either that or Mr Johnson's designated (but unanounced) heir is a Scottish Tory MP.

    Edit: or Mr J has in mind one of the Scottish Tory MPs for a major office of state.

    Not that I believe any of those. But still
    Golly, Gove standing in a Scottish seat is a morsel almost too delicious to contemplate! The idea of becoming a Scottish pm to unite the Yookay has probably featured in his fevered fantasies, even better representing a Scottish constituency.
    Maybe it was Gove intending to return (regress?) to full Jock that was the final straw for La Vine?
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    Sandpit said:

    RobD said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi reveals the Govt will publish new covid guidelines this week to wear masks on busy trains. "There will be very clear guidance that you'll be expected to wear masks on crowded carriages". This appears to be a change of plan.
    @TimesRadio

    Except it’s not a “change of plan” at all.

    It’s re-affirming what the government actually said last week - as opposed to how the media reported it - that the plan was to replace legislation with guidance from 19th July.
    Did Boris mention replacing legislation with guidance in his press conference at all a week ago ?
    I don't remember it
    Yep:

    We will end the 1 metre plus rule on social distancing, and the legal obligation to wear a face covering, although guidance will suggest where you might choose to do so, especially when cases are rising, and where you come into contact with people you don’t normally meet in enclosed places, such as obviously crowded public transport.

    https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-statement-at-coronavirus-press-conference-5-july-2021
    That’s not quite the same thing is it?

    There is a difference between “everyone should continue to wear masks” and “people may decide they wish to continue to wear masks”.
    They’re changing “You MUST wear a mask” with “You SHOULD wear a mask”.

    Maybe I’m used to aviation legislation, where there’s whole chapters on the difference between the words MUST, SHALL, SHOULD, MAY and MIGHT.

    https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/plain_language/articles/authority/
    Or the frigging Highway Code.

    I'm wondering how many people would actually be able to pass the Theory Test nowadays given the seeming wilfull ignorance in the difference between the words meanings.
  • Leon said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Indeed, I suspect we could all be wearing masks, on crowded public transport, for the rest of our lives

    No we won't. I don't and won't. So you do what you feel you need to in your fear-laden life but I'm living free, ta.

    You only get one of these things. Enjoy it.
    Interesting.

    Thought experiment: it’s November 2021 and you a mild sore throat and you’re occasionally sneezing, but you need to get to work on the Northern Line. You might have a cold or even Covid - or it might be nothing at all, it really isn’t that bad

    When you get on the Tube, do you wear a mask out of care and concern for others? For me, post pandemic, the answer is obviously Yes

    You?
    If you think you might have covid, or even a bad cold, you shouldn’t be thinking about going to work.

    Surely that’s one thing the pandemic has taught us?
    That wasn’t my example. Mine was - a mild sore throat, maybe a sniffle, sneezing. This happens to millions several times in a winter. Mostly it turns out to be nothing, and we carry on working (otherwise the economy would seize up)

    What do you do in THOSE circumstances? In Japan, or Thailand, the answer is obvious: wear a mask to protect others, just in case. It’s basic good manners. Like sneezing into a tissue rather than all over the next commuter

    We will import this practice
    Actually mask wearing in Thailand was not that high. I lived there. You're quite wrong about that. China, yes.

    Perhaps you were looking elsewhere than their faces ... ? :wink:
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    edited July 2021

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    DougSeal said:


    Must be annoying. They've done two pre-announcements now and there's a 3rd coming on Monday when (hopefully) England is basking in having put away those demons and won a tournament. 2 shots at it and there's still half the country who think like me and won't comply with FREEDOM DAY we're all safe pandemic over go back to your dreary lives.

    Perhaps - and its just an idea - there's actually not a majority or anything close to it out there of people who think like PB Clowm Apologists like you and Charles and Big G? I know we're going to hear "but we have a majority of 80" and so what - when the alternative choice was a lunatic voting for a clown makes sense.

    But the clown is supposed to be a populist. Can instinctively feel what people think and give it to them. So why is he so badly wrong and out of touch on this one? Philip on here yesterday reduced to imploring that he ignores public opinion and leads regardless of what people think.

    When the desired outcome is to change the way that people act and behave, you can't command them to do something that self-evidently feels like a risk. Some of you complain about people like me wanting to control people forever. Far from it, yet it is you and yours trying to instruct people to do something they don't believe is safe or sensible.

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Apologies if this is obvious and I’m preaching to the converted but British politics at the moment is divided into Tory and Anti-Tory. We Anti-Tories take comfort in our shared ground of hating Johnson and his myriad and obvious flaws. However, that’s all we’ve got in common and all those converted by that line have now been converted. What are we offering as an alternative to convert more?

    At first look it’s hopeful. The Anti-Tories are easily the majority, even in England alone, but accross the U.K. we are split into Lab, LD, SNP, Green and PC. Lab is itself split into Corbynite Tendancy and Continuity Blairite. Each of these Anti-Tory factions hate each other as much as they do Johnson - if not more. To justify this we paint each other as some alternate form of Tory. The Corbynite Tendancy call the Continuity Blairites “Red Tories”, many Lab and LD peeps call the SNP “Tartan Tories”, everyone calls the LD’s the “Tories little helpers”. I’ve yet to see the Greens and PC painted that way admittedly but I’m sure it’s done.

    So, while I agree with everything the Johnson haters on here and elsewhere post about him, such posts annoy me as they’re not so much preaching to the converted as screaming into the void. We need an alternative. What? A “Progressive Alliance”??? What policies would such an alliance have? The Labour Party can’t seem to come up with a cohesive set of policies. The SNP has one big policy that applies the Scotland with ripple effects on the rUK and a lot of smaller polices that effect Scotland alone. The LD’s can’t hope to have a significant impact in such an alliance. The Greens have might some that could form common ground, I suppose, and perhaps provide cover for the others, but it’s a big “might”.

    The bottom line is that I agree with 90% of what RP says but it’s not enough anymore. Those of us who don’t like this shower need to start thinking about what we can give up to work with the others that don’t. I personally don’t even know who to vote for anymore. Simply not liking Johnson and criticising his government isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. Yet even the main opposition party can’t come up with an alternate programme.
    My solution was simple - leave the country. I dislike the regressive "fuck you" nature of the English psyche, decided I wanted better for my kids, and moved north. You always get the correct result in any given election because that is what people vote for. And in England, this is what you want.
    Not always, in 1950, 1964 and February 1974 England voted Tory and got a Labour government. In 2010 and 2017 the Tories had a majority in England but it was a hung parliament UK wide.

    On current polling the Tories will almost certainly win a majority in England in 2024 again but there is a chance Starmer could become UK PM with SNP and LD support in a hung parliament even if the Tories win most seats
    The elections you speak of were not elections in England. Which is why the correct result was gained in the UK-wide election.
    I don't disagree but in 1974 there was no devolution, so it did not matter if England did not get the UK government it did not vote for.

    Now however if Scotland or Wales get a UK Tory government they did not vote for they still have an SNP Holyrood or Labour Senedd government for much of their domestic policy.

    If England gets a UK Labour-SNP government it did not vote for however it will just have to grin and bear it with no English Parliament and now it seems no longer even EVEL

    A Labour/SNP government (which would never happen in a million years, but we'll let that one go) could just legislate to end EVEL if it chose to. Or it could frame legislation in such a way as to make it UK-wide. Or it could continue with this government's strategy of bypassing Parliament altogether. EVEL is not a magic bullet to protect the minority of people who vote Tory in England. It is merely a headline.

    Indeed, so why should the Tories fail to leave it in position, but positively remove it? They'd have something to howl about if the mythical Labour gmt cancelled EVEL, so why lose that brownie point?

    I think that, for obvious reasons, Gove is one of the few Tories who actually cares about the Union and he believes that getting rid of EVEL may have some kind of appeal in Scotland. I can't see it myself, though. The damage was done in Cameron's reaction to the referendum result in 2014 and in the Brexit vote. It will take more than gestures to undo it.

    If in 2024 we end up with a minority Labour government propped up by the SNP and EVEL is scrapped then it won't be Scottish nationalism resurgent again, indeed Edinburgh will be driving the UK government.

    It will be English nationalism on the rise
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,266
    DougSeal said:

    Just been looking at the ratings for GB News.

    On average they are doing worse than Sky News and the BBC.

    If only someone had warned them about there being no profit in TV news.

    It is a shame, I loved the calls and texts from Mikes Oxlong and Hunt et al.

    Andrew Neil needs to get Calista Hebburn as their Scotch correspondent, that would get the viewers flocking in.
    Do you have a theory as to the motives behind that account? One minute I’m thinking Unionist troll, the next I’m thinking Russian Bot. Very very odd. As I say I’ve seen similar on Covid Twitter, Zero Coviders so extreme that they have to be working for the other side (whoever that might be).
    Unionist troll, probably? But quite odd and intriguing
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146
    kle4 said:

    Gary Imlach was amusing last night on the TdF highlights. Commenting on the phenomenal story of Mark Cavendish* who has equalled the great Eddie Merckx's record of 34 stage wins in the Tour de France, Imlach said it had gone under the radar in the UK, relative to the football coverage. He wasn't complaining about that, or surprised about it, but added that:

    At least we haven't had to witness the Prime Minister dressed up in cycling gear.

    Indeed.

    * Always assuming and hoping of course that Cavendish isn't fuelled by naughty sauce.

    I’ve been thinking the same thing. Cavendish will be remembered worldwide by the cycling community for at least a century to come, probably much longer. Even if England win tomorrow, only the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish will remember it, because of the constant media drone we’ll all be subjected to, à la 1966.

    Assuming he’s not on the sauce, Cavendish will be remembered as a great sportsman.
    Assuming the English win tonight, their achievement will not be remembered primarily as a sporting achievement, but as another step on the road to the dissolution of the Union.
    Not everything is about the Union. Euro championships and world cups come along regularly so are remembered by the winners but otherwise aren't that special for others - I can't recall who won the last Euros but it was no doubt a big deal for them.

    They really dont have other significance, we dont need to hunt down and crowbar in our other obsessions, it just looks weird.
    Look who’s obsessed.

    https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/boris-johnson-poses-giant-england-flag-st-george-euro-2020-match-ukraine/

  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,043

    Chaand Nagpaul
    @CNagpaul
    ·
    10m
    Just announced- targeted wearing of face masks will still be required in Wales to control spread of coronavirus infection.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059
    Leon said:

    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Indeed, I suspect we could all be wearing masks, on crowded public transport, for the rest of our lives

    No we won't. I don't and won't. So you do what you feel you need to in your fear-laden life but I'm living free, ta.

    You only get one of these things. Enjoy it.
    Interesting.

    Thought experiment: it’s November 2021 and you a mild sore throat and you’re occasionally sneezing, but you need to get to work on the Northern Line. You might have a cold or even Covid - or it might be nothing at all, it really isn’t that bad

    When you get on the Tube, do you wear a mask out of care and concern for others? For me, post pandemic, the answer is obviously Yes

    You?
    If you think you might have covid, or even a bad cold, you shouldn’t be thinking about going to work.

    Surely that’s one thing the pandemic has taught us?
    That wasn’t my example. Mine was - a mild sore throat, maybe a sniffle, sneezing. This happens to millions several times in a winter. Mostly it turns out to be nothing, and we carry on working (otherwise the economy would seize up)

    What do you do in THOSE circumstances? In Japan, or Thailand, the answer is obvious: wear a mask to protect others, just in case. It’s basic good manners. Like sneezing into a tissue rather than all over the next commuter

    We will import this practice
    I remember in spring 2019 having a cough so bad my boss practically insisted I go home. I didn’t even go to the doctor, my wife said I was so bad she briefly considered calling an ambulance. I was mad. Even then I could have worked from home.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    Now i said we should stick with the mask wearing on public transport and not at all comfortable about things like airbridge travel...but...the underlying problem with have with the Indian variant is in reality the only way we can truly dampen down the current wave is another strict lockdown, then tough restrictions until everybody including kids are double jabbed....everything else is rather performative. You can't have pubs, restaurants, gyms, schools open and expect everybody not to be exposed at some point. Outdoor transmission was very rare with original variant, it isn't with Indian.

    So in reality the only option that would make substantial difference to current course is back to basically going backwards in terms of "opening up" until spring next year.

    And of course then we still have the problem that hardly anybody actually isolates properly. And no amount of money thrown at those for whom can't work from home / can't afford a days lost pay is really going to shift the needle massively.
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905
    edited July 2021

    Fishing said:

    I'll cheekily repost this as it was lost in injury time of the last thread. With regard to half the population still wanting to be restricted:

    Have we become so risk-averse that we want to reduce life to cowering reeks?* All of life contains risk. When you step out of the shower or walk down the stairs or when you cross the road or eat a peanut. Unless we want to void the meaning of life in a dystopian vacuum pack then we have to embrace some risks.

    Is either group competent to assess the risks to which they expose themselves and, crucially, others? This is not bungee jumping. It might be Typhoid Mary.
    I'm sure this isn't you but the sneering, supercilious, attitude that someone knows better than me about how I should be free, or even if I should be, is the kind of thing that sends a shudder down my spine.

    It's the worst kind of dystopian brave new world. Something straight out of A Handmaiden's Tale.

    It's Starmerism. A man so convinced in the fundamental Goodness of Government, at least the government led by him, that his only solution to every problem is more taxes, more spending, more rules, more regulations, more nannying, less freedom ...

    And of course rather too many in today's Conservative Party aren't much better. But that's the main reason why Starmer has found it so difficult to oppose the bossiest, most bullying government in my lifetime.
    The Conservative Party solution to every problem is more taxes, more spending, more rules, more regulations, more nannying and less freedom. It’s what the (English) people voted for.

    https://www.statista.com/chart/24330/uk-tax-burden-as-share-gdp-timeline/
    From looking at that the Thatcher/Major government's look pretty dry to me?

    It's c.2000 when the tax burden went into reverse.
    All three principal Unionist parties have been in government during those two decades. They’re all just different sides of the same old coin.
    Ningi?
  • Cocky_cockneyCocky_cockney Posts: 760
    edited July 2021
    I think Leon's wrong that we will import the practice. I already see people ditching masks, as I have, in their droves. At Wimbledon we were all required to wear them under Gov't guidance apart from in our court seats. No one, literally no one, complied. Thousands of people milling around the grounds without masks. It was wonderful.

    It will be the same tonight.

    I have lateral tests at home and if I just have a sniffle but no temp I shan't wear a mask on public transport.

    I'm done with masks. Live free.
  • Alphabet_SoupAlphabet_Soup Posts: 2,703
    Sandpit said:

    RobD said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi reveals the Govt will publish new covid guidelines this week to wear masks on busy trains. "There will be very clear guidance that you'll be expected to wear masks on crowded carriages". This appears to be a change of plan.
    @TimesRadio

    Except it’s not a “change of plan” at all.

    It’s re-affirming what the government actually said last week - as opposed to how the media reported it - that the plan was to replace legislation with guidance from 19th July.
    Did Boris mention replacing legislation with guidance in his press conference at all a week ago ?
    I don't remember it
    Yep:

    We will end the 1 metre plus rule on social distancing, and the legal obligation to wear a face covering, although guidance will suggest where you might choose to do so, especially when cases are rising, and where you come into contact with people you don’t normally meet in enclosed places, such as obviously crowded public transport.

    https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-statement-at-coronavirus-press-conference-5-july-2021
    That’s not quite the same thing is it?

    There is a difference between “everyone should continue to wear masks” and “people may decide they wish to continue to wear masks”.
    They’re changing “You MUST wear a mask” with “You SHOULD wear a mask”.

    Maybe I’m used to aviation legislation, where there’s whole chapters on the difference between the words MUST, SHALL, SHOULD, MAY and MIGHT.

    https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/plain_language/articles/authority/
    That's the problem with English: it is far more nuanced than most other languages, although some may express similar distinctions with pitch and tone. I'm hoping tomorrow that Johnson will clarify whether wearing a mask when sitting alone in a car is eccentric, idiotic or barmy.
  • SouthamObserverSouthamObserver Posts: 38,879
    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    DougSeal said:


    Must be annoying. They've done two pre-announcements now and there's a 3rd coming on Monday when (hopefully) England is basking in having put away those demons and won a tournament. 2 shots at it and there's still half the country who think like me and won't comply with FREEDOM DAY we're all safe pandemic over go back to your dreary lives.

    Perhaps - and its just an idea - there's actually not a majority or anything close to it out there of people who think like PB Clowm Apologists like you and Charles and Big G? I know we're going to hear "but we have a majority of 80" and so what - when the alternative choice was a lunatic voting for a clown makes sense.

    But the clown is supposed to be a populist. Can instinctively feel what people think and give it to them. So why is he so badly wrong and out of touch on this one? Philip on here yesterday reduced to imploring that he ignores public opinion and leads regardless of what people think.

    When the desired outcome is to change the way that people act and behave, you can't command them to do something that self-evidently feels like a risk. Some of you complain about people like me wanting to control people forever. Far from it, yet it is you and yours trying to instruct people to do something they don't believe is safe or sensible.

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Apologies if this is obvious and I’m preaching to the converted but British politics at the moment is divided into Tory and Anti-Tory. We Anti-Tories take comfort in our shared ground of hating Johnson and his myriad and obvious flaws. However, that’s all we’ve got in common and all those converted by that line have now been converted. What are we offering as an alternative to convert more?

    At first look it’s hopeful. The Anti-Tories are easily the majority, even in England alone, but accross the U.K. we are split into Lab, LD, SNP, Green and PC. Lab is itself split into Corbynite Tendancy and Continuity Blairite. Each of these Anti-Tory factions hate each other as much as they do Johnson - if not more. To justify this we paint each other as some alternate form of Tory. The Corbynite Tendancy call the Continuity Blairites “Red Tories”, many Lab and LD peeps call the SNP “Tartan Tories”, everyone calls the LD’s the “Tories little helpers”. I’ve yet to see the Greens and PC painted that way admittedly but I’m sure it’s done.

    So, while I agree with everything the Johnson haters on here and elsewhere post about him, such posts annoy me as they’re not so much preaching to the converted as screaming into the void. We need an alternative. What? A “Progressive Alliance”??? What policies would such an alliance have? The Labour Party can’t seem to come up with a cohesive set of policies. The SNP has one big policy that applies the Scotland with ripple effects on the rUK and a lot of smaller polices that effect Scotland alone. The LD’s can’t hope to have a significant impact in such an alliance. The Greens have might some that could form common ground, I suppose, and perhaps provide cover for the others, but it’s a big “might”.

    The bottom line is that I agree with 90% of what RP says but it’s not enough anymore. Those of us who don’t like this shower need to start thinking about what we can give up to work with the others that don’t. I personally don’t even know who to vote for anymore. Simply not liking Johnson and criticising his government isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. Yet even the main opposition party can’t come up with an alternate programme.
    My solution was simple - leave the country. I dislike the regressive "fuck you" nature of the English psyche, decided I wanted better for my kids, and moved north. You always get the correct result in any given election because that is what people vote for. And in England, this is what you want.
    Not always, in 1950, 1964 and February 1974 England voted Tory and got a Labour government. In 2010 and 2017 the Tories had a majority in England but it was a hung parliament UK wide.

    On current polling the Tories will almost certainly win a majority in England in 2024 again but there is a chance Starmer could become UK PM with SNP and LD support in a hung parliament even if the Tories win most seats
    The elections you speak of were not elections in England. Which is why the correct result was gained in the UK-wide election.
    I don't disagree but in 1974 there was no devolution, so it did not matter if England did not get the UK government it did not vote for.

    Now however if Scotland or Wales get a UK Tory government they did not vote for they still have an SNP Holyrood or Labour Senedd government for much of their domestic policy.

    If England gets a UK Labour-SNP government it did not vote for however it will just have to grin and bear it with no English Parliament and now it seems no longer even EVEL

    A Labour/SNP government (which would never happen in a million years, but we'll let that one go) could just legislate to end EVEL if it chose to. Or it could frame legislation in such a way as to make it UK-wide. Or it could continue with this government's strategy of bypassing Parliament altogether. EVEL is not a magic bullet to protect the minority of people who vote Tory in England. It is merely a headline.

    Indeed, so why should the Tories fail to leave it in position, but positively remove it? They'd have something to howl about if the mythical Labour gmt cancelled EVEL, so why lose that brownie point?

    I think that, for obvious reasons, Gove is one of the few Tories who actually cares about the Union and he believes that getting rid of EVEL may have some kind of appeal in Scotland. I can't see it myself, though. The damage was done in Cameron's reaction to the referendum result in 2014 and in the Brexit vote. It will take more than gestures to undo it.

    If in 2024 we end up with a minority Labour government propped up by the SNP and EVEL is scrapped then it won't be Scottish nationalism resurgent again, indeed Edinburgh will be driving the UK government.

    It will be English nationalism on the rise

    We already have an English nationalist government in Westminster and its actions have made the Union more fragile than it has been for more than 300 years. If we see even more English nationalism because right-wingers cannot cope with non-Tory UK governments, then the UK will be well and truly over.

  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,772

    DavidL said:

    Leon said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    RobD said:

    Leon said:

    From the Times (££)


    Death toll of a million?
    So she says

    She doesn’t give a time-span however. If she means a million dead in a year, that’s horrific. It implies a global death toll of 70 million, for a start. Possibly way more than that, if you factor in inferior health systems, general chaos. 100 million? 300 million?

    However is she means an extra million dead over 10-15 years that’s very nasty but not apocalyptic. 600,000 die every year. So if this is her take, we will have 10% more deaths every year. Life expectancy will shrink, but not catastrophically
    I doubt that 60k will die from COVID per year. Post vaccination if we get more than 5k deaths it would be a surprise. The virus would need to mutate quite significantly to start killing off 60k per year in a vaccinated population.
    I have no real idea. Tho I note that this virus has already mutated faster and more perniciously than many virologists expected.
    No it hasn't.

    It has mutated far less effectively than most virologists were predicting. To the point where now, despite people's disbelief in the actual stats, it's a vanishingly minor illness and cause of death in the UK. For those healthy double vaccinated people in the UK the chances of dying from covid are next to zero.

    Of 125 deaths in the UK fewer than 1 will bear any relation to covid and that's despite mass testing for it to the point of absurdity.

    It's over. The people just need to be retrained.
    The number of people admitted to hospital with Covid was up 56% yesterday week on week. Its really not over, not by a long shot. But the balance of risks has changed and so should our response.
    It is over. 20 or 30 deaths a day is pifflingly small. 450 people die every day from cancer.

    Perspective now urgently required.

    Get jabbed, live your life. Period.
    Yesterday it was 34 and up 62% in a week. At what point at that rate of increase does it cease to be "piffling"? We also have an increasing number of long Covid victims that are going to keep our hospitals busy for many years to come.

    I am with you in that I think regulation should now be limited to the most extreme situations such as hospitals and care homes but I think claiming that this is "over" goes way too far and fails to recognise the risks we are still facing. If we go too far down that road we could end up in lockdown again.
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146
    Roger said:

    Gary Imlach was amusing last night on the TdF highlights. Commenting on the phenomenal story of Mark Cavendish* who has equalled the great Eddie Merckx's record of 34 stage wins in the Tour de France, Imlach said it had gone under the radar in the UK, relative to the football coverage. He wasn't complaining about that, or surprised about it, but added that:

    At least we haven't had to witness the Prime Minister dressed up in cycling gear.

    Indeed.

    * Always assuming and hoping of course that Cavendish isn't fuelled by naughty sauce.

    I’ve been thinking the same thing. Cavendish will be remembered worldwide by the cycling community for at least a century to come, probably much longer. Even if England win tomorrow, only the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish will remember it, because of the constant media drone we’ll all be subjected to, à la 1966.

    Assuming he’s not on the sauce, Cavendish will be remembered as a great sportsman.
    Assuming the English win tonight, their achievement will not be remembered primarily as a sporting achievement, but as another step on the road to the dissolution of the Union.
    Why do you think England winning will help on the road to the dissolution of the Union? I should say that nothing would please me more than a dissolution of the Union if you could rejoin the EU. I'd become Scottish in a heartbeat. I loathe the ugly isolationist country we've become. They're even talking about Liz Truss for PM!
    Track record. 1966 was fantastic for both Plaid and the SNP, a gift that kept giving for over half a century.

    We’d love to have you Roger. You are in good company as we take in refugees fleeing from England’s ugly Brexit revolution.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    DougSeal said:


    Must be annoying. They've done two pre-announcements now and there's a 3rd coming on Monday when (hopefully) England is basking in having put away those demons and won a tournament. 2 shots at it and there's still half the country who think like me and won't comply with FREEDOM DAY we're all safe pandemic over go back to your dreary lives.

    Perhaps - and its just an idea - there's actually not a majority or anything close to it out there of people who think like PB Clowm Apologists like you and Charles and Big G? I know we're going to hear "but we have a majority of 80" and so what - when the alternative choice was a lunatic voting for a clown makes sense.

    But the clown is supposed to be a populist. Can instinctively feel what people think and give it to them. So why is he so badly wrong and out of touch on this one? Philip on here yesterday reduced to imploring that he ignores public opinion and leads regardless of what people think.

    When the desired outcome is to change the way that people act and behave, you can't command them to do something that self-evidently feels like a risk. Some of you complain about people like me wanting to control people forever. Far from it, yet it is you and yours trying to instruct people to do something they don't believe is safe or sensible.

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Apologies if this is obvious and I’m preaching to the converted but British politics at the moment is divided into Tory and Anti-Tory. We Anti-Tories take comfort in our shared ground of hating Johnson and his myriad and obvious flaws. However, that’s all we’ve got in common and all those converted by that line have now been converted. What are we offering as an alternative to convert more?

    At first look it’s hopeful. The Anti-Tories are easily the majority, even in England alone, but accross the U.K. we are split into Lab, LD, SNP, Green and PC. Lab is itself split into Corbynite Tendancy and Continuity Blairite. Each of these Anti-Tory factions hate each other as much as they do Johnson - if not more. To justify this we paint each other as some alternate form of Tory. The Corbynite Tendancy call the Continuity Blairites “Red Tories”, many Lab and LD peeps call the SNP “Tartan Tories”, everyone calls the LD’s the “Tories little helpers”. I’ve yet to see the Greens and PC painted that way admittedly but I’m sure it’s done.

    So, while I agree with everything the Johnson haters on here and elsewhere post about him, such posts annoy me as they’re not so much preaching to the converted as screaming into the void. We need an alternative. What? A “Progressive Alliance”??? What policies would such an alliance have? The Labour Party can’t seem to come up with a cohesive set of policies. The SNP has one big policy that applies the Scotland with ripple effects on the rUK and a lot of smaller polices that effect Scotland alone. The LD’s can’t hope to have a significant impact in such an alliance. The Greens have might some that could form common ground, I suppose, and perhaps provide cover for the others, but it’s a big “might”.

    The bottom line is that I agree with 90% of what RP says but it’s not enough anymore. Those of us who don’t like this shower need to start thinking about what we can give up to work with the others that don’t. I personally don’t even know who to vote for anymore. Simply not liking Johnson and criticising his government isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. Yet even the main opposition party can’t come up with an alternate programme.
    My solution was simple - leave the country. I dislike the regressive "fuck you" nature of the English psyche, decided I wanted better for my kids, and moved north. You always get the correct result in any given election because that is what people vote for. And in England, this is what you want.
    Not always, in 1950, 1964 and February 1974 England voted Tory and got a Labour government. In 2010 and 2017 the Tories had a majority in England but it was a hung parliament UK wide.

    On current polling the Tories will almost certainly win a majority in England in 2024 again but there is a chance Starmer could become UK PM with SNP and LD support in a hung parliament even if the Tories win most seats
    The elections you speak of were not elections in England. Which is why the correct result was gained in the UK-wide election.
    I don't disagree but in 1974 there was no devolution, so it did not matter if England did not get the UK government it did not vote for.

    Now however if Scotland or Wales get a UK Tory government they did not vote for they still have an SNP Holyrood or Labour Senedd government for much of their domestic policy.

    If England gets a UK Labour government it did not vote for however it will just have to grin and bear it with no English Parliament and now it seems no longer even EVEL
    You still haven't explained why the Tories are allowing such an atrocious grievance to develop by themselves actively cancelling EVEL that was their solution to this problem.
    I don't disagree, I think it is madness for Gove to suggest abolishing EVEL, especially with no English Parliament proposed instead.

    It does not matter now as the Tories have a UK majority as well as an English majority, it wlll matter in 2023/24 however if the Tories still have an English majority but not a UK majority
    Thanks for that! Nobody seems to be able to offer any up front and non-Machiavellian explanation.

    There is of course the possibility that Mr Gove intends to stand for a Scottish seat - maybe Peterborough and Fraserhead? - at the next GE (or someome will apply to the Chiltern Hundreds and make way for a by election) and he doesn't want to lose the chance of becoming Prime Minister of the UK. Either that or Mr Johnson's designated (but unanounced) heir is a Scottish Tory MP.

    Edit: or Mr J has in mind one of the Scottish Tory MPs for a major office of state.

    Not that I believe any of those. But still
    Golly, Gove standing in a Scottish seat is a morsel almost too delicious to contemplate! The idea of becoming a Scottish pm to unite the Yookay has probably featured in his fevered fantasies, even better representing a Scottish constituency.
    Maybe it was Gove intending to return (regress?) to full Jock that was the final straw for La Vine?
    Deleting EVEL would at least be a rational step in that case. In the case of everything else (placate the Jocks and make up for 2014-17? abolish devolition?) it would be like the bloke who is restoring a really rusty old car with the usual bits missing and thinks he's done a great start when he's polished up the old AA badge.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    edited July 2021

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    DougSeal said:


    Must be annoying. They've done two pre-announcements now and there's a 3rd coming on Monday when (hopefully) England is basking in having put away those demons and won a tournament. 2 shots at it and there's still half the country who think like me and won't comply with FREEDOM DAY we're all safe pandemic over go back to your dreary lives.

    Perhaps - and its just an idea - there's actually not a majority or anything close to it out there of people who think like PB Clowm Apologists like you and Charles and Big G? I know we're going to hear "but we have a majority of 80" and so what - when the alternative choice was a lunatic voting for a clown makes sense.

    But the clown is supposed to be a populist. Can instinctively feel what people think and give it to them. So why is he so badly wrong and out of touch on this one? Philip on here yesterday reduced to imploring that he ignores public opinion and leads regardless of what people think.

    When the desired outcome is to change the way that people act and behave, you can't command them to do something that self-evidently feels like a risk. Some of you complain about people like me wanting to control people forever. Far from it, yet it is you and yours trying to instruct people to do something they don't believe is safe or sensible.

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Apologies if this is obvious and I’m preaching to the converted but British politics at the moment is divided into Tory and Anti-Tory. We Anti-Tories take comfort in our shared ground of hating Johnson and his myriad and obvious flaws. However, that’s all we’ve got in common and all those converted by that line have now been converted. What are we offering as an alternative to convert more?

    At first look it’s hopeful. The Anti-Tories are easily the majority, even in England alone, but accross the U.K. we are split into Lab, LD, SNP, Green and PC. Lab is itself split into Corbynite Tendancy and Continuity Blairite. Each of these Anti-Tory factions hate each other as much as they do Johnson - if not more. To justify this we paint each other as some alternate form of Tory. The Corbynite Tendancy call the Continuity Blairites “Red Tories”, many Lab and LD peeps call the SNP “Tartan Tories”, everyone calls the LD’s the “Tories little helpers”. I’ve yet to see the Greens and PC painted that way admittedly but I’m sure it’s done.

    So, while I agree with everything the Johnson haters on here and elsewhere post about him, such posts annoy me as they’re not so much preaching to the converted as screaming into the void. We need an alternative. What? A “Progressive Alliance”??? What policies would such an alliance have? The Labour Party can’t seem to come up with a cohesive set of policies. The SNP has one big policy that applies the Scotland with ripple effects on the rUK and a lot of smaller polices that effect Scotland alone. The LD’s can’t hope to have a significant impact in such an alliance. The Greens have might some that could form common ground, I suppose, and perhaps provide cover for the others, but it’s a big “might”.

    The bottom line is that I agree with 90% of what RP says but it’s not enough anymore. Those of us who don’t like this shower need to start thinking about what we can give up to work with the others that don’t. I personally don’t even know who to vote for anymore. Simply not liking Johnson and criticising his government isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. Yet even the main opposition party can’t come up with an alternate programme.
    My solution was simple - leave the country. I dislike the regressive "fuck you" nature of the English psyche, decided I wanted better for my kids, and moved north. You always get the correct result in any given election because that is what people vote for. And in England, this is what you want.
    Not always, in 1950, 1964 and February 1974 England voted Tory and got a Labour government. In 2010 and 2017 the Tories had a majority in England but it was a hung parliament UK wide.

    On current polling the Tories will almost certainly win a majority in England in 2024 again but there is a chance Starmer could become UK PM with SNP and LD support in a hung parliament even if the Tories win most seats
    The elections you speak of were not elections in England. Which is why the correct result was gained in the UK-wide election.
    I don't disagree but in 1974 there was no devolution, so it did not matter if England did not get the UK government it did not vote for.

    Now however if Scotland or Wales get a UK Tory government they did not vote for they still have an SNP Holyrood or Labour Senedd government for much of their domestic policy.

    If England gets a UK Labour-SNP government it did not vote for however it will just have to grin and bear it with no English Parliament and now it seems no longer even EVEL

    A Labour/SNP government (which would never happen in a million years, but we'll let that one go) could just legislate to end EVEL if it chose to. Or it could frame legislation in such a way as to make it UK-wide. Or it could continue with this government's strategy of bypassing Parliament altogether. EVEL is not a magic bullet to protect the minority of people who vote Tory in England. It is merely a headline.

    Indeed, so why should the Tories fail to leave it in position, but positively remove it? They'd have something to howl about if the mythical Labour gmt cancelled EVEL, so why lose that brownie point?

    I think that, for obvious reasons, Gove is one of the few Tories who actually cares about the Union and he believes that getting rid of EVEL may have some kind of appeal in Scotland. I can't see it myself, though. The damage was done in Cameron's reaction to the referendum result in 2014 and in the Brexit vote. It will take more than gestures to undo it.

    If in 2024 we end up with a minority Labour government propped up by the SNP and EVEL is scrapped then it won't be Scottish nationalism resurgent again, indeed Edinburgh will be driving the UK government.

    It will be English nationalism on the rise

    We already have an English nationalist government in Westminster and its actions have made the Union more fragile than it has been for more than 300 years. If we see even more English nationalism because right-wingers cannot cope with non-Tory UK governments, then the UK will be well and truly over.

    No, even if Scots and Welsh voters now dislike the current UK Tory government they still have a Welsh Labour government in the Senedd or an SNP government at Holyrood to run much of their domestic policy.

    If however England gets a Labour government propped up by the SNP it did not vote for it will have no such protection for the Tory majority in England being preserved for English domestic policy if EVEL is scrapped and there is no English Parliament either.

    What the English want is merely equality within the UK to what the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish already have given the Union has now largely shifted to a Federal UK outside England anyway
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274

    Oliver Johnson
    @BristOliver
    ·
    1h
    Going forward, I'd like to see a weekly lottery with big cash prizes, where everyone who is already double jabbed or has registered two LFDs that week can enter.

    I liked the idea in the US, but with 90% uptake in vaccines here I don't think here it will make much difference. Especially as we know vaccine hesitancy for whom covid is really danergous is greatest among those for known "gambling" can be problematic on religious grounds.

    Perhaps for younger people there is some low cost incentive? E.g. i remember as a student Orange Wednesdays was really popular incentive to be on Orange mobile network.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 39,749
    DougSeal said:

    Just been looking at the ratings for GB News.

    On average they are doing worse than Sky News and the BBC.

    If only someone had warned them about there being no profit in TV news.

    It is a shame, I loved the calls and texts from Mikes Oxlong and Hunt et al.

    Andrew Neil needs to get Calista Hebburn as their Scotch correspondent, that would get the viewers flocking in.
    Do you have a theory as to the motives behind that account? One minute I’m thinking Unionist troll, the next I’m thinking Russian Bot. Very very odd. As I say I’ve seen similar on Covid Twitter, Zero Coviders so extreme that they have to be working for the other side (whoever that might be).
    I would tend to think Russian troll bot if troll bot it is, causing chaos and angry reaction seems to be Vlad’s mo as Trump’s USA proves.

    Gormless as Johnson’s attempts to speak to Scotland are, I’d expect a Unionist operation to be less tone deaf.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059
    Leon said:

    DougSeal said:

    Just been looking at the ratings for GB News.

    On average they are doing worse than Sky News and the BBC.

    If only someone had warned them about there being no profit in TV news.

    It is a shame, I loved the calls and texts from Mikes Oxlong and Hunt et al.

    Andrew Neil needs to get Calista Hebburn as their Scotch correspondent, that would get the viewers flocking in.
    Do you have a theory as to the motives behind that account? One minute I’m thinking Unionist troll, the next I’m thinking Russian Bot. Very very odd. As I say I’ve seen similar on Covid Twitter, Zero Coviders so extreme that they have to be working for the other side (whoever that might be).
    Unionist troll, probably? But quite odd and intriguing
    We could discuss all day. The one thing that finally tipped me over to the Russian Bot side was the other example of the “anti-socialist” TV she gave in the famous “Pesky Blinders” post. That other show was Sky’s Chernobyl. That tipped it for me but even so the Unionist troll theory is also credible.

    Not as vital as the Lab Leak arguments but still fascinating.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,043
    DavidL said:

    DavidL said:

    Leon said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    RobD said:

    Leon said:

    From the Times (££)


    Death toll of a million?
    So she says

    She doesn’t give a time-span however. If she means a million dead in a year, that’s horrific. It implies a global death toll of 70 million, for a start. Possibly way more than that, if you factor in inferior health systems, general chaos. 100 million? 300 million?

    However is she means an extra million dead over 10-15 years that’s very nasty but not apocalyptic. 600,000 die every year. So if this is her take, we will have 10% more deaths every year. Life expectancy will shrink, but not catastrophically
    I doubt that 60k will die from COVID per year. Post vaccination if we get more than 5k deaths it would be a surprise. The virus would need to mutate quite significantly to start killing off 60k per year in a vaccinated population.
    I have no real idea. Tho I note that this virus has already mutated faster and more perniciously than many virologists expected.
    No it hasn't.

    It has mutated far less effectively than most virologists were predicting. To the point where now, despite people's disbelief in the actual stats, it's a vanishingly minor illness and cause of death in the UK. For those healthy double vaccinated people in the UK the chances of dying from covid are next to zero.

    Of 125 deaths in the UK fewer than 1 will bear any relation to covid and that's despite mass testing for it to the point of absurdity.

    It's over. The people just need to be retrained.
    The number of people admitted to hospital with Covid was up 56% yesterday week on week. Its really not over, not by a long shot. But the balance of risks has changed and so should our response.
    It is over. 20 or 30 deaths a day is pifflingly small. 450 people die every day from cancer.

    Perspective now urgently required.

    Get jabbed, live your life. Period.
    Yesterday it was 34 and up 62% in a week. At what point at that rate of increase does it cease to be "piffling"? We also have an increasing number of long Covid victims that are going to keep our hospitals busy for many years to come.

    I am with you in that I think regulation should now be limited to the most extreme situations such as hospitals and care homes but I think claiming that this is "over" goes way too far and fails to recognise the risks we are still facing. If we go too far down that road we could end up in lockdown again.
    Tom Newton Dunn
    @tnewtondunn
    ·
    15m
    Dr Hopkins says the UK's coronavirus third wave is currently "three doubling times away from the peak, unless something changes". We're at 500 new hospital admissions a day now, opening up the prospect of 4,000 a day at the peak. Higher than April 2020's peak.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,266
    DougSeal said:

    Leon said:

    DougSeal said:

    Just been looking at the ratings for GB News.

    On average they are doing worse than Sky News and the BBC.

    If only someone had warned them about there being no profit in TV news.

    It is a shame, I loved the calls and texts from Mikes Oxlong and Hunt et al.

    Andrew Neil needs to get Calista Hebburn as their Scotch correspondent, that would get the viewers flocking in.
    Do you have a theory as to the motives behind that account? One minute I’m thinking Unionist troll, the next I’m thinking Russian Bot. Very very odd. As I say I’ve seen similar on Covid Twitter, Zero Coviders so extreme that they have to be working for the other side (whoever that might be).
    Unionist troll, probably? But quite odd and intriguing
    We could discuss all day. The one thing that finally tipped me over to the Russian Bot side was the other example of the “anti-socialist” TV she gave in the famous “Pesky Blinders” post. That other show was Sky’s Chernobyl. That tipped it for me but even so the Unionist troll theory is also credible.

    Not as vital as the Lab Leak arguments but still fascinating.
    Btw Calista’s account has now disappeared
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739
    edited July 2021

    It an actual English nationalist administration ever came to power in London then item one on the agenda would be the dissolution of the Union.

    And that was the first thing on BoZo's agenda.

    Tell Northern Ireland to fuck off...
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited July 2021

    DavidL said:

    DavidL said:

    Leon said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    RobD said:

    Leon said:

    From the Times (££)


    Death toll of a million?
    So she says

    She doesn’t give a time-span however. If she means a million dead in a year, that’s horrific. It implies a global death toll of 70 million, for a start. Possibly way more than that, if you factor in inferior health systems, general chaos. 100 million? 300 million?

    However is she means an extra million dead over 10-15 years that’s very nasty but not apocalyptic. 600,000 die every year. So if this is her take, we will have 10% more deaths every year. Life expectancy will shrink, but not catastrophically
    I doubt that 60k will die from COVID per year. Post vaccination if we get more than 5k deaths it would be a surprise. The virus would need to mutate quite significantly to start killing off 60k per year in a vaccinated population.
    I have no real idea. Tho I note that this virus has already mutated faster and more perniciously than many virologists expected.
    No it hasn't.

    It has mutated far less effectively than most virologists were predicting. To the point where now, despite people's disbelief in the actual stats, it's a vanishingly minor illness and cause of death in the UK. For those healthy double vaccinated people in the UK the chances of dying from covid are next to zero.

    Of 125 deaths in the UK fewer than 1 will bear any relation to covid and that's despite mass testing for it to the point of absurdity.

    It's over. The people just need to be retrained.
    The number of people admitted to hospital with Covid was up 56% yesterday week on week. Its really not over, not by a long shot. But the balance of risks has changed and so should our response.
    It is over. 20 or 30 deaths a day is pifflingly small. 450 people die every day from cancer.

    Perspective now urgently required.

    Get jabbed, live your life. Period.
    Yesterday it was 34 and up 62% in a week. At what point at that rate of increase does it cease to be "piffling"? We also have an increasing number of long Covid victims that are going to keep our hospitals busy for many years to come.

    I am with you in that I think regulation should now be limited to the most extreme situations such as hospitals and care homes but I think claiming that this is "over" goes way too far and fails to recognise the risks we are still facing. If we go too far down that road we could end up in lockdown again.
    Tom Newton Dunn
    @tnewtondunn
    ·
    15m
    Dr Hopkins says the UK's coronavirus third wave is currently "three doubling times away from the peak, unless something changes". We're at 500 new hospital admissions a day now, opening up the prospect of 4,000 a day at the peak. Higher than April 2020's peak.
    I just can't see how 4000 a day is possible, unless vaccine really aren't working as well as was estimated.

    90% of the adult population have antibodies against covid, reinfection is very rare and other than the very very rare instance is "mild". The rate of hospitalitizations among the young low, even one dose is claimed to give decent protection against serious covid.

    And only 10% in hospital are double vaccinated.....
  • Alphabet_SoupAlphabet_Soup Posts: 2,703

    Roger said:

    Gary Imlach was amusing last night on the TdF highlights. Commenting on the phenomenal story of Mark Cavendish* who has equalled the great Eddie Merckx's record of 34 stage wins in the Tour de France, Imlach said it had gone under the radar in the UK, relative to the football coverage. He wasn't complaining about that, or surprised about it, but added that:

    At least we haven't had to witness the Prime Minister dressed up in cycling gear.

    Indeed.

    * Always assuming and hoping of course that Cavendish isn't fuelled by naughty sauce.

    I’ve been thinking the same thing. Cavendish will be remembered worldwide by the cycling community for at least a century to come, probably much longer. Even if England win tomorrow, only the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish will remember it, because of the constant media drone we’ll all be subjected to, à la 1966.

    Assuming he’s not on the sauce, Cavendish will be remembered as a great sportsman.
    Assuming the English win tonight, their achievement will not be remembered primarily as a sporting achievement, but as another step on the road to the dissolution of the Union.
    Why do you think England winning will help on the road to the dissolution of the Union? I should say that nothing would please me more than a dissolution of the Union if you could rejoin the EU. I'd become Scottish in a heartbeat. I loathe the ugly isolationist country we've become. They're even talking about Liz Truss for PM!
    Track record. 1966 was fantastic for both Plaid and the SNP, a gift that kept giving for over half a century.

    We’d love to have you Roger. You are in good company as we take in refugees fleeing from England’s ugly Brexit revolution.
    Point of info: Carmarthen by-election (14 July) preceded the World Cup final (30 July) and inspired the England team to try that little bit harder to preserve the union.
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146
    HYUFD said:

    Gary Imlach was amusing last night on the TdF highlights. Commenting on the phenomenal story of Mark Cavendish* who has equalled the great Eddie Merckx's record of 34 stage wins in the Tour de France, Imlach said it had gone under the radar in the UK, relative to the football coverage. He wasn't complaining about that, or surprised about it, but added that:

    At least we haven't had to witness the Prime Minister dressed up in cycling gear.

    Indeed.

    * Always assuming and hoping of course that Cavendish isn't fuelled by naughty sauce.

    I’ve been thinking the same thing. Cavendish will be remembered worldwide by the cycling community for at least a century to come, probably much longer. Even if England win tomorrow, only the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish will remember it, because of the constant media drone we’ll all be subjected to, à la 1966.

    Assuming he’s not on the sauce, Cavendish will be remembered as a great sportsman.
    Assuming the English win tonight, their achievement will not be remembered primarily as a sporting achievement, but as another step on the road to the dissolution of the Union.
    What rubbish, the fact England got all the way to the final while Scotland and Wales got knocked out in the early stages might boost English nationalism a bit, especially if England win, as it would show England would be a strong nation even on its own but I doubt it would make any difference to Scottish independence. If you are a Scottish Nationalist you hated England and its sporting teams before the tournament and still do and if you are a Scottish Unionist you happily supported Scotland and will wish England well tonight too.

    However I am looking forward to the British Lions tour and Olympics later this month when as Scots or English we can once again support the same team
    The problem with you FUDHY is that you understand neo-Unionism (and are an invaluable source of information on that movement), but you are utterly clueless about all other important blocs:

    1. traditional Unionism of the sort that has kept the Union clinging on this last half century, ie the SLab/SLD/civic-Scotland axis

    2. the Scottish independence movement

    3. and most importantly, ordinary Scots
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614

    Oliver Johnson
    @BristOliver
    ·
    1h
    Going forward, I'd like to see a weekly lottery with big cash prizes, where everyone who is already double jabbed or has registered two LFDs that week can enter.

    I liked the idea in the US, but with 90% uptake in vaccines here I don't think here it will make much difference. Especially as we know vaccine hesitancy for whom covid is really danergous is greatest among those for known "gambling" can be problematic on religious grounds.

    Perhaps for younger people there is some low cost incentive? E.g. i remember as a student Orange Wednesdays was really popular incentive to be on Orange mobile network.
    The incentive for younger people will be the travel restrictions.

    Vaccinated = test and release
    Not vaccinated = quarantine for 10 days.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059
    Leon said:

    DougSeal said:

    Leon said:

    DougSeal said:

    Just been looking at the ratings for GB News.

    On average they are doing worse than Sky News and the BBC.

    If only someone had warned them about there being no profit in TV news.

    It is a shame, I loved the calls and texts from Mikes Oxlong and Hunt et al.

    Andrew Neil needs to get Calista Hebburn as their Scotch correspondent, that would get the viewers flocking in.
    Do you have a theory as to the motives behind that account? One minute I’m thinking Unionist troll, the next I’m thinking Russian Bot. Very very odd. As I say I’ve seen similar on Covid Twitter, Zero Coviders so extreme that they have to be working for the other side (whoever that might be).
    Unionist troll, probably? But quite odd and intriguing
    We could discuss all day. The one thing that finally tipped me over to the Russian Bot side was the other example of the “anti-socialist” TV she gave in the famous “Pesky Blinders” post. That other show was Sky’s Chernobyl. That tipped it for me but even so the Unionist troll theory is also credible.

    Not as vital as the Lab Leak arguments but still fascinating.
    Btw Calista’s account has now disappeared
    Yeah, saw that. Shame.
  • another_richardanother_richard Posts: 24,967
    Sandpit said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Indeed, I suspect we could all be wearing masks, on crowded public transport, for the rest of our lives

    No we won't. I don't and won't. So you do what you feel you need to in your fear-laden life but I'm living free, ta.

    You only get one of these things. Enjoy it.
    Interesting.

    Thought experiment: it’s November 2021 and you a mild sore throat and you’re occasionally sneezing, but you need to get to work on the Northern Line. You might have a cold or even Covid - or it might be nothing at all, it really isn’t that bad

    When you get on the Tube, do you wear a mask out of care and concern for others? For me, post pandemic, the answer is obviously Yes

    You?
    If you think you might have covid, or even a bad cold, you shouldn’t be thinking about going to work.

    Surely that’s one thing the pandemic has taught us?
    That's easy to say but it doesn't apply equally to all workers.

    For some their work would be done by someone else for others it piles up on their desk.

    For some they don't lose any pay for others they do.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772

    The true nature of the Cult of Boris is revealed by the FREEDOM DAY nonsense. "We'e doing this to get things back to normal" they say, which means that you should go on the tube into the office and buy £4 coffees and eat out and pack 64 of you into the steam railway coach that was posted on here yesterday as an example of an organisation desperate for normal because £.

    As now multiple polls show, the public aren't as stupid as the PM or as gung-ho as some on here. They aren't going into the office crushed in on the tube now because they and their businesses have realised the pointlessness of it. They aren't buying £4 twatty coffees because they're shit value for money. They aren't packing into steam railways seats because they'e now risk aware.

    Lifting pretty much all restrictions won't change this. Nor will the government's increasingly shouty pronouncements to get back to work you plebs. Yes, some people will deploy their natural baseline anger and arrogance to not care but half of them never stopped.

    So when the bums don't appear onto steam railway seats, the financial support won't be there to keep them going - the reverse in fact as loans start getting called back in. The government will say "we have freed the public, if they aren't coming it must be your fault". The NHS being swamped again by not just Covid but the sheer number of staff absent and the 13m case backlog in non-covid is, we will be told, nothing to worry about.

    This is the best case scenario. Lack of business, lack of staff, lack of support, blame the people. The worst case is all that then reimposition of "never again" restrictions because Omega is tearing through the vaccine. And all the time the Tories sneering, arrogant and increasingly angry that the plebs aren't doing what their betters have told them to, applying "common sense" in a way that best maximises revenues for their patrons and donors.

    When the Scottish numbers rocketed upwards a friend of mine on Facebook posted something along the lines of: "Who could have foreseen that this would happen after you open up?" and was mightily pissed off at me when I suggested that this would be okay, because vaccines.

    This same friend has, since Saturday last, posted on Facebook about: Going to some participatory sensory ~theatre production (with a couple of dozen other members of the public), eating at a restaurant with one group of friends, enjoying a BBQ with a different set of friends, playing boardgames with a third group of friends, meeting up for beers.

    Regardless of what you might think it is sensible for people to do, if most of the people who post on social media about how the politicians have messed this up by opening things up to quickly are taking advantage and mixing with dozens of contacts each week, then I think that the hospitality industries are going to be fine.

    It's only going to be a relatively small proportion of people, like myself, who are being cautious while waiting for a second dose. Everyone else, despite what they say on social media, or tell opinion pollsters, is going back to normal.

    And, nervous though I am, I think this will be mostly fine. Would have been a lot better if Delta had been delayed, or if vaccine supply had ramped up further, but I think the sky will hold, and not fall in.

    One further point is that, during the autumn and winter the contrast with unvaccinated countries, such as Indonesia just now, and others in the months to come, will probably serve to remind voters of how fortunate they are that Boris bought them vaccines.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    edited July 2021
    Scott_xP said:

    It an actual English nationalist administration ever came to power in London then item one on the agenda would be the dissolution of the Union.

    And that was the first thing on BoZo's agenda.

    Tell Northern Ireland to fuck off...
    Nope.

    If Boris was genuinely an English Nationalist he would have gone to No Deal ultra hard Brexit and imposed a hard border in Ireland and given no concessions to the Scottish Remain majority or Nationalist sentiment in Ireland at all.

    He would then have scrapped Holyrood and the Senedd and told the Scottish and Welsh to like it or lump it.

    Though if he had gone that far there would have been 60%+ support for independence in Scotland and a clear majority in Northern Ireland for Irish unity now and the Union would already be over
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 39,749
    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    DougSeal said:


    Must be annoying. They've done two pre-announcements now and there's a 3rd coming on Monday when (hopefully) England is basking in having put away those demons and won a tournament. 2 shots at it and there's still half the country who think like me and won't comply with FREEDOM DAY we're all safe pandemic over go back to your dreary lives.

    Perhaps - and its just an idea - there's actually not a majority or anything close to it out there of people who think like PB Clowm Apologists like you and Charles and Big G? I know we're going to hear "but we have a majority of 80" and so what - when the alternative choice was a lunatic voting for a clown makes sense.

    But the clown is supposed to be a populist. Can instinctively feel what people think and give it to them. So why is he so badly wrong and out of touch on this one? Philip on here yesterday reduced to imploring that he ignores public opinion and leads regardless of what people think.

    When the desired outcome is to change the way that people act and behave, you can't command them to do something that self-evidently feels like a risk. Some of you complain about people like me wanting to control people forever. Far from it, yet it is you and yours trying to instruct people to do something they don't believe is safe or sensible.

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Apologies if this is obvious and I’m preaching to the converted but British politics at the moment is divided into Tory and Anti-Tory. We Anti-Tories take comfort in our shared ground of hating Johnson and his myriad and obvious flaws. However, that’s all we’ve got in common and all those converted by that line have now been converted. What are we offering as an alternative to convert more?

    At first look it’s hopeful. The Anti-Tories are easily the majority, even in England alone, but accross the U.K. we are split into Lab, LD, SNP, Green and PC. Lab is itself split into Corbynite Tendancy and Continuity Blairite. Each of these Anti-Tory factions hate each other as much as they do Johnson - if not more. To justify this we paint each other as some alternate form of Tory. The Corbynite Tendancy call the Continuity Blairites “Red Tories”, many Lab and LD peeps call the SNP “Tartan Tories”, everyone calls the LD’s the “Tories little helpers”. I’ve yet to see the Greens and PC painted that way admittedly but I’m sure it’s done.

    So, while I agree with everything the Johnson haters on here and elsewhere post about him, such posts annoy me as they’re not so much preaching to the converted as screaming into the void. We need an alternative. What? A “Progressive Alliance”??? What policies would such an alliance have? The Labour Party can’t seem to come up with a cohesive set of policies. The SNP has one big policy that applies the Scotland with ripple effects on the rUK and a lot of smaller polices that effect Scotland alone. The LD’s can’t hope to have a significant impact in such an alliance. The Greens have might some that could form common ground, I suppose, and perhaps provide cover for the others, but it’s a big “might”.

    The bottom line is that I agree with 90% of what RP says but it’s not enough anymore. Those of us who don’t like this shower need to start thinking about what we can give up to work with the others that don’t. I personally don’t even know who to vote for anymore. Simply not liking Johnson and criticising his government isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. Yet even the main opposition party can’t come up with an alternate programme.
    My solution was simple - leave the country. I dislike the regressive "fuck you" nature of the English psyche, decided I wanted better for my kids, and moved north. You always get the correct result in any given election because that is what people vote for. And in England, this is what you want.
    Not always, in 1950, 1964 and February 1974 England voted Tory and got a Labour government. In 2010 and 2017 the Tories had a majority in England but it was a hung parliament UK wide.

    On current polling the Tories will almost certainly win a majority in England in 2024 again but there is a chance Starmer could become UK PM with SNP and LD support in a hung parliament even if the Tories win most seats
    The elections you speak of were not elections in England. Which is why the correct result was gained in the UK-wide election.
    I don't disagree but in 1974 there was no devolution, so it did not matter if England did not get the UK government it did not vote for.

    Now however if Scotland or Wales get a UK Tory government they did not vote for they still have an SNP Holyrood or Labour Senedd government for much of their domestic policy.

    If England gets a UK Labour government it did not vote for however it will just have to grin and bear it with no English Parliament and now it seems no longer even EVEL
    You still haven't explained why the Tories are allowing such an atrocious grievance to develop by themselves actively cancelling EVEL that was their solution to this problem.
    I don't disagree, I think it is madness for Gove to suggest abolishing EVEL, especially with no English Parliament proposed instead.

    It does not matter now as the Tories have a UK majority as well as an English majority, it wlll matter in 2023/24 however if the Tories still have an English majority but not a UK majority
    Thanks for that! Nobody seems to be able to offer any up front and non-Machiavellian explanation.

    There is of course the possibility that Mr Gove intends to stand for a Scottish seat - maybe Peterborough and Fraserhead? - at the next GE (or someome will apply to the Chiltern Hundreds and make way for a by election) and he doesn't want to lose the chance of becoming Prime Minister of the UK. Either that or Mr Johnson's designated (but unanounced) heir is a Scottish Tory MP.

    Edit: or Mr J has in mind one of the Scottish Tory MPs for a major office of state.

    Not that I believe any of those. But still
    Golly, Gove standing in a Scottish seat is a morsel almost too delicious to contemplate! The idea of becoming a Scottish pm to unite the Yookay has probably featured in his fevered fantasies, even better representing a Scottish constituency.
    Maybe it was Gove intending to return (regress?) to full Jock that was the final straw for La Vine?
    Deleting EVEL would at least be a rational step in that case. In the case of everything else (placate the Jocks and make up for 2014-17? abolish devolition?) it would be like the bloke who is restoring a really rusty old car with the usual bits missing and thinks he's done a great start when he's polished up the old AA badge.
    Exactamundo, Haynes owners’ manual for the Union with the last 30 pages missing.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,772

    DavidL said:

    DavidL said:

    Leon said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    RobD said:

    Leon said:

    From the Times (££)


    Death toll of a million?
    So she says

    She doesn’t give a time-span however. If she means a million dead in a year, that’s horrific. It implies a global death toll of 70 million, for a start. Possibly way more than that, if you factor in inferior health systems, general chaos. 100 million? 300 million?

    However is she means an extra million dead over 10-15 years that’s very nasty but not apocalyptic. 600,000 die every year. So if this is her take, we will have 10% more deaths every year. Life expectancy will shrink, but not catastrophically
    I doubt that 60k will die from COVID per year. Post vaccination if we get more than 5k deaths it would be a surprise. The virus would need to mutate quite significantly to start killing off 60k per year in a vaccinated population.
    I have no real idea. Tho I note that this virus has already mutated faster and more perniciously than many virologists expected.
    No it hasn't.

    It has mutated far less effectively than most virologists were predicting. To the point where now, despite people's disbelief in the actual stats, it's a vanishingly minor illness and cause of death in the UK. For those healthy double vaccinated people in the UK the chances of dying from covid are next to zero.

    Of 125 deaths in the UK fewer than 1 will bear any relation to covid and that's despite mass testing for it to the point of absurdity.

    It's over. The people just need to be retrained.
    The number of people admitted to hospital with Covid was up 56% yesterday week on week. Its really not over, not by a long shot. But the balance of risks has changed and so should our response.
    It is over. 20 or 30 deaths a day is pifflingly small. 450 people die every day from cancer.

    Perspective now urgently required.

    Get jabbed, live your life. Period.
    Yesterday it was 34 and up 62% in a week. At what point at that rate of increase does it cease to be "piffling"? We also have an increasing number of long Covid victims that are going to keep our hospitals busy for many years to come.

    I am with you in that I think regulation should now be limited to the most extreme situations such as hospitals and care homes but I think claiming that this is "over" goes way too far and fails to recognise the risks we are still facing. If we go too far down that road we could end up in lockdown again.
    Tom Newton Dunn
    @tnewtondunn
    ·
    15m
    Dr Hopkins says the UK's coronavirus third wave is currently "three doubling times away from the peak, unless something changes". We're at 500 new hospital admissions a day now, opening up the prospect of 4,000 a day at the peak. Higher than April 2020's peak.
    I hope that is pessimistic and that we are no more than one doubling away from the peak now. There are some hints in @Malmesbury's figures that the number of new cases is topping out but clearly admissions and deaths will lag that as usual.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,019
    Leon said:

    Also striking, from that Luntz essay

    “As if that wasn’t enough, here’s something truly troubling. Young people as a whole in the UK are more likely to feel Britain is systematically racist than the non-white community who are actually experiencing the racism – because that’s what the young are being taught and told.

    “One more time: racism and discrimination do exist. But if you’re brought up to consider yourself a victim, you will be a victim.”

    And that's the problem with Wokeness in a nutshell.
  • SouthamObserverSouthamObserver Posts: 38,879
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    DougSeal said:


    Must be annoying. They've done two pre-announcements now and there's a 3rd coming on Monday when (hopefully) England is basking in having put away those demons and won a tournament. 2 shots at it and there's still half the country who think like me and won't comply with FREEDOM DAY we're all safe pandemic over go back to your dreary lives.

    Perhaps - and its just an idea - there's actually not a majority or anything close to it out there of people who think like PB Clowm Apologists like you and Charles and Big G? I know we're going to hear "but we have a majority of 80" and so what - when the alternative choice was a lunatic voting for a clown makes sense.

    But the clown is supposed to be a populist. Can instinctively feel what people think and give it to them. So why is he so badly wrong and out of touch on this one? Philip on here yesterday reduced to imploring that he ignores public opinion and leads regardless of what people think.

    When the desired outcome is to change the way that people act and behave, you can't command them to do something that self-evidently feels like a risk. Some of you complain about people like me wanting to control people forever. Far from it, yet it is you and yours trying to instruct people to do something they don't believe is safe or sensible.

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Apologies if this is obvious and I’m preaching to the converted but British politics at the moment is divided into Tory and Anti-Tory. We Anti-Tories take comfort in our shared ground of hating Johnson and his myriad and obvious flaws. However, that’s all we’ve got in common and all those converted by that line have now been converted. What are we offering as an alternative to convert more?

    At first look it’s hopeful. The Anti-Tories are easily the majority, even in England alone, but accross the U.K. we are split into Lab, LD, SNP, Green and PC. Lab is itself split into Corbynite Tendancy and Continuity Blairite. Each of these Anti-Tory factions hate each other as much as they do Johnson - if not more. To justify this we paint each other as some alternate form of Tory. The Corbynite Tendancy call the Continuity Blairites “Red Tories”, many Lab and LD peeps call the SNP “Tartan Tories”, everyone calls the LD’s the “Tories little helpers”. I’ve yet to see the Greens and PC painted that way admittedly but I’m sure it’s done.

    So, while I agree with everything the Johnson haters on here and elsewhere post about him, such posts annoy me as they’re not so much preaching to the converted as screaming into the void. We need an alternative. What? A “Progressive Alliance”??? What policies would such an alliance have? The Labour Party can’t seem to come up with a cohesive set of policies. The SNP has one big policy that applies the Scotland with ripple effects on the rUK and a lot of smaller polices that effect Scotland alone. The LD’s can’t hope to have a significant impact in such an alliance. The Greens have might some that could form common ground, I suppose, and perhaps provide cover for the others, but it’s a big “might”.

    The bottom line is that I agree with 90% of what RP says but it’s not enough anymore. Those of us who don’t like this shower need to start thinking about what we can give up to work with the others that don’t. I personally don’t even know who to vote for anymore. Simply not liking Johnson and criticising his government isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. Yet even the main opposition party can’t come up with an alternate programme.
    My solution was simple - leave the country. I dislike the regressive "fuck you" nature of the English psyche, decided I wanted better for my kids, and moved north. You always get the correct result in any given election because that is what people vote for. And in England, this is what you want.
    Not always, in 1950, 1964 and February 1974 England voted Tory and got a Labour government. In 2010 and 2017 the Tories had a majority in England but it was a hung parliament UK wide.

    On current polling the Tories will almost certainly win a majority in England in 2024 again but there is a chance Starmer could become UK PM with SNP and LD support in a hung parliament even if the Tories win most seats
    The elections you speak of were not elections in England. Which is why the correct result was gained in the UK-wide election.
    I don't disagree but in 1974 there was no devolution, so it did not matter if England did not get the UK government it did not vote for.

    Now however if Scotland or Wales get a UK Tory government they did not vote for they still have an SNP Holyrood or Labour Senedd government for much of their domestic policy.

    If England gets a UK Labour-SNP government it did not vote for however it will just have to grin and bear it with no English Parliament and now it seems no longer even EVEL

    A Labour/SNP government (which would never happen in a million years, but we'll let that one go) could just legislate to end EVEL if it chose to. Or it could frame legislation in such a way as to make it UK-wide. Or it could continue with this government's strategy of bypassing Parliament altogether. EVEL is not a magic bullet to protect the minority of people who vote Tory in England. It is merely a headline.

    Indeed, so why should the Tories fail to leave it in position, but positively remove it? They'd have something to howl about if the mythical Labour gmt cancelled EVEL, so why lose that brownie point?

    I think that, for obvious reasons, Gove is one of the few Tories who actually cares about the Union and he believes that getting rid of EVEL may have some kind of appeal in Scotland. I can't see it myself, though. The damage was done in Cameron's reaction to the referendum result in 2014 and in the Brexit vote. It will take more than gestures to undo it.

    If in 2024 we end up with a minority Labour government propped up by the SNP and EVEL is scrapped then it won't be Scottish nationalism resurgent again, indeed Edinburgh will be driving the UK government.

    It will be English nationalism on the rise

    We already have an English nationalist government in Westminster and its actions have made the Union more fragile than it has been for more than 300 years. If we see even more English nationalism because right-wingers cannot cope with non-Tory UK governments, then the UK will be well and truly over.

    No, even if Scots and Welsh voters now dislike the current UK Tory government they still have a Welsh Labour government in the Senedd or an SNP government at Holyrood to run much of their domestic policy.

    If however England gets a Labour government propped up by the SNP it did not vote for it will have no such protection for the Tory majority in England being preserved for English domestic policy if EVEL is scrapped and there is no English Parliament either.

    What the English want is merely equality within the UK to what the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish already have given the Union has now largely shifted to a Federal UK outside England anyway

    I'd be happy with an English parliament that is elected in the same way as the Welsh and Scottish ones. As there is no Tory majority in England, maybe we'd get a legislature that more aligns with how people actually cast their votes.

  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    edited July 2021

    HYUFD said:

    Gary Imlach was amusing last night on the TdF highlights. Commenting on the phenomenal story of Mark Cavendish* who has equalled the great Eddie Merckx's record of 34 stage wins in the Tour de France, Imlach said it had gone under the radar in the UK, relative to the football coverage. He wasn't complaining about that, or surprised about it, but added that:

    At least we haven't had to witness the Prime Minister dressed up in cycling gear.

    Indeed.

    * Always assuming and hoping of course that Cavendish isn't fuelled by naughty sauce.

    I’ve been thinking the same thing. Cavendish will be remembered worldwide by the cycling community for at least a century to come, probably much longer. Even if England win tomorrow, only the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish will remember it, because of the constant media drone we’ll all be subjected to, à la 1966.

    Assuming he’s not on the sauce, Cavendish will be remembered as a great sportsman.
    Assuming the English win tonight, their achievement will not be remembered primarily as a sporting achievement, but as another step on the road to the dissolution of the Union.
    What rubbish, the fact England got all the way to the final while Scotland and Wales got knocked out in the early stages might boost English nationalism a bit, especially if England win, as it would show England would be a strong nation even on its own but I doubt it would make any difference to Scottish independence. If you are a Scottish Nationalist you hated England and its sporting teams before the tournament and still do and if you are a Scottish Unionist you happily supported Scotland and will wish England well tonight too.

    However I am looking forward to the British Lions tour and Olympics later this month when as Scots or English we can once again support the same team
    The problem with you FUDHY is that you understand neo-Unionism (and are an invaluable source of information on that movement), but you are utterly clueless about all other important blocs:

    1. traditional Unionism of the sort that has kept the Union clinging on this last half century, ie the SLab/SLD/civic-Scotland axis

    2. the Scottish independence movement

    3. and most importantly, ordinary Scots
    The 55% of Scots who voted No in 2014 are not that bothered either way whether England win or lose tonight but will politely wish them well.

    It is only the 45% of Scots who voted Yes like you who absolutely despise the England team and are praying for an Italy win, as demonstrated by the headline in the National
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072
    Sandpit said:

    RobD said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi reveals the Govt will publish new covid guidelines this week to wear masks on busy trains. "There will be very clear guidance that you'll be expected to wear masks on crowded carriages". This appears to be a change of plan.
    @TimesRadio

    Except it’s not a “change of plan” at all.

    It’s re-affirming what the government actually said last week - as opposed to how the media reported it - that the plan was to replace legislation with guidance from 19th July.
    Did Boris mention replacing legislation with guidance in his press conference at all a week ago ?
    I don't remember it
    Yep:

    We will end the 1 metre plus rule on social distancing, and the legal obligation to wear a face covering, although guidance will suggest where you might choose to do so, especially when cases are rising, and where you come into contact with people you don’t normally meet in enclosed places, such as obviously crowded public transport.

    https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-statement-at-coronavirus-press-conference-5-july-2021
    That’s not quite the same thing is it?

    There is a difference between “everyone should continue to wear masks” and “people may decide they wish to continue to wear masks”.
    They’re changing “You MUST wear a mask” with “You SHOULD wear a mask”.

    Maybe I’m used to aviation legislation, where there’s whole chapters on the difference between the words MUST, SHALL, SHOULD, MAY and MIGHT.

    https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/plain_language/articles/authority/
    Aye but that isn’t what he said
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905
    Scott_xP said:

    It an actual English nationalist administration ever came to power in London then item one on the agenda would be the dissolution of the Union.

    And that was the first thing on BoZo's agenda.

    Tell Northern Ireland to fuck off...
    You can accuse the man of all sorts but that suggestion doesn't pass muster. If the British Government really wanted to wash its hands of Northern Ireland then it could simply command its Parliamentary majority to vote to eject it. It would hardly be the first time in history that a state voted to spit out an unwanted part of itself.
  • SouthamObserverSouthamObserver Posts: 38,879

    We already have an English nationalist government in Westminster

    No we don't.

    If an actual English nationalist administration ever came to power in London then item one on the agenda would be the dissolution of the Union.

    Given that we do have an English nationalist government we can see that is not the case. For all kinds of historical reasons, the Union gives English nationalists a level of international weight, prestige and significance its dissolution would remove.

  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Gary Imlach was amusing last night on the TdF highlights. Commenting on the phenomenal story of Mark Cavendish* who has equalled the great Eddie Merckx's record of 34 stage wins in the Tour de France, Imlach said it had gone under the radar in the UK, relative to the football coverage. He wasn't complaining about that, or surprised about it, but added that:

    At least we haven't had to witness the Prime Minister dressed up in cycling gear.

    Indeed.

    * Always assuming and hoping of course that Cavendish isn't fuelled by naughty sauce.

    I’ve been thinking the same thing. Cavendish will be remembered worldwide by the cycling community for at least a century to come, probably much longer. Even if England win tomorrow, only the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish will remember it, because of the constant media drone we’ll all be subjected to, à la 1966.

    Assuming he’s not on the sauce, Cavendish will be remembered as a great sportsman.
    Assuming the English win tonight, their achievement will not be remembered primarily as a sporting achievement, but as another step on the road to the dissolution of the Union.
    What rubbish, the fact England got all the way to the final while Scotland and Wales got knocked out in the early stages might boost English nationalism a bit, especially if England win, as it would show England would be a strong nation even on its own but I doubt it would make any difference to Scottish independence. If you are a Scottish Nationalist you hated England and its sporting teams before the tournament and still do and if you are a Scottish Unionist you happily supported Scotland and will wish England well tonight too.

    However I am looking forward to the British Lions tour and Olympics later this month when as Scots or English we can once again support the same team
    The problem with you FUDHY is that you understand neo-Unionism (and are an invaluable source of information on that movement), but you are utterly clueless about all other important blocs:

    1. traditional Unionism of the sort that has kept the Union clinging on this last half century, ie the SLab/SLD/civic-Scotland axis

    2. the Scottish independence movement

    3. and most importantly, ordinary Scots
    The 55% of Scots who voted No in 2014 are not that bothered either way whether England win or lose tonight but will politely wish them well.

    It is only the 45% of Scots who voted Yes like you who absolutely despise the England team and are praying for an Italy win, as demonstrated by the headline in the National
    The circulation of the National is what, 7,000? It’s more an online click bait generator than anything else, and that headline proves it.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    DougSeal said:


    Must be annoying. They've done two pre-announcements now and there's a 3rd coming on Monday when (hopefully) England is basking in having put away those demons and won a tournament. 2 shots at it and there's still half the country who think like me and won't comply with FREEDOM DAY we're all safe pandemic over go back to your dreary lives.

    Perhaps - and its just an idea - there's actually not a majority or anything close to it out there of people who think like PB Clowm Apologists like you and Charles and Big G? I know we're going to hear "but we have a majority of 80" and so what - when the alternative choice was a lunatic voting for a clown makes sense.

    But the clown is supposed to be a populist. Can instinctively feel what people think and give it to them. So why is he so badly wrong and out of touch on this one? Philip on here yesterday reduced to imploring that he ignores public opinion and leads regardless of what people think.

    When the desired outcome is to change the way that people act and behave, you can't command them to do something that self-evidently feels like a risk. Some of you complain about people like me wanting to control people forever. Far from it, yet it is you and yours trying to instruct people to do something they don't believe is safe or sensible.

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Apologies if this is obvious and I’m preaching to the converted but British politics at the moment is divided into Tory and Anti-Tory. We Anti-Tories take comfort in our shared ground of hating Johnson and his myriad and obvious flaws. However, that’s all we’ve got in common and all those converted by that line have now been converted. What are we offering as an alternative to convert more?

    At first look it’s hopeful. The Anti-Tories are easily the majority, even in England alone, but accross the U.K. we are split into Lab, LD, SNP, Green and PC. Lab is itself split into Corbynite Tendancy and Continuity Blairite. Each of these Anti-Tory factions hate each other as much as they do Johnson - if not more. To justify this we paint each other as some alternate form of Tory. The Corbynite Tendancy call the Continuity Blairites “Red Tories”, many Lab and LD peeps call the SNP “Tartan Tories”, everyone calls the LD’s the “Tories little helpers”. I’ve yet to see the Greens and PC painted that way admittedly but I’m sure it’s done.

    So, while I agree with everything the Johnson haters on here and elsewhere post about him, such posts annoy me as they’re not so much preaching to the converted as screaming into the void. We need an alternative. What? A “Progressive Alliance”??? What policies would such an alliance have? The Labour Party can’t seem to come up with a cohesive set of policies. The SNP has one big policy that applies the Scotland with ripple effects on the rUK and a lot of smaller polices that effect Scotland alone. The LD’s can’t hope to have a significant impact in such an alliance. The Greens have might some that could form common ground, I suppose, and perhaps provide cover for the others, but it’s a big “might”.

    The bottom line is that I agree with 90% of what RP says but it’s not enough anymore. Those of us who don’t like this shower need to start thinking about what we can give up to work with the others that don’t. I personally don’t even know who to vote for anymore. Simply not liking Johnson and criticising his government isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. Yet even the main opposition party can’t come up with an alternate programme.
    My solution was simple - leave the country. I dislike the regressive "fuck you" nature of the English psyche, decided I wanted better for my kids, and moved north. You always get the correct result in any given election because that is what people vote for. And in England, this is what you want.
    Not always, in 1950, 1964 and February 1974 England voted Tory and got a Labour government. In 2010 and 2017 the Tories had a majority in England but it was a hung parliament UK wide.

    On current polling the Tories will almost certainly win a majority in England in 2024 again but there is a chance Starmer could become UK PM with SNP and LD support in a hung parliament even if the Tories win most seats
    The elections you speak of were not elections in England. Which is why the correct result was gained in the UK-wide election.
    I don't disagree but in 1974 there was no devolution, so it did not matter if England did not get the UK government it did not vote for.

    Now however if Scotland or Wales get a UK Tory government they did not vote for they still have an SNP Holyrood or Labour Senedd government for much of their domestic policy.

    If England gets a UK Labour-SNP government it did not vote for however it will just have to grin and bear it with no English Parliament and now it seems no longer even EVEL

    A Labour/SNP government (which would never happen in a million years, but we'll let that one go) could just legislate to end EVEL if it chose to. Or it could frame legislation in such a way as to make it UK-wide. Or it could continue with this government's strategy of bypassing Parliament altogether. EVEL is not a magic bullet to protect the minority of people who vote Tory in England. It is merely a headline.

    Indeed, so why should the Tories fail to leave it in position, but positively remove it? They'd have something to howl about if the mythical Labour gmt cancelled EVEL, so why lose that brownie point?

    I think that, for obvious reasons, Gove is one of the few Tories who actually cares about the Union and he believes that getting rid of EVEL may have some kind of appeal in Scotland. I can't see it myself, though. The damage was done in Cameron's reaction to the referendum result in 2014 and in the Brexit vote. It will take more than gestures to undo it.

    If in 2024 we end up with a minority Labour government propped up by the SNP and EVEL is scrapped then it won't be Scottish nationalism resurgent again, indeed Edinburgh will be driving the UK government.

    It will be English nationalism on the rise

    We already have an English nationalist government in Westminster and its actions have made the Union more fragile than it has been for more than 300 years. If we see even more English nationalism because right-wingers cannot cope with non-Tory UK governments, then the UK will be well and truly over.

    No, even if Scots and Welsh voters now dislike the current UK Tory government they still have a Welsh Labour government in the Senedd or an SNP government at Holyrood to run much of their domestic policy.

    If however England gets a Labour government propped up by the SNP it did not vote for it will have no such protection for the Tory majority in England being preserved for English domestic policy if EVEL is scrapped and there is no English Parliament either.

    What the English want is merely equality within the UK to what the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish already have given the Union has now largely shifted to a Federal UK outside England anyway

    I'd be happy with an English parliament that is elected in the same way as the Welsh and Scottish ones. As there is no Tory majority in England, maybe we'd get a legislature that more aligns with how people actually cast their votes.

    Well at least that would be an improvement on the current situation, though the Tories would still win most seats in England even with the Welsh or Scottish system even if not an outright majority
  • SouthamObserverSouthamObserver Posts: 38,879
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    DougSeal said:


    Must be annoying. They've done two pre-announcements now and there's a 3rd coming on Monday when (hopefully) England is basking in having put away those demons and won a tournament. 2 shots at it and there's still half the country who think like me and won't comply with FREEDOM DAY we're all safe pandemic over go back to your dreary lives.

    Perhaps - and its just an idea - there's actually not a majority or anything close to it out there of people who think like PB Clowm Apologists like you and Charles and Big G? I know we're going to hear "but we have a majority of 80" and so what - when the alternative choice was a lunatic voting for a clown makes sense.

    But the clown is supposed to be a populist. Can instinctively feel what people think and give it to them. So why is he so badly wrong and out of touch on this one? Philip on here yesterday reduced to imploring that he ignores public opinion and leads regardless of what people think.

    When the desired outcome is to change the way that people act and behave, you can't command them to do something that self-evidently feels like a risk. Some of you complain about people like me wanting to control people forever. Far from it, yet it is you and yours trying to instruct people to do something they don't believe is safe or sensible.

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Apologies if this is obvious and I’m preaching to the converted but British politics at the moment is divided into Tory and Anti-Tory. We Anti-Tories take comfort in our shared ground of hating Johnson and his myriad and obvious flaws. However, that’s all we’ve got in common and all those converted by that line have now been converted. What are we offering as an alternative to convert more?

    At first look it’s hopeful. The Anti-Tories are easily the majority, even in England alone, but accross the U.K. we are split into Lab, LD, SNP, Green and PC. Lab is itself split into Corbynite Tendancy and Continuity Blairite. Each of these Anti-Tory factions hate each other as much as they do Johnson - if not more. To justify this we paint each other as some alternate form of Tory. The Corbynite Tendancy call the Continuity Blairites “Red Tories”, many Lab and LD peeps call the SNP “Tartan Tories”, everyone calls the LD’s the “Tories little helpers”. I’ve yet to see the Greens and PC painted that way admittedly but I’m sure it’s done.

    So, while I agree with everything the Johnson haters on here and elsewhere post about him, such posts annoy me as they’re not so much preaching to the converted as screaming into the void. We need an alternative. What? A “Progressive Alliance”??? What policies would such an alliance have? The Labour Party can’t seem to come up with a cohesive set of policies. The SNP has one big policy that applies the Scotland with ripple effects on the rUK and a lot of smaller polices that effect Scotland alone. The LD’s can’t hope to have a significant impact in such an alliance. The Greens have might some that could form common ground, I suppose, and perhaps provide cover for the others, but it’s a big “might”.

    The bottom line is that I agree with 90% of what RP says but it’s not enough anymore. Those of us who don’t like this shower need to start thinking about what we can give up to work with the others that don’t. I personally don’t even know who to vote for anymore. Simply not liking Johnson and criticising his government isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. Yet even the main opposition party can’t come up with an alternate programme.
    My solution was simple - leave the country. I dislike the regressive "fuck you" nature of the English psyche, decided I wanted better for my kids, and moved north. You always get the correct result in any given election because that is what people vote for. And in England, this is what you want.
    Not always, in 1950, 1964 and February 1974 England voted Tory and got a Labour government. In 2010 and 2017 the Tories had a majority in England but it was a hung parliament UK wide.

    On current polling the Tories will almost certainly win a majority in England in 2024 again but there is a chance Starmer could become UK PM with SNP and LD support in a hung parliament even if the Tories win most seats
    The elections you speak of were not elections in England. Which is why the correct result was gained in the UK-wide election.
    I don't disagree but in 1974 there was no devolution, so it did not matter if England did not get the UK government it did not vote for.

    Now however if Scotland or Wales get a UK Tory government they did not vote for they still have an SNP Holyrood or Labour Senedd government for much of their domestic policy.

    If England gets a UK Labour-SNP government it did not vote for however it will just have to grin and bear it with no English Parliament and now it seems no longer even EVEL

    A Labour/SNP government (which would never happen in a million years, but we'll let that one go) could just legislate to end EVEL if it chose to. Or it could frame legislation in such a way as to make it UK-wide. Or it could continue with this government's strategy of bypassing Parliament altogether. EVEL is not a magic bullet to protect the minority of people who vote Tory in England. It is merely a headline.

    Indeed, so why should the Tories fail to leave it in position, but positively remove it? They'd have something to howl about if the mythical Labour gmt cancelled EVEL, so why lose that brownie point?

    I think that, for obvious reasons, Gove is one of the few Tories who actually cares about the Union and he believes that getting rid of EVEL may have some kind of appeal in Scotland. I can't see it myself, though. The damage was done in Cameron's reaction to the referendum result in 2014 and in the Brexit vote. It will take more than gestures to undo it.

    If in 2024 we end up with a minority Labour government propped up by the SNP and EVEL is scrapped then it won't be Scottish nationalism resurgent again, indeed Edinburgh will be driving the UK government.

    It will be English nationalism on the rise

    We already have an English nationalist government in Westminster and its actions have made the Union more fragile than it has been for more than 300 years. If we see even more English nationalism because right-wingers cannot cope with non-Tory UK governments, then the UK will be well and truly over.

    No, even if Scots and Welsh voters now dislike the current UK Tory government they still have a Welsh Labour government in the Senedd or an SNP government at Holyrood to run much of their domestic policy.

    If however England gets a Labour government propped up by the SNP it did not vote for it will have no such protection for the Tory majority in England being preserved for English domestic policy if EVEL is scrapped and there is no English Parliament either.

    What the English want is merely equality within the UK to what the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish already have given the Union has now largely shifted to a Federal UK outside England anyway

    I'd be happy with an English parliament that is elected in the same way as the Welsh and Scottish ones. As there is no Tory majority in England, maybe we'd get a legislature that more aligns with how people actually cast their votes.

    Well at least that would be an improvement on the current situation, though the Tories would still win most seats in England even with the Welsh or Scottish system even if not an outright majority

    Yep, they would - at least to start.

  • sarissasarissa Posts: 1,749

    Roger said:

    Gary Imlach was amusing last night on the TdF highlights. Commenting on the phenomenal story of Mark Cavendish* who has equalled the great Eddie Merckx's record of 34 stage wins in the Tour de France, Imlach said it had gone under the radar in the UK, relative to the football coverage. He wasn't complaining about that, or surprised about it, but added that:

    At least we haven't had to witness the Prime Minister dressed up in cycling gear.

    Indeed.

    * Always assuming and hoping of course that Cavendish isn't fuelled by naughty sauce.

    I’ve been thinking the same thing. Cavendish will be remembered worldwide by the cycling community for at least a century to come, probably much longer. Even if England win tomorrow, only the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish will remember it, because of the constant media drone we’ll all be subjected to, à la 1966.

    Assuming he’s not on the sauce, Cavendish will be remembered as a great sportsman.
    Assuming the English win tonight, their achievement will not be remembered primarily as a sporting achievement, but as another step on the road to the dissolution of the Union.
    Why do you think England winning will help on the road to the dissolution of the Union? I should say that nothing would please me more than a dissolution of the Union if you could rejoin the EU. I'd become Scottish in a heartbeat. I loathe the ugly isolationist country we've become. They're even talking about Liz Truss for PM!
    Track record. 1966 was fantastic for both Plaid and the SNP, a gift that kept giving for over half a century.

    We’d love to have you Roger. You are in good company as we take in refugees fleeing from England’s ugly Brexit revolution.
    I suspect the Wembley Wizards and Lisbon Lions of 1967 were as much, if not more, responsible for that.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    DougSeal said:


    Must be annoying. They've done two pre-announcements now and there's a 3rd coming on Monday when (hopefully) England is basking in having put away those demons and won a tournament. 2 shots at it and there's still half the country who think like me and won't comply with FREEDOM DAY we're all safe pandemic over go back to your dreary lives.

    Perhaps - and its just an idea - there's actually not a majority or anything close to it out there of people who think like PB Clowm Apologists like you and Charles and Big G? I know we're going to hear "but we have a majority of 80" and so what - when the alternative choice was a lunatic voting for a clown makes sense.

    But the clown is supposed to be a populist. Can instinctively feel what people think and give it to them. So why is he so badly wrong and out of touch on this one? Philip on here yesterday reduced to imploring that he ignores public opinion and leads regardless of what people think.

    When the desired outcome is to change the way that people act and behave, you can't command them to do something that self-evidently feels like a risk. Some of you complain about people like me wanting to control people forever. Far from it, yet it is you and yours trying to instruct people to do something they don't believe is safe or sensible.

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Apologies if this is obvious and I’m preaching to the converted but British politics at the moment is divided into Tory and Anti-Tory. We Anti-Tories take comfort in our shared ground of hating Johnson and his myriad and obvious flaws. However, that’s all we’ve got in common and all those converted by that line have now been converted. What are we offering as an alternative to convert more?

    At first look it’s hopeful. The Anti-Tories are easily the majority, even in England alone, but accross the U.K. we are split into Lab, LD, SNP, Green and PC. Lab is itself split into Corbynite Tendancy and Continuity Blairite. Each of these Anti-Tory factions hate each other as much as they do Johnson - if not more. To justify this we paint each other as some alternate form of Tory. The Corbynite Tendancy call the Continuity Blairites “Red Tories”, many Lab and LD peeps call the SNP “Tartan Tories”, everyone calls the LD’s the “Tories little helpers”. I’ve yet to see the Greens and PC painted that way admittedly but I’m sure it’s done.

    So, while I agree with everything the Johnson haters on here and elsewhere post about him, such posts annoy me as they’re not so much preaching to the converted as screaming into the void. We need an alternative. What? A “Progressive Alliance”??? What policies would such an alliance have? The Labour Party can’t seem to come up with a cohesive set of policies. The SNP has one big policy that applies the Scotland with ripple effects on the rUK and a lot of smaller polices that effect Scotland alone. The LD’s can’t hope to have a significant impact in such an alliance. The Greens have might some that could form common ground, I suppose, and perhaps provide cover for the others, but it’s a big “might”.

    The bottom line is that I agree with 90% of what RP says but it’s not enough anymore. Those of us who don’t like this shower need to start thinking about what we can give up to work with the others that don’t. I personally don’t even know who to vote for anymore. Simply not liking Johnson and criticising his government isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. Yet even the main opposition party can’t come up with an alternate programme.
    My solution was simple - leave the country. I dislike the regressive "fuck you" nature of the English psyche, decided I wanted better for my kids, and moved north. You always get the correct result in any given election because that is what people vote for. And in England, this is what you want.
    Not always, in 1950, 1964 and February 1974 England voted Tory and got a Labour government. In 2010 and 2017 the Tories had a majority in England but it was a hung parliament UK wide.

    On current polling the Tories will almost certainly win a majority in England in 2024 again but there is a chance Starmer could become UK PM with SNP and LD support in a hung parliament even if the Tories win most seats
    The elections you speak of were not elections in England. Which is why the correct result was gained in the UK-wide election.
    I don't disagree but in 1974 there was no devolution, so it did not matter if England did not get the UK government it did not vote for.

    Now however if Scotland or Wales get a UK Tory government they did not vote for they still have an SNP Holyrood or Labour Senedd government for much of their domestic policy.

    If England gets a UK Labour-SNP government it did not vote for however it will just have to grin and bear it with no English Parliament and now it seems no longer even EVEL

    A Labour/SNP government (which would never happen in a million years, but we'll let that one go) could just legislate to end EVEL if it chose to. Or it could frame legislation in such a way as to make it UK-wide. Or it could continue with this government's strategy of bypassing Parliament altogether. EVEL is not a magic bullet to protect the minority of people who vote Tory in England. It is merely a headline.

    Indeed, so why should the Tories fail to leave it in position, but positively remove it? They'd have something to howl about if the mythical Labour gmt cancelled EVEL, so why lose that brownie point?

    I think that, for obvious reasons, Gove is one of the few Tories who actually cares about the Union and he believes that getting rid of EVEL may have some kind of appeal in Scotland. I can't see it myself, though. The damage was done in Cameron's reaction to the referendum result in 2014 and in the Brexit vote. It will take more than gestures to undo it.

    If in 2024 we end up with a minority Labour government propped up by the SNP and EVEL is scrapped then it won't be Scottish nationalism resurgent again, indeed Edinburgh will be driving the UK government.

    It will be English nationalism on the rise

    We already have an English nationalist government in Westminster and its actions have made the Union more fragile than it has been for more than 300 years. If we see even more English nationalism because right-wingers cannot cope with non-Tory UK governments, then the UK will be well and truly over.

    No, even if Scots and Welsh voters now dislike the current UK Tory government they still have a Welsh Labour government in the Senedd or an SNP government at Holyrood to run much of their domestic policy.

    If however England gets a Labour government propped up by the SNP it did not vote for it will have no such protection for the Tory majority in England being preserved for English domestic policy if EVEL is scrapped and there is no English Parliament either.

    What the English want is merely equality within the UK to what the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish already have given the Union has now largely shifted to a Federal UK outside England anyway

    I'd be happy with an English parliament that is elected in the same way as the Welsh and Scottish ones. As there is no Tory majority in England, maybe we'd get a legislature that more aligns with how people actually cast their votes.

    Well at least that would be an improvement on the current situation, though the Tories would still win most seats in England even with the Welsh or Scottish system even if not an outright majority
    It’s a start. A plurality is better than a majority for those of us on the other side of the fence
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    At this rate, the lions will have to just play against themselves....

    British and Irish Lions: South Africa captain Siya Kolisi tests positive for Covid-19 - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/57794891
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712

    We already have an English nationalist government in Westminster

    No we don't.

    If an actual English nationalist administration ever came to power in London then item one on the agenda would be the dissolution of the Union.

    Given that we do have an English nationalist government we can see that is not the case. For all kinds of historical reasons, the Union gives English nationalists a level of international weight, prestige and significance its dissolution would remove.

    Actually it doesn't, we ceased to be a superpower when we gave India independence.

    England would still be a medium ranked power in or outside the Union, it is Scotland and Wales who would go from medium ranked power to small, largely insignificant power (albeit the Scots at least might try to regain that by rejoining the EU, in which case they would not be seeking full complete independence anyway).

    However even England would still fall from about the 5th to 7th largest economy if the Union ended so we are all stronger with it
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Gary Imlach was amusing last night on the TdF highlights. Commenting on the phenomenal story of Mark Cavendish* who has equalled the great Eddie Merckx's record of 34 stage wins in the Tour de France, Imlach said it had gone under the radar in the UK, relative to the football coverage. He wasn't complaining about that, or surprised about it, but added that:

    At least we haven't had to witness the Prime Minister dressed up in cycling gear.

    Indeed.

    * Always assuming and hoping of course that Cavendish isn't fuelled by naughty sauce.

    I’ve been thinking the same thing. Cavendish will be remembered worldwide by the cycling community for at least a century to come, probably much longer. Even if England win tomorrow, only the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish will remember it, because of the constant media drone we’ll all be subjected to, à la 1966.

    Assuming he’s not on the sauce, Cavendish will be remembered as a great sportsman.
    Assuming the English win tonight, their achievement will not be remembered primarily as a sporting achievement, but as another step on the road to the dissolution of the Union.
    What rubbish, the fact England got all the way to the final while Scotland and Wales got knocked out in the early stages might boost English nationalism a bit, especially if England win, as it would show England would be a strong nation even on its own but I doubt it would make any difference to Scottish independence. If you are a Scottish Nationalist you hated England and its sporting teams before the tournament and still do and if you are a Scottish Unionist you happily supported Scotland and will wish England well tonight too.

    However I am looking forward to the British Lions tour and Olympics later this month when as Scots or English we can once again support the same team
    The problem with you FUDHY is that you understand neo-Unionism (and are an invaluable source of information on that movement), but you are utterly clueless about all other important blocs:

    1. traditional Unionism of the sort that has kept the Union clinging on this last half century, ie the SLab/SLD/civic-Scotland axis

    2. the Scottish independence movement

    3. and most importantly, ordinary Scots
    The 55% of Scots who voted No in 2014 are not that bothered either way whether England win or lose tonight but will politely wish them well.

    It is only the 45% of Scots who voted Yes like you who absolutely despise the England team and are praying for an Italy win, as demonstrated by the headline in the National
    Ahem...

    https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/sport/football/7347681/scotland-fans-england-euro-2020-poll/

    My own guess would be that the Scottish population falls roughly into thirds.

    -One third still thinks of itself as either primarily or secondarily British, is broadly friendly and will wish us (the English) well
    -One third thinks of itself as only Scottish and, whilst not actively hostile, regards England as its main rival and will support anyone but England in anything
    -The final third hates us
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072
    HYUFD said:

    We already have an English nationalist government in Westminster

    No we don't.

    If an actual English nationalist administration ever came to power in London then item one on the agenda would be the dissolution of the Union.

    Given that we do have an English nationalist government we can see that is not the case. For all kinds of historical reasons, the Union gives English nationalists a level of international weight, prestige and significance its dissolution would remove.

    Actually it doesn't, we ceased to be a superpower when we gave India independence.

    England would still be a medium ranked power in or outside the Union, it is Scotland and Wales who would go from medium ranked power to small, largely insignificant power (albeit the Scots at least might try to regain that by rejoining the EU, in which case they would not be seeking full complete independence anyway).

    However even England would still fall from about the 5th to 7th largest economy if the Union ended so we are all stronger with it
    “Medium ranked power” is not how English nationalists see themselves.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059

    At this rate, the lions will have to just play against themselves....

    British and Irish Lions: South Africa captain Siya Kolisi tests positive for Covid-19 - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/57794891

    Once went on a rugby tour to Barcelona where we had to play ourselves. The oppo had double booked their own tour to London the same weekend. Ended up having a touch rugby tournament on the beach.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712

    HYUFD said:

    We already have an English nationalist government in Westminster

    No we don't.

    If an actual English nationalist administration ever came to power in London then item one on the agenda would be the dissolution of the Union.

    Given that we do have an English nationalist government we can see that is not the case. For all kinds of historical reasons, the Union gives English nationalists a level of international weight, prestige and significance its dissolution would remove.

    Actually it doesn't, we ceased to be a superpower when we gave India independence.

    England would still be a medium ranked power in or outside the Union, it is Scotland and Wales who would go from medium ranked power to small, largely insignificant power (albeit the Scots at least might try to regain that by rejoining the EU, in which case they would not be seeking full complete independence anyway).

    However even England would still fall from about the 5th to 7th largest economy if the Union ended so we are all stronger with it
    “Medium ranked power” is not how English nationalists see themselves.
    Yes well I am a Unionist, not an English nationalist
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059

    Roger said:

    Gary Imlach was amusing last night on the TdF highlights. Commenting on the phenomenal story of Mark Cavendish* who has equalled the great Eddie Merckx's record of 34 stage wins in the Tour de France, Imlach said it had gone under the radar in the UK, relative to the football coverage. He wasn't complaining about that, or surprised about it, but added that:

    At least we haven't had to witness the Prime Minister dressed up in cycling gear.

    Indeed.

    * Always assuming and hoping of course that Cavendish isn't fuelled by naughty sauce.

    I’ve been thinking the same thing. Cavendish will be remembered worldwide by the cycling community for at least a century to come, probably much longer. Even if England win tomorrow, only the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish will remember it, because of the constant media drone we’ll all be subjected to, à la 1966.

    Assuming he’s not on the sauce, Cavendish will be remembered as a great sportsman.
    Assuming the English win tonight, their achievement will not be remembered primarily as a sporting achievement, but as another step on the road to the dissolution of the Union.
    Why do you think England winning will help on the road to the dissolution of the Union? I should say that nothing would please me more than a dissolution of the Union if you could rejoin the EU. I'd become Scottish in a heartbeat. I loathe the ugly isolationist country we've become. They're even talking about Liz Truss for PM!
    Track record. 1966 was fantastic for both Plaid and the SNP, a gift that kept giving for over half a century.

    We’d love to have you Roger. You are in good company as we take in refugees fleeing from England’s ugly Brexit revolution.
    As I say above, not really a solution, unless Scotland can take in more than 20 million more people overnight.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149
    DougSeal said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Gary Imlach was amusing last night on the TdF highlights. Commenting on the phenomenal story of Mark Cavendish* who has equalled the great Eddie Merckx's record of 34 stage wins in the Tour de France, Imlach said it had gone under the radar in the UK, relative to the football coverage. He wasn't complaining about that, or surprised about it, but added that:

    At least we haven't had to witness the Prime Minister dressed up in cycling gear.

    Indeed.

    * Always assuming and hoping of course that Cavendish isn't fuelled by naughty sauce.

    I’ve been thinking the same thing. Cavendish will be remembered worldwide by the cycling community for at least a century to come, probably much longer. Even if England win tomorrow, only the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish will remember it, because of the constant media drone we’ll all be subjected to, à la 1966.

    Assuming he’s not on the sauce, Cavendish will be remembered as a great sportsman.
    Assuming the English win tonight, their achievement will not be remembered primarily as a sporting achievement, but as another step on the road to the dissolution of the Union.
    What rubbish, the fact England got all the way to the final while Scotland and Wales got knocked out in the early stages might boost English nationalism a bit, especially if England win, as it would show England would be a strong nation even on its own but I doubt it would make any difference to Scottish independence. If you are a Scottish Nationalist you hated England and its sporting teams before the tournament and still do and if you are a Scottish Unionist you happily supported Scotland and will wish England well tonight too.

    However I am looking forward to the British Lions tour and Olympics later this month when as Scots or English we can once again support the same team
    The problem with you FUDHY is that you understand neo-Unionism (and are an invaluable source of information on that movement), but you are utterly clueless about all other important blocs:

    1. traditional Unionism of the sort that has kept the Union clinging on this last half century, ie the SLab/SLD/civic-Scotland axis

    2. the Scottish independence movement

    3. and most importantly, ordinary Scots
    The 55% of Scots who voted No in 2014 are not that bothered either way whether England win or lose tonight but will politely wish them well.

    It is only the 45% of Scots who voted Yes like you who absolutely despise the England team and are praying for an Italy win, as demonstrated by the headline in the National
    The circulation of the National is what, 7,000? It’s more an online click bait generator than anything else, and that headline proves it.
    To put that in context the Scotsman circulation for just over a year ago was 14.4K of which about 80% was paid. I can't find a recent figure for the Glasgow Herald but I would expect 20K or so if a similar decline to the Scotsman.

    The National was established by the Herald's publishers in a great hurry when the Herald went from middle of the road to all full on Britnat and discovered they lost a lot of their readers very quickly.

  • SouthamObserverSouthamObserver Posts: 38,879
    HYUFD said:

    We already have an English nationalist government in Westminster

    No we don't.

    If an actual English nationalist administration ever came to power in London then item one on the agenda would be the dissolution of the Union.

    Given that we do have an English nationalist government we can see that is not the case. For all kinds of historical reasons, the Union gives English nationalists a level of international weight, prestige and significance its dissolution would remove.

    Actually it doesn't, we ceased to be a superpower when we gave India independence.

    England would still be a medium ranked power in or outside the Union, it is Scotland and Wales who would go from medium ranked power to small, largely insignificant power (albeit the Scots at least might try to regain that by rejoining the EU, in which case they would not be seeking full complete independence anyway).

    However even England would still fall from about the 5th to 7th largest economy if the Union ended so we are all stronger with it

    The UK comes with an historical legacy and significant soft power. No English nationalist politician would voluntarily give that up.

  • another_richardanother_richard Posts: 24,967
    Carnyx said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    DougSeal said:


    Must be annoying. They've done two pre-announcements now and there's a 3rd coming on Monday when (hopefully) England is basking in having put away those demons and won a tournament. 2 shots at it and there's still half the country who think like me and won't comply with FREEDOM DAY we're all safe pandemic over go back to your dreary lives.

    Perhaps - and its just an idea - there's actually not a majority or anything close to it out there of people who think like PB Clowm Apologists like you and Charles and Big G? I know we're going to hear "but we have a majority of 80" and so what - when the alternative choice was a lunatic voting for a clown makes sense.

    But the clown is supposed to be a populist. Can instinctively feel what people think and give it to them. So why is he so badly wrong and out of touch on this one? Philip on here yesterday reduced to imploring that he ignores public opinion and leads regardless of what people think.

    When the desired outcome is to change the way that people act and behave, you can't command them to do something that self-evidently feels like a risk. Some of you complain about people like me wanting to control people forever. Far from it, yet it is you and yours trying to instruct people to do something they don't believe is safe or sensible.

    I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Apologies if this is obvious and I’m preaching to the converted but British politics at the moment is divided into Tory and Anti-Tory. We Anti-Tories take comfort in our shared ground of hating Johnson and his myriad and obvious flaws. However, that’s all we’ve got in common and all those converted by that line have now been converted. What are we offering as an alternative to convert more?

    At first look it’s hopeful. The Anti-Tories are easily the majority, even in England alone, but accross the U.K. we are split into Lab, LD, SNP, Green and PC. Lab is itself split into Corbynite Tendancy and Continuity Blairite. Each of these Anti-Tory factions hate each other as much as they do Johnson - if not more. To justify this we paint each other as some alternate form of Tory. The Corbynite Tendancy call the Continuity Blairites “Red Tories”, many Lab and LD peeps call the SNP “Tartan Tories”, everyone calls the LD’s the “Tories little helpers”. I’ve yet to see the Greens and PC painted that way admittedly but I’m sure it’s done.

    So, while I agree with everything the Johnson haters on here and elsewhere post about him, such posts annoy me as they’re not so much preaching to the converted as screaming into the void. We need an alternative. What? A “Progressive Alliance”??? What policies would such an alliance have? The Labour Party can’t seem to come up with a cohesive set of policies. The SNP has one big policy that applies the Scotland with ripple effects on the rUK and a lot of smaller polices that effect Scotland alone. The LD’s can’t hope to have a significant impact in such an alliance. The Greens have might some that could form common ground, I suppose, and perhaps provide cover for the others, but it’s a big “might”.

    The bottom line is that I agree with 90% of what RP says but it’s not enough anymore. Those of us who don’t like this shower need to start thinking about what we can give up to work with the others that don’t. I personally don’t even know who to vote for anymore. Simply not liking Johnson and criticising his government isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. Yet even the main opposition party can’t come up with an alternate programme.
    My solution was simple - leave the country. I dislike the regressive "fuck you" nature of the English psyche, decided I wanted better for my kids, and moved north. You always get the correct result in any given election because that is what people vote for. And in England, this is what you want.
    Not always, in 1950, 1964 and February 1974 England voted Tory and got a Labour government. In 2010 and 2017 the Tories had a majority in England but it was a hung parliament UK wide.

    On current polling the Tories will almost certainly win a majority in England in 2024 again but there is a chance Starmer could become UK PM with SNP and LD support in a hung parliament even if the Tories win most seats
    The elections you speak of were not elections in England. Which is why the correct result was gained in the UK-wide election.
    I don't disagree but in 1974 there was no devolution, so it did not matter if England did not get the UK government it did not vote for.

    Now however if Scotland or Wales get a UK Tory government they did not vote for they still have an SNP Holyrood or Labour Senedd government for much of their domestic policy.

    If England gets a UK Labour-SNP government it did not vote for however it will just have to grin and bear it with no English Parliament and now it seems no longer even EVEL

    A Labour/SNP government (which would never happen in a million years, but we'll let that one go) could just legislate to end EVEL if it chose to. Or it could frame legislation in such a way as to make it UK-wide. Or it could continue with this government's strategy of bypassing Parliament altogether. EVEL is not a magic bullet to protect the minority of people who vote Tory in England. It is merely a headline.

    Indeed, so why should the Tories fail to leave it in position, but positively remove it? They'd have something to howl about if the mythical Labour gmt cancelled EVEL, so why lose that brownie point?
    An interesting question for Conservatives:

    Is a permanent Labour/SNP Westminster government a price worth paying to keep Scotland in the union ?

    I suspect you would get results which SCONs would not like.

    Though are SCONs really SCONs but instead SUs ?

    Is the Unionist bit more important to them than the Conservative part ?

    Whereas in England even Gove doesn't call himself a Unionist:

    https://www.surreyheath.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/council/Elections/DORPDec19.pdf
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,959
    edited July 2021
    This is England.

    If we lose to Italy, there will be a clamour for Southgate's head tomorrow....

    Even if we win, it'll be because England "have won boring". We want to win by "Attack!! Attack!! Attack attack attack!!!!"
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    edited July 2021

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Gary Imlach was amusing last night on the TdF highlights. Commenting on the phenomenal story of Mark Cavendish* who has equalled the great Eddie Merckx's record of 34 stage wins in the Tour de France, Imlach said it had gone under the radar in the UK, relative to the football coverage. He wasn't complaining about that, or surprised about it, but added that:

    At least we haven't had to witness the Prime Minister dressed up in cycling gear.

    Indeed.

    * Always assuming and hoping of course that Cavendish isn't fuelled by naughty sauce.

    I’ve been thinking the same thing. Cavendish will be remembered worldwide by the cycling community for at least a century to come, probably much longer. Even if England win tomorrow, only the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish will remember it, because of the constant media drone we’ll all be subjected to, à la 1966.

    Assuming he’s not on the sauce, Cavendish will be remembered as a great sportsman.
    Assuming the English win tonight, their achievement will not be remembered primarily as a sporting achievement, but as another step on the road to the dissolution of the Union.
    What rubbish, the fact England got all the way to the final while Scotland and Wales got knocked out in the early stages might boost English nationalism a bit, especially if England win, as it would show England would be a strong nation even on its own but I doubt it would make any difference to Scottish independence. If you are a Scottish Nationalist you hated England and its sporting teams before the tournament and still do and if you are a Scottish Unionist you happily supported Scotland and will wish England well tonight too.

    However I am looking forward to the British Lions tour and Olympics later this month when as Scots or English we can once again support the same team
    The problem with you FUDHY is that you understand neo-Unionism (and are an invaluable source of information on that movement), but you are utterly clueless about all other important blocs:

    1. traditional Unionism of the sort that has kept the Union clinging on this last half century, ie the SLab/SLD/civic-Scotland axis

    2. the Scottish independence movement

    3. and most importantly, ordinary Scots
    The 55% of Scots who voted No in 2014 are not that bothered either way whether England win or lose tonight but will politely wish them well.

    It is only the 45% of Scots who voted Yes like you who absolutely despise the England team and are praying for an Italy win, as demonstrated by the headline in the National
    Ahem...

    https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/sport/football/7347681/scotland-fans-england-euro-2020-poll/

    My own guess would be that the Scottish population falls roughly into thirds.

    -One third still thinks of itself as either primarily or secondarily British, is broadly friendly and will wish us (the English) well
    -One third thinks of itself as only Scottish and, whilst not actively hostile, regards England as its main rival and will support anyone but England in anything
    -The final third hates us
    Most Scottish football fans tend to be working class and of course Scottish working class voters voted for independence in 2014 just as English working class voters voted to leave the EU in 2016.

    It was middle class Scottish voters who voted to stay in the UK just as it was mainly middle class English voters who voted to Remain in the EU.

    However Yougov found only 38% of all Scots actively wanted Denmark to beat England, not much different to the 45% who voted Yes in 2014

    https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1412796324706201607?s=20
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,047
    rcs1000 said:

    Just watched Black Widow.

    It's the Quantum of Solace of the MCU. I'm still not entirely clear what exactly happened.

    I liked Quantum of Solace. Had most of what makes a good Bond film for me. They got plenty crapper after that, with that 60's pastiche with bald Blofeld being the total travesty of them all.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 23,929
    RobD said:

    Robert Jenrick, a member of the government, has stated that he will no longer be following government advice after 19th July. Is his position tenable?

    QTWTAIY? I suspect lots of members of the government ignore lots of government advice.
    Jenrick survived breaking the covid rules at the start of the pandemic when he drove to his second third home.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 39,749
    Carnyx said:

    DougSeal said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    Gary Imlach was amusing last night on the TdF highlights. Commenting on the phenomenal story of Mark Cavendish* who has equalled the great Eddie Merckx's record of 34 stage wins in the Tour de France, Imlach said it had gone under the radar in the UK, relative to the football coverage. He wasn't complaining about that, or surprised about it, but added that:

    At least we haven't had to witness the Prime Minister dressed up in cycling gear.

    Indeed.

    * Always assuming and hoping of course that Cavendish isn't fuelled by naughty sauce.

    I’ve been thinking the same thing. Cavendish will be remembered worldwide by the cycling community for at least a century to come, probably much longer. Even if England win tomorrow, only the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish will remember it, because of the constant media drone we’ll all be subjected to, à la 1966.

    Assuming he’s not on the sauce, Cavendish will be remembered as a great sportsman.
    Assuming the English win tonight, their achievement will not be remembered primarily as a sporting achievement, but as another step on the road to the dissolution of the Union.
    What rubbish, the fact England got all the way to the final while Scotland and Wales got knocked out in the early stages might boost English nationalism a bit, especially if England win, as it would show England would be a strong nation even on its own but I doubt it would make any difference to Scottish independence. If you are a Scottish Nationalist you hated England and its sporting teams before the tournament and still do and if you are a Scottish Unionist you happily supported Scotland and will wish England well tonight too.

    However I am looking forward to the British Lions tour and Olympics later this month when as Scots or English we can once again support the same team
    The problem with you FUDHY is that you understand neo-Unionism (and are an invaluable source of information on that movement), but you are utterly clueless about all other important blocs:

    1. traditional Unionism of the sort that has kept the Union clinging on this last half century, ie the SLab/SLD/civic-Scotland axis

    2. the Scottish independence movement

    3. and most importantly, ordinary Scots
    The 55% of Scots who voted No in 2014 are not that bothered either way whether England win or lose tonight but will politely wish them well.

    It is only the 45% of Scots who voted Yes like you who absolutely despise the England team and are praying for an Italy win, as demonstrated by the headline in the National
    The circulation of the National is what, 7,000? It’s more an online click bait generator than anything else, and that headline proves it.
    To put that in context the Scotsman circulation for just over a year ago was 14.4K of which about 80% was paid. I can't find a recent figure for the Glasgow Herald but I would expect 20K or so if a similar decline to the Scotsman.

    The National was established by the Herald's publishers in a great hurry when the Herald went from middle of the road to all full on Britnat and discovered they lost a lot of their readers very quickly.

    On previous evidence on here there seem to be quite a few Unionists who subscribe to it.
This discussion has been closed.