For all those supporting BoJo - what success has he delivered over the last 2 years?
I am not supporting him, but he got us out of the EU, got a trade deal that protected our sovereignty more than anyone said was possible, and got us a vaccine program earlier than anyone else in Europe
The one that ended the United Kingdom as a trading block and forces GB and NI companies to have export licences to sell things to each other?
If that's protecting the sovereignty of the UK I'd hate to see what not ptotecting it looks like.
Theresa May's backstop.
Infinitely worse.
Perhaps, but isn't relevant to the argument @Aslan was promoting. He said that the current trade deal - which dissolved the UK trading area - "protected our sovereignty". I now need an export license to sell products in my own country. How has that protected our sovereignty to do things like not need an export license to trade inside our own country...
I don't need you to come back in with alternative takes on external sovereignty - you have one perspective on that, I have another. But the ending of the UK as a trading nation is indisputable - we are now split in two with GB as one trading zone and NI as another trading zone. Usually deals that protect a country's sovereignty doesn't split a chunk off it.
It did protect our sovereignty because we had Article 16 so could override it. The ending is not indisputable, we'll see what the situation is post-Article 16.
There are plenty of countries that have had chunks split off, where its convenient to do so, its far from unprecedented.
On that logic while in the EU our sovereignty was protected because we could always leave.
Either in the EU we were sovereign because we could leave and there is no compromise of sovereignty over NI because we can invoke A16; or in the EU we were not sovereign and we are not sovereign now because there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI.
You are a logical debater. Which is it; it can't be both.
We were always technically sovereign, we could only exercise that sovereignty by invoking Article 50 so we rightly did when people wanted to exercise that sovereignty.
Same deal with Article 16 - and I think it should be invoked too.
So as it stands we are not sovereign because we haven't exercised it. Is that right?
Why did it take a year for this video to emerge. I mean, great it did, but presumably someone’s been sitting on it these last 12 months?
I always wonder about stuff like this. My theory is that rather than someone noticing this 12 months ago and waiting until the right time to release it, someone who has access to the archives (maybe a secret copy on their personal PC) went back through them when the party story broke to see if she mentioned it. But maybe I'm wrong, and politics is even more cut-throat and cynical than I think.
Please cry for me, Allegra Stratton The truth is... I have no idea what the truth is.
I've just watched the video: am I alone in thinking that Ms Stratton has been extremely hard done by?
She made a joke and laughed inappropriately and had to resign. That’s all I can see she’s done. Anything else?
Depends on the context. I just watched it. If (big if) there actually had been this party the week before and she knew about it and was jokey jokey let's pretend it didn't happen/was a business meeting then it's worse.
If however they were just wargaming and a christmas party was something thrown at her our of the blue then it is better verging on nothing to see here.
I expect an announcement in the HOC tomorrow and a 5.00pm press conference
Which lazy civil servant decided on 5pm anyway. I understand the people involved want to go home / get to the staff party, but if the idea is for people to be able to watch it's a nonsense.
So the theories are 1) that this is revenge by Dom, and 2) that this is a pre-emptive strike by some opponent of lockdown to ward off lockdown, a la Hancock. (Did we ever find out who was behind that?). Presumably 1 and 2 can't both be true - ISTR Dom was a keen advocate of lockdown, though maybe he's changed his mind. If not Dom, who do we think is orchestrating this? Is it even someone the public know about?
The most interesting event of the day is still Sunak nodding in judicious approval at Blackford saying that Tory MPs needed to consider Johnson’s fitness to lead. He is behind this.
Likely to be an announcement to Commons tomorrow afternoon with briefing at 5pm tomorrow. NOT CONFIRMED
Will be absolutely laughable if they even think about it. What planet are these people on?
It's completely mental, today Pfizer announce that three doses gives a high level of neutralising protection against Omicron, our booster programme is mostly Pfizer and yet the idiots in charge are desperately looking for a dead cat to distract the nation so we'll end up with completely unnecessary restrictions with no end date because if this is the new normal (COVID being endemic and all that) then these NPIs also become the new normal.
I think the current news makes new restrictions less likely not more likely. A bit like the leaking of Hancock's video. Which is possibly why it was leaked.
This has shot to pieces any moral authority the PM had for new restrictions. I think even if he was planning new restrictions, those now are hopefully stillborn because he knows now he can't do that.
Hope so at least.
I don't think so, Boris likes a big gesture and plan B is a big gesture that will capture the front pages for a few days. It will make precisely zero difference to COVID, one only needs to look at continental Europe where they have got all of the plan B restrictions plus a lot more yet face a worse winter than we do. The only reason to implement plan B is to grab headlines and make it look like they are doing something.
I think had this story not broken he was probably getting ready to do the 'big gesture' of Plan B in response to the Omicron story.
Now that's going to be a harder sell when people turn around and say "but why should we listen to you?"
This video leak has neutered Boris. Just as the HandsFaceArse video did for Hancock and freed Javid up to do differently.
Please cry for me, Allegra Stratton The truth is... I have no idea what the truth is.
I've just watched the video: am I alone in thinking that Ms Stratton has been extremely hard done by?
Not really? It’s was her job to do PR. She ought to have known better than a) to have attended parties in No 10 (if she did) and b) to have then made light of that fact on camera, given the circumstances. Her current tears demonstrate that she’s human & understands the impact her actions have had, which more than nothing, but doesn’t actually excuse those actions.
If it turns out that she herself never attended any of these events in No10 & has simply been unlucky enough to be filmed making a joke about how indefensible they are & no one else takes any consequences then yes, she will absolutely have been hard done by though.
Likely to be an announcement to Commons tomorrow afternoon with briefing at 5pm tomorrow. NOT CONFIRMED
Will be absolutely laughable if they even think about it. What planet are these people on?
It's completely mental, today Pfizer announce that three doses gives a high level of neutralising protection against Omicron, our booster programme is mostly Pfizer and yet the idiots in charge are desperately looking for a dead cat to distract the nation so we'll end up with completely unnecessary restrictions with no end date because if this is the new normal (COVID being endemic and all that) then these NPIs also become the new normal.
Most of us have AZ-AZ-Pfizer. So not sure the Pfizer statement covers that.
It does, in fact AZ/AZ/Pfizer is probably better than 3x Pfizer, at least that's what the UK study showed for t-cell formation and antibody boosting. In the end all of the combinations - AZ/AZ/Pfizer, 3x Pfizer, AZ/AZ/Moderna, 3x Moderna and Pfizer/Pfizer/Moderna will give very, very good protection against Omicron.
Please cry for me, Allegra Stratton The truth is... I have no idea what the truth is.
I've just watched the video: am I alone in thinking that Ms Stratton has been extremely hard done by?
I agree with this. It is the smoking gun proving the party happened, but the video itself isn't an awful crime. Her laugh isn't that callous, and was never meant to be public. If she'd done this at a press conference or perhaps just before/after one when she thought the cameras weren't recording that would be one thing. But having a quick laugh with colleagues while trying to decide on a line at an internal meeting just isn't unreasonable.
So the theories are 1) that this is revenge by Dom, and 2) that this is a pre-emptive strike by some opponent of lockdown to ward off lockdown, a la Hancock. (Did we ever find out who was behind that?). Presumably 1 and 2 can't both be true - ISTR Dom was a keen advocate of lockdown, though maybe he's changed his mind. If not Dom, who do we think is orchestrating this? Is it even someone the public know about?
If number 2 the person involved is a fool. Boris clearly only has 1 weapon to change the story, and he's surrounded by civil servants desperate for him to use it.
Why did it take a year for this video to emerge. I mean, great it did, but presumably someone’s been sitting on it these last 12 months?
I always wonder about stuff like this. My theory is that rather than someone noticing this 12 months ago and waiting until the right time to release it, someone who has access to the archives (maybe a secret copy on their personal PC) went back through them when the party story broke to see if she mentioned it. But maybe I'm wrong, and politics is even more cut-throat and cynical than I think.
The theory I've seen bandied about is that the person that recorded/leaked it didn't know about the party until quite recently then remembered this recording and put two and two together.
I was told an external contractor did the recordings.
Likely to be an announcement to Commons tomorrow afternoon with briefing at 5pm tomorrow. NOT CONFIRMED
Will be absolutely laughable if they even think about it. What planet are these people on?
It's completely mental, today Pfizer announce that three doses gives a high level of neutralising protection against Omicron, our booster programme is mostly Pfizer and yet the idiots in charge are desperately looking for a dead cat to distract the nation so we'll end up with completely unnecessary restrictions with no end date because if this is the new normal (COVID being endemic and all that) then these NPIs also become the new normal.
I think the current news makes new restrictions less likely not more likely. A bit like the leaking of Hancock's video. Which is possibly why it was leaked.
This has shot to pieces any moral authority the PM had for new restrictions. I think even if he was planning new restrictions, those now are hopefully stillborn because he knows now he can't do that.
Hope so at least.
I don't think so, Boris likes a big gesture and plan B is a big gesture that will capture the front pages for a few days. It will make precisely zero difference to COVID, one only needs to look at continental Europe where they have got all of the plan B restrictions plus a lot more yet face a worse winter than we do. The only reason to implement plan B is to grab headlines and make it look like they are doing something.
I'm coming to the conclusion that vaxports are pretty pointless now. If they had introduced them 3 months ago (when I was advocating for them on here) they would have done good work: driving up vax uptake. Now? This late in the day? Meh
The other big Plan B measure - Work From Home - will do a lot of economic damage to city centres (at Xmas!) and barely delay Omicron
The focus of the government should instead be on surging the booster campaign to warp speed, and simultaneously preparing the NHS for, potentially, a lot of cases over a fairly short period of time - from now til end Jan?
However I agree with you that they will probably go with Plan B, just because. And I fear that will be a slip road to Lockdown
The Allegra Stratton part of the story is just plain weird. Here you have someone who saw the danger, but didn't act. You would have thought she would have grabbed the tape afterwards.
Without being too harsh, I would expect someone potentially the public face of a government to be a little bit more, what is the word, serious in their approach to this role. The occasion seemed like kids having fun, playing at the office.
Whilst you would have to be cold not to feel some sympathy. It's hard to be too sympathetic towards someone who failed at the very skill they were employed to provide.
Yet the real villain of the story is not her. She is yet another casualty left in Boris' wake...
For all those supporting BoJo - what success has he delivered over the last 2 years?
I am not supporting him, but he got us out of the EU, got a trade deal that protected our sovereignty more than anyone said was possible, and got us a vaccine program earlier than anyone else in Europe
The one that ended the United Kingdom as a trading block and forces GB and NI companies to have export licences to sell things to each other?
If that's protecting the sovereignty of the UK I'd hate to see what not ptotecting it looks like.
Theresa May's backstop.
Infinitely worse.
Perhaps, but isn't relevant to the argument @Aslan was promoting. He said that the current trade deal - which dissolved the UK trading area - "protected our sovereignty". I now need an export license to sell products in my own country. How has that protected our sovereignty to do things like not need an export license to trade inside our own country...
I don't need you to come back in with alternative takes on external sovereignty - you have one perspective on that, I have another. But the ending of the UK as a trading nation is indisputable - we are now split in two with GB as one trading zone and NI as another trading zone. Usually deals that protect a country's sovereignty doesn't split a chunk off it.
It did protect our sovereignty because we had Article 16 so could override it. The ending is not indisputable, we'll see what the situation is post-Article 16.
There are plenty of countries that have had chunks split off, where its convenient to do so, its far from unprecedented.
On that logic while in the EU our sovereignty was protected because we could always leave.
Either in the EU we were sovereign because we could leave and there is no compromise of sovereignty over NI because we can invoke A16; or in the EU we were not sovereign and we are not sovereign now because there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI.
You are a logical debater. Which is it; it can't be both.
We were always technically sovereign, we could only exercise that sovereignty by invoking Article 50 so we rightly did when people wanted to exercise that sovereignty.
Same deal with Article 16 - and I think it should be invoked too.
So as it stands we are not sovereign because we haven't exercised it. Is that right?
No of course not. We were always sovereign.
We have put our sovereignty into abeyance until we invoke the Article. Its still there, like a break glass, but until we want to do so we're simply not exercising it.
So if you want to exercise your sovereignty you can invoke the Article. If you don't and are OK with abeyance, then no need to do so.
Ah ok so our sovereignty is "in abeyance" (a state of temporary disuse or suspension). So our sovereignty has been suspended. But you said that the NI deal protected our sovereignty, not that it was in abeyance. And if protected means we could exercise it at any time thereby becoming sovereign but have not done so yet then that was precisely our situation while in the EU.
Nee No 10 spokes said: “The PM will hold a covid press conference at 6pm.” That’s going to be a laugh - meant to be about new covid regs for England - already in place in Scotland. What will first Q be ? https://twitter.com/Torcuil/status/1468626322033369090
Please cry for me, Allegra Stratton The truth is... I have no idea what the truth is.
I've just watched the video: am I alone in thinking that Ms Stratton has been extremely hard done by?
She made a joke and laughed inappropriately and had to resign. That’s all I can see she’s done. Anything else?
My reading was they were trying out how to deal with the party problem and she just laughed at how absurd the whole thing was.
I think it's fair to say her laugh is pretty ambiguous. I hear it as you do, but I totally see how it could sound like she is laughing about the party happening as more of a wink wink in-joke.
Please cry for me, Allegra Stratton The truth is... I have no idea what the truth is.
I've just watched the video: am I alone in thinking that Ms Stratton has been extremely hard done by?
She made a joke and laughed inappropriately and had to resign. That’s all I can see she’s done. Anything else?
Depends on the context. I just watched it. If (big if) there actually had been this party the week before and she knew about it and was jokey jokey let's pretend it didn't happen/was a business meeting then it's worse.
If however they were just wargaming and a christmas party was something thrown at her our of the blue then it is better verging on nothing to see here.
"I went home" sounds entirely genuine to me. So again the question Why just her and not the guy who raises the point?
Why did it take a year for this video to emerge. I mean, great it did, but presumably someone’s been sitting on it these last 12 months?
Anyone working in Politics have to be on their guard 100% of the time.
I laugh inappropriately and make stupid jokes all the time, as I am sure most people do, but there is no money to be made leaking a video of me at work.
For all those supporting BoJo - what success has he delivered over the last 2 years?
I am not supporting him, but he got us out of the EU, got a trade deal that protected our sovereignty more than anyone said was possible, and got us a vaccine program earlier than anyone else in Europe
The one that ended the United Kingdom as a trading block and forces GB and NI companies to have export licences to sell things to each other?
If that's protecting the sovereignty of the UK I'd hate to see what not ptotecting it looks like.
Theresa May's backstop.
Infinitely worse.
Perhaps, but isn't relevant to the argument @Aslan was promoting. He said that the current trade deal - which dissolved the UK trading area - "protected our sovereignty". I now need an export license to sell products in my own country. How has that protected our sovereignty to do things like not need an export license to trade inside our own country...
I don't need you to come back in with alternative takes on external sovereignty - you have one perspective on that, I have another. But the ending of the UK as a trading nation is indisputable - we are now split in two with GB as one trading zone and NI as another trading zone. Usually deals that protect a country's sovereignty doesn't split a chunk off it.
It did protect our sovereignty because we had Article 16 so could override it. The ending is not indisputable, we'll see what the situation is post-Article 16.
There are plenty of countries that have had chunks split off, where its convenient to do so, its far from unprecedented.
On that logic while in the EU our sovereignty was protected because we could always leave.
Either in the EU we were sovereign because we could leave and there is no compromise of sovereignty over NI because we can invoke A16; or in the EU we were not sovereign and we are not sovereign now because there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI.
You are a logical debater. Which is it; it can't be both.
We were always technically sovereign, we could only exercise that sovereignty by invoking Article 50 so we rightly did when people wanted to exercise that sovereignty.
Same deal with Article 16 - and I think it should be invoked too.
So as it stands we are not sovereign because we haven't exercised it. Is that right?
If memory serves, you've been trying variants (so to speak) of this line for a couple of years now, and I'm sorry, but I think it's a stupid argument. If we our sovereignty within the EU is only present because we have the option to leave it, then we clearly aren't sovereign while we're in it, and the fact that we assented (implicitly) to that reality is irrelevant.
He who [has to] break[s] a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.
Feel rather sorry for Stratton. This will haunt her, as she tearfully says, for the rest of her life
This gives the lie to any idea this is some kind of internal Spectator/ITV plot. She is married to James Forsyth, the Spec's political ed, he won't be happy seeing his wife in bits, nor will their kids be overjoyed at the sight of Mum weeping on telly
Bollocks, she's crying because she got caught, no sympathy.
No, she isn't. She has been painted as a heartless witch in front of an entire country, during a time of great death and suffering. The emotional impact on her must be severe, and it will be long lasting
She had to resign, and it is good that she did. But she's still a human being. She made a foolish, throwaway remark about a party which - it seems - she never even attended. Who hasn't made a daft remark that would look terrible if filmed and put in a different context?
One can condemn the actions but still forgive the person. And she has done the right thing. Resigned almost immediately
She hasn't been painted like that, she is heartless.
While we were all making sacrificing she was taking the piss.
Good grief - she’s heartless based on this situation??
She wasn’t taking the piss out of people being locked down v Downing Street denizens having a jolly.
She was clearly, like most normal people, laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation of potentially answering questions she couldn’t really answer as firstly she wasn’t there and secondly she most likely had been briefed what she had to say. It’s almost as if her comments were the living reality of this emoji 🤷🏻♀️
And since when did everyone have to be so fucking serious - bad shit happens and people laugh and joke about things to get through - gallows humour, tommies joking as they are being bombed by the Germans, my friends who are doctors in A&E who have ripped the piss out of the situation as - well it’s not going to make things better than being a puritan wanker or worse constantly pretending to be so miserable.
I quite happily admit that I’ve constantly used humour in my personal and professional situation over the last two years, including around the long lead up and aftermath of my father’s death last year so I cannot support this ridiculous po-faced bollocks about someone laughing - they weren’t mocking people suffering - they were mocking the situation they found themselves in.
And yet the austere humourless Boris Johnson, like some latter day Oliver Cromwell, says he is "sickened" by it.
So the theories are 1) that this is revenge by Dom, and 2) that this is a pre-emptive strike by some opponent of lockdown to ward off lockdown, a la Hancock. (Did we ever find out who was behind that?). Presumably 1 and 2 can't both be true - ISTR Dom was a keen advocate of lockdown, though maybe he's changed his mind. If not Dom, who do we think is orchestrating this? Is it even someone the public know about?
There may not be orchestration, as such. it could easily be some advisor (or ex-advisor) from no 10 who's pissed off at Johnson for one or more of any number of reasons from petty nonsense to grand policy. Indeed, it's probably more likely an advisor given this is all inside Downing St.
Likely to be an announcement to Commons tomorrow afternoon with briefing at 5pm tomorrow. NOT CONFIRMED
Will be absolutely laughable if they even think about it. What planet are these people on?
It's completely mental, today Pfizer announce that three doses gives a high level of neutralising protection against Omicron, our booster programme is mostly Pfizer and yet the idiots in charge are desperately looking for a dead cat to distract the nation so we'll end up with completely unnecessary restrictions with no end date because if this is the new normal (COVID being endemic and all that) then these NPIs also become the new normal.
I think the current news makes new restrictions less likely not more likely. A bit like the leaking of Hancock's video. Which is possibly why it was leaked.
This has shot to pieces any moral authority the PM had for new restrictions. I think even if he was planning new restrictions, those now are hopefully stillborn because he knows now he can't do that.
Hope so at least.
I don't think so, Boris likes a big gesture and plan B is a big gesture that will capture the front pages for a few days. It will make precisely zero difference to COVID, one only needs to look at continental Europe where they have got all of the plan B restrictions plus a lot more yet face a worse winter than we do. The only reason to implement plan B is to grab headlines and make it look like they are doing something.
I'm coming to the conclusion that vaxports are pretty pointless now. If they had introduced them 3 months ago (when I was advocating for them on here) they would have done good work: driving up vax uptake. Now? This late in the day? Meh
The other big Plan B measure - Work From Home - will do a lot of economic damage to city centres (at Xmas!) and barely delay Omicron
The focus of the government should instead be on surging the booster campaign to warp speed, and simultaneously preparing the NHS for, potentially, a lot of cases over a fairly short period of time - from now til end Jan?
However I agree with you that they will probably go with Plan B, just because. And I fear that will be a slip road to Lockdown
With vaccine passports what you get is 2-3m into the vaccine funnel at the expense of 8-10m into the natural immunity funnel. The latter is preferable.
But yes, we are heading inexorably to lockdown 4 and this time I have no hope of ever leaving it because there's nothing to save the day. Let the unvaccinated fools die and be done with it.
The Tory party will have played the working class like a violin.
I never understood "levelling up" as a class thing - it was about more focus on the North wasn't it, i.e. become less London-focused?
It's never been well defined, to say the least, but I certainly saw it as a nod to "left behind" communities - places with a pervasive sense of their best days being very much in the past. A fair few of those are in the north, but plenty of northern towns and cities don't have that sense at all (e.g. Manchester, York etc) and plenty of places in the south, often coastal towns and the sort of market town with limited appeal, certainly do.
For all those supporting BoJo - what success has he delivered over the last 2 years?
I am not supporting him, but he got us out of the EU, got a trade deal that protected our sovereignty more than anyone said was possible, and got us a vaccine program earlier than anyone else in Europe
The one that ended the United Kingdom as a trading block and forces GB and NI companies to have export licences to sell things to each other?
If that's protecting the sovereignty of the UK I'd hate to see what not ptotecting it looks like.
Theresa May's backstop.
Infinitely worse.
Perhaps, but isn't relevant to the argument @Aslan was promoting. He said that the current trade deal - which dissolved the UK trading area - "protected our sovereignty". I now need an export license to sell products in my own country. How has that protected our sovereignty to do things like not need an export license to trade inside our own country...
I don't need you to come back in with alternative takes on external sovereignty - you have one perspective on that, I have another. But the ending of the UK as a trading nation is indisputable - we are now split in two with GB as one trading zone and NI as another trading zone. Usually deals that protect a country's sovereignty doesn't split a chunk off it.
It did protect our sovereignty because we had Article 16 so could override it. The ending is not indisputable, we'll see what the situation is post-Article 16.
There are plenty of countries that have had chunks split off, where its convenient to do so, its far from unprecedented.
On that logic while in the EU our sovereignty was protected because we could always leave.
Either in the EU we were sovereign because we could leave and there is no compromise of sovereignty over NI because we can invoke A16; or in the EU we were not sovereign and we are not sovereign now because there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI.
You are a logical debater. Which is it; it can't be both.
We were always technically sovereign, we could only exercise that sovereignty by invoking Article 50 so we rightly did when people wanted to exercise that sovereignty.
Same deal with Article 16 - and I think it should be invoked too.
So as it stands we are not sovereign because we haven't exercised it. Is that right?
No of course not. We were always sovereign.
We have put our sovereignty into abeyance until we invoke the Article. Its still there, like a break glass, but until we want to do so we're simply not exercising it.
So if you want to exercise your sovereignty you can invoke the Article. If you don't and are OK with abeyance, then no need to do so.
Ah ok so our sovereignty is "in abeyance" (a state of temporary disuse or suspension). So our sovereignty has been suspended. But you said that the NI deal protected our sovereignty, not that it was in abeyance. And if protected means we could exercise it at any time thereby becoming sovereign but have not done so yet then that was precisely our situation while in the EU.
So which is it.
Both.
Just as in the EU we had our sovereignty (because we have Article 50/16) but it is in abeyance until we exercise the relevant Article.
Its not precisely the situation while in the EU, because the abeyance only applies to an tiny fraction (NI) and not the whole country.
Stratton's video and subsequent resignation is an absolute smoke screen.
The party during lockdown and Johnson's knowledge of what was going on remains the question. The media however have their scalp and are happy to move on.
Johnson lives another day...but... let's just hope Ant and Dec don't skewer Johnson tonight... again
Likely to be an announcement to Commons tomorrow afternoon with briefing at 5pm tomorrow. NOT CONFIRMED
Will be absolutely laughable if they even think about it. What planet are these people on?
It's completely mental, today Pfizer announce that three doses gives a high level of neutralising protection against Omicron, our booster programme is mostly Pfizer and yet the idiots in charge are desperately looking for a dead cat to distract the nation so we'll end up with completely unnecessary restrictions with no end date because if this is the new normal (COVID being endemic and all that) then these NPIs also become the new normal.
I think the current news makes new restrictions less likely not more likely. A bit like the leaking of Hancock's video. Which is possibly why it was leaked.
This has shot to pieces any moral authority the PM had for new restrictions. I think even if he was planning new restrictions, those now are hopefully stillborn because he knows now he can't do that.
Hope so at least.
I don't think so, Boris likes a big gesture and plan B is a big gesture that will capture the front pages for a few days. It will make precisely zero difference to COVID, one only needs to look at continental Europe where they have got all of the plan B restrictions plus a lot more yet face a worse winter than we do. The only reason to implement plan B is to grab headlines and make it look like they are doing something.
I'm coming to the conclusion that vaxports are pretty pointless now. If they had introduced them 3 months ago (when I was advocating for them on here) they would have done good work: driving up vax uptake. Now? This late in the day? Meh
The other big Plan B measure - Work From Home - will do a lot of economic damage to city centres (at Xmas!) and barely delay Omicron
The focus of the government should instead be on surging the booster campaign to warp speed, and simultaneously preparing the NHS for, potentially, a lot of cases over a fairly short period of time - from now til end Jan?
However I agree with you that they will probably go with Plan B, just because. And I fear that will be a slip road to Lockdown
With vaccine passports what you get is 2-3m into the vaccine funnel at the expense of 8-10m into the natural immunity funnel. The latter is preferable.
But yes, we are heading inexorably to lockdown 4 and this time I have no hope of ever leaving it because there's nothing to save the day. Let the unvaccinated fools die and be done with it.
Shout out to Rishi & Sajid enabling this absolute transparant nonsense. Sickening there was clearly so little resistance at cabinet that they've been able to move so fast with so little basis.
The most interesting event of the day is still Sunak nodding in judicious approval at Blackford saying that Tory MPs needed to consider Johnson’s fitness to lead. He is behind this.
I didn't spot this at the time, and I think it's most likely that he's nodding to say that the PM is the right man for the job... however it's a very interesting segment.
If 3 vaxx doses or 2 plus an infection still pretty much stop you getting omicron, then there aren't gonna be many hospitalisation even in a large omicron wave cos we've already triple-vaxxed the main groups from which hospitalisations come.
I have been pointing out, since the vaccinations started that there will be millions of un-vaxed people even if we get to 95% of the vulnerable populations.
Hence, if you can't get R below 1 and keep it there, trouble.
For all those supporting BoJo - what success has he delivered over the last 2 years?
I am not supporting him, but he got us out of the EU, got a trade deal that protected our sovereignty more than anyone said was possible, and got us a vaccine program earlier than anyone else in Europe
The one that ended the United Kingdom as a trading block and forces GB and NI companies to have export licences to sell things to each other?
If that's protecting the sovereignty of the UK I'd hate to see what not ptotecting it looks like.
Theresa May's backstop.
Infinitely worse.
Perhaps, but isn't relevant to the argument @Aslan was promoting. He said that the current trade deal - which dissolved the UK trading area - "protected our sovereignty". I now need an export license to sell products in my own country. How has that protected our sovereignty to do things like not need an export license to trade inside our own country...
I don't need you to come back in with alternative takes on external sovereignty - you have one perspective on that, I have another. But the ending of the UK as a trading nation is indisputable - we are now split in two with GB as one trading zone and NI as another trading zone. Usually deals that protect a country's sovereignty doesn't split a chunk off it.
It did protect our sovereignty because we had Article 16 so could override it. The ending is not indisputable, we'll see what the situation is post-Article 16.
There are plenty of countries that have had chunks split off, where its convenient to do so, its far from unprecedented.
On that logic while in the EU our sovereignty was protected because we could always leave.
Either in the EU we were sovereign because we could leave and there is no compromise of sovereignty over NI because we can invoke A16; or in the EU we were not sovereign and we are not sovereign now because there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI.
You are a logical debater. Which is it; it can't be both.
We were always technically sovereign, we could only exercise that sovereignty by invoking Article 50 so we rightly did when people wanted to exercise that sovereignty.
Same deal with Article 16 - and I think it should be invoked too.
So as it stands we are not sovereign because we haven't exercised it. Is that right?
If memory serves, you've been trying variants (so to speak) of this line for a couple of years now, and I'm sorry, but I think it's a stupid argument. If we our sovereignty within the EU is only present because we have the option to leave it, then we clearly aren't sovereign while we're in it, and the fact that we assented (implicitly) to that reality is irrelevant.
He who [has to] break[s] a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.
Apology accepted. Although your point is wrong. We were always sovereign whether we decided to exercise it or not. Of course we made compromises but did so as a sovereign nation.
But that is not the point. If we were not sovereign within the EU because we hadn't "proved" it by leaving, then the NI deal means we are not sovereign because as of this moment we haven't exercised A16. It can't be both.
If you think we weren't sovereign while in the EU and aren't sovereign now because the NI deal means that there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI that is fair enough. But you can't argue for one and not the other.
So the theories are 1) that this is revenge by Dom, and 2) that this is a pre-emptive strike by some opponent of lockdown to ward off lockdown, a la Hancock. (Did we ever find out who was behind that?). Presumably 1 and 2 can't both be true - ISTR Dom was a keen advocate of lockdown, though maybe he's changed his mind. If not Dom, who do we think is orchestrating this? Is it even someone the public know about?
There may not be orchestration, as such. it could easily be some advisor (or ex-advisor) from no 10 who's pissed off at Johnson for one or more of any number of reasons from petty nonsense to grand policy. Indeed, it's probably more likely an advisor given this is all inside Downing St.
Yes, fair point. Not everything is a conspiracy. Also, hello David! Welcome back!
"Ed (questioner in @itvnews video) Oldfield's CV looks v thin and short to be Head of Broadcast at No.10 with no broadcast/journalistic experience. He was apparently a transcriber in CCHQ previously but his father has donated tens of thousands to party so mystery solved I guess..."
Likely to be an announcement to Commons tomorrow afternoon with briefing at 5pm tomorrow. NOT CONFIRMED
Will be absolutely laughable if they even think about it. What planet are these people on?
It's completely mental, today Pfizer announce that three doses gives a high level of neutralising protection against Omicron, our booster programme is mostly Pfizer and yet the idiots in charge are desperately looking for a dead cat to distract the nation so we'll end up with completely unnecessary restrictions with no end date because if this is the new normal (COVID being endemic and all that) then these NPIs also become the new normal.
I think the current news makes new restrictions less likely not more likely. A bit like the leaking of Hancock's video. Which is possibly why it was leaked.
This has shot to pieces any moral authority the PM had for new restrictions. I think even if he was planning new restrictions, those now are hopefully stillborn because he knows now he can't do that.
Hope so at least.
I don't think so, Boris likes a big gesture and plan B is a big gesture that will capture the front pages for a few days. It will make precisely zero difference to COVID, one only needs to look at continental Europe where they have got all of the plan B restrictions plus a lot more yet face a worse winter than we do. The only reason to implement plan B is to grab headlines and make it look like they are doing something.
I'm coming to the conclusion that vaxports are pretty pointless now. If they had introduced them 3 months ago (when I was advocating for them on here) they would have done good work: driving up vax uptake. Now? This late in the day? Meh
The other big Plan B measure - Work From Home - will do a lot of economic damage to city centres (at Xmas!) and barely delay Omicron
The focus of the government should instead be on surging the booster campaign to warp speed, and simultaneously preparing the NHS for, potentially, a lot of cases over a fairly short period of time - from now til end Jan?
However I agree with you that they will probably go with Plan B, just because. And I fear that will be a slip road to Lockdown
With vaccine passports what you get is 2-3m into the vaccine funnel at the expense of 8-10m into the natural immunity funnel. The latter is preferable.
But yes, we are heading inexorably to lockdown 4 and this time I have no hope of ever leaving it because there's nothing to save the day. Let the unvaccinated fools die and be done with it.
Must say there is a terrible sense of inevitability about where we are headed. Again.
Likely to be an announcement to Commons tomorrow afternoon with briefing at 5pm tomorrow. NOT CONFIRMED
Will be absolutely laughable if they even think about it. What planet are these people on?
It's completely mental, today Pfizer announce that three doses gives a high level of neutralising protection against Omicron, our booster programme is mostly Pfizer and yet the idiots in charge are desperately looking for a dead cat to distract the nation so we'll end up with completely unnecessary restrictions with no end date because if this is the new normal (COVID being endemic and all that) then these NPIs also become the new normal.
I think the current news makes new restrictions less likely not more likely. A bit like the leaking of Hancock's video. Which is possibly why it was leaked.
This has shot to pieces any moral authority the PM had for new restrictions. I think even if he was planning new restrictions, those now are hopefully stillborn because he knows now he can't do that.
Hope so at least.
I don't think so, Boris likes a big gesture and plan B is a big gesture that will capture the front pages for a few days. It will make precisely zero difference to COVID, one only needs to look at continental Europe where they have got all of the plan B restrictions plus a lot more yet face a worse winter than we do. The only reason to implement plan B is to grab headlines and make it look like they are doing something.
I'm coming to the conclusion that vaxports are pretty pointless now. If they had introduced them 3 months ago (when I was advocating for them on here) they would have done good work: driving up vax uptake. Now? This late in the day? Meh
The other big Plan B measure - Work From Home - will do a lot of economic damage to city centres (at Xmas!) and barely delay Omicron
The focus of the government should instead be on surging the booster campaign to warp speed, and simultaneously preparing the NHS for, potentially, a lot of cases over a fairly short period of time - from now til end Jan?
However I agree with you that they will probably go with Plan B, just because. And I fear that will be a slip road to Lockdown
With vaccine passports what you get is 2-3m into the vaccine funnel at the expense of 8-10m into the natural immunity funnel. The latter is preferable.
But yes, we are heading inexorably to lockdown 4 and this time I have no hope of ever leaving it because there's nothing to save the day. Let the unvaccinated fools die and be done with it.
Shout out to Rishi & Sajid enabling this absolute transparant nonsense. Sickening there was clearly so little resistance at cabinet that they've been able to move so fast with so little basis.
The problem is there is no benefit in blocking a tightening of the rules once Boris gets going.
Fans attending sports events including Premier League matches this weekend are expected to be required to have vaccine passports or proof of a negative test as part of new government rules to tackle the Covid pandemic.
The Premier League was in talks with Whitehall officials on Wednesday seeking clarification on the requirements of complying with the government’s plan B, due to be announced to deal with the spread of the Omicron variant.
Glad I went to see Spurs on Sunday, I expect getting into the stadium will now take 2-3h of queuing and checking vaccine status with arguments and fights breaking out.
It'll be interesting to see if they accept the blue cards issued at vaccination rather than an "app" on a phone. I've been surveyed twice so far this season (once at Arsenal and once at Leicester), and on both occasions the blue card was fine.
I still object to them asking, but so long as they aren't insisting on me downloading something on to my phone, then I'm not too worried. But there is bound to be trouble if they actually stop people from entering without proof of being vaccinated.
You can order a paper document from the NHS Hospitals - more official than the card but not linked to the matrix
Whilst I object to Vaxports on principle, they exist and I can't do the things I want to do without them. So I just show the QR code on the app. Why faff with paper documents?
Because the government has tried 3 times to expropriate my health data and I don’t trust them not to try again. Why make it easy for them?
On topic, the worst thing from this polling is this.
Three in ten say they are less likely to follow Covid rules as a result (29%).
This rises to a third of Labour voters (33%) and those aged 18-34 (33%) who say the same.
Over half say they are just as likely to follow the rules (54%)
Whatever Boris Johnson announces tonight will be ignored by large parts of the country making us less secure.
He needs to go and be replaced by someone with the credibility and authority to launch you new Covid-19 measures.
Except it wouldn't matter if Jesus were to descend from heaven to promote any new Covid measures. First of all, the country, or a large enough fraction of it at any rate, has had enough of Covid measures and will happily ignore them if they think they can get away with it. And secondly, there's probably nothing short of a full lockdown that will do anything to seriously impede the latest version of this bloody virus, it's questionable as to whether or not even that will work, and neither the economy nor wider society can sustain an annual cycle of hokey cokey house arrest for the next thousand years.
The Government can plausibly get away with yet more masks (useless) and WFH (not useful enough,) and after that it is out of options. Reinstating large scale business support and putting about five or six million people back on furlough until various roadmap steps between April and July, let alone shutting all the schools again for the Winter, is a non-starter. And if declining to go to those lengths means, to put it bluntly, tent hospitals and doctors having to decide which Covid patient gets a ventilator and which one gets a big shot of morphine, then that's what's going to end up happening. After all, selectively abandoning non-Covid patients to perish through lack of care capacity is already a reality in the NHS. Why should selectively abandoning Covid patients to perish as well seem so unimaginable?
Basically, if we are fortunate and this latest wave of the disease is moderate then we can all breathe a sigh of relief, and if we aren't and it's bad then there are no workable strategies left for avoiding a massacre. Draconian restrictions are over. Finished.
For all those supporting BoJo - what success has he delivered over the last 2 years?
I am not supporting him, but he got us out of the EU, got a trade deal that protected our sovereignty more than anyone said was possible, and got us a vaccine program earlier than anyone else in Europe
The one that ended the United Kingdom as a trading block and forces GB and NI companies to have export licences to sell things to each other?
If that's protecting the sovereignty of the UK I'd hate to see what not ptotecting it looks like.
Theresa May's backstop.
Infinitely worse.
Perhaps, but isn't relevant to the argument @Aslan was promoting. He said that the current trade deal - which dissolved the UK trading area - "protected our sovereignty". I now need an export license to sell products in my own country. How has that protected our sovereignty to do things like not need an export license to trade inside our own country...
I don't need you to come back in with alternative takes on external sovereignty - you have one perspective on that, I have another. But the ending of the UK as a trading nation is indisputable - we are now split in two with GB as one trading zone and NI as another trading zone. Usually deals that protect a country's sovereignty doesn't split a chunk off it.
It did protect our sovereignty because we had Article 16 so could override it. The ending is not indisputable, we'll see what the situation is post-Article 16.
There are plenty of countries that have had chunks split off, where its convenient to do so, its far from unprecedented.
On that logic while in the EU our sovereignty was protected because we could always leave.
Either in the EU we were sovereign because we could leave and there is no compromise of sovereignty over NI because we can invoke A16; or in the EU we were not sovereign and we are not sovereign now because there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI.
You are a logical debater. Which is it; it can't be both.
We were always technically sovereign, we could only exercise that sovereignty by invoking Article 50 so we rightly did when people wanted to exercise that sovereignty.
Same deal with Article 16 - and I think it should be invoked too.
So as it stands we are not sovereign because we haven't exercised it. Is that right?
No of course not. We were always sovereign.
We have put our sovereignty into abeyance until we invoke the Article. Its still there, like a break glass, but until we want to do so we're simply not exercising it.
So if you want to exercise your sovereignty you can invoke the Article. If you don't and are OK with abeyance, then no need to do so.
Ah ok so our sovereignty is "in abeyance" (a state of temporary disuse or suspension). So our sovereignty has been suspended. But you said that the NI deal protected our sovereignty, not that it was in abeyance. And if protected means we could exercise it at any time thereby becoming sovereign but have not done so yet then that was precisely our situation while in the EU.
So which is it.
Both.
Just as in the EU we had our sovereignty (because we have Article 50/16) but it is in abeyance until we exercise the relevant Article.
Its not precisely the situation while in the EU, because the abeyance only applies to an tiny fraction (NI) and not the whole country.
At least you accept that the NI deal does not protect our sovereignty and our sovereignty is currently in abeyance ie suspended.
"Ed (questioner in @itvnews video) Oldfield's CV looks v thin and short to be Head of Broadcast at No.10 with no broadcast/journalistic experience. He was apparently a transcriber in CCHQ previously but his father has donated tens of thousands to party so mystery solved I guess..."
And Stratton wasn't up to the job either, but got it by being a friend of the PM's wife.
For all those supporting BoJo - what success has he delivered over the last 2 years?
I am not supporting him, but he got us out of the EU, got a trade deal that protected our sovereignty more than anyone said was possible, and got us a vaccine program earlier than anyone else in Europe
The one that ended the United Kingdom as a trading block and forces GB and NI companies to have export licences to sell things to each other?
If that's protecting the sovereignty of the UK I'd hate to see what not ptotecting it looks like.
Theresa May's backstop.
Infinitely worse.
Perhaps, but isn't relevant to the argument @Aslan was promoting. He said that the current trade deal - which dissolved the UK trading area - "protected our sovereignty". I now need an export license to sell products in my own country. How has that protected our sovereignty to do things like not need an export license to trade inside our own country...
I don't need you to come back in with alternative takes on external sovereignty - you have one perspective on that, I have another. But the ending of the UK as a trading nation is indisputable - we are now split in two with GB as one trading zone and NI as another trading zone. Usually deals that protect a country's sovereignty doesn't split a chunk off it.
It did protect our sovereignty because we had Article 16 so could override it. The ending is not indisputable, we'll see what the situation is post-Article 16.
There are plenty of countries that have had chunks split off, where its convenient to do so, its far from unprecedented.
On that logic while in the EU our sovereignty was protected because we could always leave.
Either in the EU we were sovereign because we could leave and there is no compromise of sovereignty over NI because we can invoke A16; or in the EU we were not sovereign and we are not sovereign now because there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI.
You are a logical debater. Which is it; it can't be both.
We were always technically sovereign, we could only exercise that sovereignty by invoking Article 50 so we rightly did when people wanted to exercise that sovereignty.
Same deal with Article 16 - and I think it should be invoked too.
So as it stands we are not sovereign because we haven't exercised it. Is that right?
If memory serves, you've been trying variants (so to speak) of this line for a couple of years now, and I'm sorry, but I think it's a stupid argument. If we our sovereignty within the EU is only present because we have the option to leave it, then we clearly aren't sovereign while we're in it, and the fact that we assented (implicitly) to that reality is irrelevant.
He who [has to] break[s] a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.
Apology accepted. Although your point is wrong. We were always sovereign whether we decided to exercise it or not. Of course we made compromises but did so as a sovereign nation.
But that is not the point. If we were not sovereign within the EU because we hadn't "proved" it by leaving, then the NI deal means we are not sovereign because as of this moment we haven't exercised A16. It can't be both.
If you think we weren't sovereign while in the EU and aren't sovereign now because the NI deal means that there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI that is fair enough. But you can't argue for one and not the other.
We were always sovereign for both. The question is if you wanted to exercise your sovereignty or not.
The English and Welsh voted to exercise their sovereignty, hence invoking Article 50. The NI did not, hence the special arrangements.
Now if the NI wish to exercise theirs, then A16 is the right answer for them, just as it was for the UK as a whole. For the same reasons. Using the same logic.
For all those supporting BoJo - what success has he delivered over the last 2 years?
I am not supporting him, but he got us out of the EU, got a trade deal that protected our sovereignty more than anyone said was possible, and got us a vaccine program earlier than anyone else in Europe
The one that ended the United Kingdom as a trading block and forces GB and NI companies to have export licences to sell things to each other?
If that's protecting the sovereignty of the UK I'd hate to see what not ptotecting it looks like.
Theresa May's backstop.
Infinitely worse.
Perhaps, but isn't relevant to the argument @Aslan was promoting. He said that the current trade deal - which dissolved the UK trading area - "protected our sovereignty". I now need an export license to sell products in my own country. How has that protected our sovereignty to do things like not need an export license to trade inside our own country...
I don't need you to come back in with alternative takes on external sovereignty - you have one perspective on that, I have another. But the ending of the UK as a trading nation is indisputable - we are now split in two with GB as one trading zone and NI as another trading zone. Usually deals that protect a country's sovereignty doesn't split a chunk off it.
It did protect our sovereignty because we had Article 16 so could override it. The ending is not indisputable, we'll see what the situation is post-Article 16.
There are plenty of countries that have had chunks split off, where its convenient to do so, its far from unprecedented.
On that logic while in the EU our sovereignty was protected because we could always leave.
Either in the EU we were sovereign because we could leave and there is no compromise of sovereignty over NI because we can invoke A16; or in the EU we were not sovereign and we are not sovereign now because there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI.
You are a logical debater. Which is it; it can't be both.
We were always technically sovereign, we could only exercise that sovereignty by invoking Article 50 so we rightly did when people wanted to exercise that sovereignty.
Same deal with Article 16 - and I think it should be invoked too.
So as it stands we are not sovereign because we haven't exercised it. Is that right?
No of course not. We were always sovereign.
We have put our sovereignty into abeyance until we invoke the Article. Its still there, like a break glass, but until we want to do so we're simply not exercising it.
So if you want to exercise your sovereignty you can invoke the Article. If you don't and are OK with abeyance, then no need to do so.
Ah ok so our sovereignty is "in abeyance" (a state of temporary disuse or suspension). So our sovereignty has been suspended. But you said that the NI deal protected our sovereignty, not that it was in abeyance. And if protected means we could exercise it at any time thereby becoming sovereign but have not done so yet then that was precisely our situation while in the EU.
So which is it.
Both.
Just as in the EU we had our sovereignty (because we have Article 50/16) but it is in abeyance until we exercise the relevant Article.
Its not precisely the situation while in the EU, because the abeyance only applies to an tiny fraction (NI) and not the whole country.
At least you accept that the NI deal does not protect our sovereignty and our sovereignty is currently in abeyance ie suspended.
What are you talking about. Abeyance is protected.
That was my primary reaction yesterday upon reading the story of Michelle Maddox, the owner of Clootie McToot, the world’s only clootie dumpling shop, based in Abernethy in Perthshire.
As was reported yesterday, Michelle was among twelve businesses who last week were invited by the UK Government to set up market stalls in Downing street to showcase the best of British produce....Within hours, Michelle’s Facebook page received a series of appalling threats and abuse in a series of private messages from people who saw her trade visit not as a useful attempt to boost Scottish produce but as a kind of treacherous endorsement for Mr Johnson’s leadership.
....Yet it is an indisputable fact that the majority of prominent Scottish nationalists in recent years have sought to frame their pursuit of independence in an overtly nationalist manner – as a constant struggle between insiders and outsiders, between them and us, between the oppressed and the oppressors.
On topic, the worst thing from this polling is this.
Three in ten say they are less likely to follow Covid rules as a result (29%).
This rises to a third of Labour voters (33%) and those aged 18-34 (33%) who say the same.
Over half say they are just as likely to follow the rules (54%)
Whatever Boris Johnson announces tonight will be ignored by large parts of the country making us less secure.
He needs to go and be replaced by someone with the credibility and authority to launch you new Covid-19 measures.
Except it wouldn't matter if Jesus were to descend from heaven to promote any new Covid measures. First of all, the country, or a large enough fraction of it at any rate, has had enough of Covid measures and will happily ignore them if they think they can get away with it. And secondly, there's probably nothing short of a full lockdown that will do anything to seriously impede the latest version of this bloody virus, it's questionable as to whether or not even that will work, and neither the economy nor wider society can sustain an annual cycle of hokey cokey house arrest for the next thousand years.
The Government can plausibly get away with yet more masks (useless) and WFH (not useful enough,) and after that it is out of options. Reinstating large scale business support and putting about five or six million people back on furlough until various roadmap steps between April and July, let alone shutting all the schools again for the Winter, is a non-starter. And if declining to go to those lengths means, to put it bluntly, tent hospitals and doctors having to decide which Covid patient gets a ventilator and which one gets a big shot of morphine, then that's what's going to end up happening. After all, selectively abandoning non-Covid patients to perish through lack of care capacity is already a reality in the NHS. Why should selectively abandoning Covid patients to perish as well seem so unimaginable?
Basically, if we are fortunate and this latest wave of the disease is moderate then we can all breathe a sigh of relief, and if we aren't and it's bad then there are no workable strategies left for avoiding a massacre. Draconian restrictions are over. Finished.
I'm not sure it's as "mild" as we all hope
Benedict Barclay @BarclayBenedict · 2m Replying to @BarclayBenedict The total number of people in hospital with Covid is 4,252, which is very sharply up on 2,550 last week.
Gauteng has fallen from 72% of cases to 59%, which shows that cases are now rising faster in other provinces.
For all those supporting BoJo - what success has he delivered over the last 2 years?
I am not supporting him, but he got us out of the EU, got a trade deal that protected our sovereignty more than anyone said was possible, and got us a vaccine program earlier than anyone else in Europe
The one that ended the United Kingdom as a trading block and forces GB and NI companies to have export licences to sell things to each other?
If that's protecting the sovereignty of the UK I'd hate to see what not ptotecting it looks like.
Theresa May's backstop.
Infinitely worse.
Perhaps, but isn't relevant to the argument @Aslan was promoting. He said that the current trade deal - which dissolved the UK trading area - "protected our sovereignty". I now need an export license to sell products in my own country. How has that protected our sovereignty to do things like not need an export license to trade inside our own country...
I don't need you to come back in with alternative takes on external sovereignty - you have one perspective on that, I have another. But the ending of the UK as a trading nation is indisputable - we are now split in two with GB as one trading zone and NI as another trading zone. Usually deals that protect a country's sovereignty doesn't split a chunk off it.
It did protect our sovereignty because we had Article 16 so could override it. The ending is not indisputable, we'll see what the situation is post-Article 16.
There are plenty of countries that have had chunks split off, where its convenient to do so, its far from unprecedented.
On that logic while in the EU our sovereignty was protected because we could always leave.
Either in the EU we were sovereign because we could leave and there is no compromise of sovereignty over NI because we can invoke A16; or in the EU we were not sovereign and we are not sovereign now because there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI.
You are a logical debater. Which is it; it can't be both.
We were always technically sovereign, we could only exercise that sovereignty by invoking Article 50 so we rightly did when people wanted to exercise that sovereignty.
Same deal with Article 16 - and I think it should be invoked too.
So as it stands we are not sovereign because we haven't exercised it. Is that right?
If memory serves, you've been trying variants (so to speak) of this line for a couple of years now, and I'm sorry, but I think it's a stupid argument. If we our sovereignty within the EU is only present because we have the option to leave it, then we clearly aren't sovereign while we're in it, and the fact that we assented (implicitly) to that reality is irrelevant.
He who [has to] break[s] a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.
Apology accepted. Although your point is wrong. We were always sovereign whether we decided to exercise it or not. Of course we made compromises but did so as a sovereign nation.
But that is not the point. If we were not sovereign within the EU because we hadn't "proved" it by leaving, then the NI deal means we are not sovereign because as of this moment we haven't exercised A16. It can't be both.
If you think we weren't sovereign while in the EU and aren't sovereign now because the NI deal means that there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI that is fair enough. But you can't argue for one and not the other.
We were always sovereign for both. The question is if you wanted to exercise your sovereignty or not.
The English and Welsh voted to exercise their sovereignty, hence invoking Article 50. The NI did not, hence the special arrangements.
Now if the NI wish to exercise theirs, then A16 is the right answer for them, just as it was for the UK as a whole. For the same reasons. Using the same logic.
No inconsistencies.
Excellent.
But we are talking about the UK Government here. Because that is the entity that is conducting these deals. So we were sovereign while in the EU: tick. And we are sovereign with this NI deal: tick.
So why all the fuss about leaving the EU to reclaim our sovereignty.
For all those supporting BoJo - what success has he delivered over the last 2 years?
I am not supporting him, but he got us out of the EU, got a trade deal that protected our sovereignty more than anyone said was possible, and got us a vaccine program earlier than anyone else in Europe
The one that ended the United Kingdom as a trading block and forces GB and NI companies to have export licences to sell things to each other?
If that's protecting the sovereignty of the UK I'd hate to see what not ptotecting it looks like.
Theresa May's backstop.
Infinitely worse.
Perhaps, but isn't relevant to the argument @Aslan was promoting. He said that the current trade deal - which dissolved the UK trading area - "protected our sovereignty". I now need an export license to sell products in my own country. How has that protected our sovereignty to do things like not need an export license to trade inside our own country...
I don't need you to come back in with alternative takes on external sovereignty - you have one perspective on that, I have another. But the ending of the UK as a trading nation is indisputable - we are now split in two with GB as one trading zone and NI as another trading zone. Usually deals that protect a country's sovereignty doesn't split a chunk off it.
It did protect our sovereignty because we had Article 16 so could override it. The ending is not indisputable, we'll see what the situation is post-Article 16.
There are plenty of countries that have had chunks split off, where its convenient to do so, its far from unprecedented.
On that logic while in the EU our sovereignty was protected because we could always leave.
Either in the EU we were sovereign because we could leave and there is no compromise of sovereignty over NI because we can invoke A16; or in the EU we were not sovereign and we are not sovereign now because there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI.
You are a logical debater. Which is it; it can't be both.
We were always technically sovereign, we could only exercise that sovereignty by invoking Article 50 so we rightly did when people wanted to exercise that sovereignty.
Same deal with Article 16 - and I think it should be invoked too.
So as it stands we are not sovereign because we haven't exercised it. Is that right?
If memory serves, you've been trying variants (so to speak) of this line for a couple of years now, and I'm sorry, but I think it's a stupid argument. If we our sovereignty within the EU is only present because we have the option to leave it, then we clearly aren't sovereign while we're in it, and the fact that we assented (implicitly) to that reality is irrelevant.
He who [has to] break[s] a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.
Apology accepted. Although your point is wrong. We were always sovereign whether we decided to exercise it or not. Of course we made compromises but did so as a sovereign nation.
But that is not the point. If we were not sovereign within the EU because we hadn't "proved" it by leaving, then the NI deal means we are not sovereign because as of this moment we haven't exercised A16. It can't be both.
If you think we weren't sovereign while in the EU and aren't sovereign now because the NI deal means that there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI that is fair enough. But you can't argue for one and not the other.
We were always sovereign for both. The question is if you wanted to exercise your sovereignty or not.
The English and Welsh voted to exercise their sovereignty, hence invoking Article 50. The NI did not, hence the special arrangements.
Now if the NI wish to exercise theirs, then A16 is the right answer for them, just as it was for the UK as a whole. For the same reasons. Using the same logic.
No inconsistencies.
Excellent. So we were sovereign while in the EU: tick. And we are sovereign with this NI deal: tick.
So why all the fuss about leaving the EU to reclaim our sovereignty.
On topic, the worst thing from this polling is this.
Three in ten say they are less likely to follow Covid rules as a result (29%).
This rises to a third of Labour voters (33%) and those aged 18-34 (33%) who say the same.
Over half say they are just as likely to follow the rules (54%)
Whatever Boris Johnson announces tonight will be ignored by large parts of the country making us less secure.
He needs to go and be replaced by someone with the credibility and authority to launch you new Covid-19 measures.
Except it wouldn't matter if Jesus were to descend from heaven to promote any new Covid measures. First of all, the country, or a large enough fraction of it at any rate, has had enough of Covid measures and will happily ignore them if they think they can get away with it. And secondly, there's probably nothing short of a full lockdown that will do anything to seriously impede the latest version of this bloody virus, it's questionable as to whether or not even that will work, and neither the economy nor wider society can sustain an annual cycle of hokey cokey house arrest for the next thousand years.
The Government can plausibly get away with yet more masks (useless) and WFH (not useful enough,) and after that it is out of options. Reinstating large scale business support and putting about five or six million people back on furlough until various roadmap steps between April and July, let alone shutting all the schools again for the Winter, is a non-starter. And if declining to go to those lengths means, to put it bluntly, tent hospitals and doctors having to decide which Covid patient gets a ventilator and which one gets a big shot of morphine, then that's what's going to end up happening. After all, selectively abandoning non-Covid patients to perish through lack of care capacity is already a reality in the NHS. Why should selectively abandoning Covid patients to perish as well seem so unimaginable?
Basically, if we are fortunate and this latest wave of the disease is moderate then we can all breathe a sigh of relief, and if we aren't and it's bad then there are no workable strategies left for avoiding a massacre. Draconian restrictions are over. Finished.
I'm not sure it's as "mild" as we all hope
Benedict Barclay @BarclayBenedict · 2m Replying to @BarclayBenedict The total number of people in hospital with Covid is 4,252, which is very sharply up on 2,550 last week.
Gauteng has fallen from 72% of cases to 59%, which shows that cases are now rising faster in other provinces.
How many of those hospitalisations were unvaccinated?
Likely to be an announcement to Commons tomorrow afternoon with briefing at 5pm tomorrow. NOT CONFIRMED
Will be absolutely laughable if they even think about it. What planet are these people on?
It's completely mental, today Pfizer announce that three doses gives a high level of neutralising protection against Omicron, our booster programme is mostly Pfizer and yet the idiots in charge are desperately looking for a dead cat to distract the nation so we'll end up with completely unnecessary restrictions with no end date because if this is the new normal (COVID being endemic and all that) then these NPIs also become the new normal.
I think the current news makes new restrictions less likely not more likely. A bit like the leaking of Hancock's video. Which is possibly why it was leaked.
This has shot to pieces any moral authority the PM had for new restrictions. I think even if he was planning new restrictions, those now are hopefully stillborn because he knows now he can't do that.
Hope so at least.
I don't think so, Boris likes a big gesture and plan B is a big gesture that will capture the front pages for a few days. It will make precisely zero difference to COVID, one only needs to look at continental Europe where they have got all of the plan B restrictions plus a lot more yet face a worse winter than we do. The only reason to implement plan B is to grab headlines and make it look like they are doing something.
I'm coming to the conclusion that vaxports are pretty pointless now. If they had introduced them 3 months ago (when I was advocating for them on here) they would have done good work: driving up vax uptake. Now? This late in the day? Meh
The other big Plan B measure - Work From Home - will do a lot of economic damage to city centres (at Xmas!) and barely delay Omicron
The focus of the government should instead be on surging the booster campaign to warp speed, and simultaneously preparing the NHS for, potentially, a lot of cases over a fairly short period of time - from now til end Jan?
However I agree with you that they will probably go with Plan B, just because. And I fear that will be a slip road to Lockdown
With vaccine passports what you get is 2-3m into the vaccine funnel at the expense of 8-10m into the natural immunity funnel. The latter is preferable.
But yes, we are heading inexorably to lockdown 4 and this time I have no hope of ever leaving it because there's nothing to save the day. Let the unvaccinated fools die and be done with it.
Must say there is a terrible sense of inevitability about where we are headed. Again.
I'm very low about it all to be honest.
I'm not - and thats despite losing one of last week's planned piss-ups to the pox. Off to that London at the weekend for another gig and more beer. Unless or until they actually lock us down why be down? Wearing a mask is not enough of an imposition to mean you can't go out and do stuff
For all those supporting BoJo - what success has he delivered over the last 2 years?
I am not supporting him, but he got us out of the EU, got a trade deal that protected our sovereignty more than anyone said was possible, and got us a vaccine program earlier than anyone else in Europe
The one that ended the United Kingdom as a trading block and forces GB and NI companies to have export licences to sell things to each other?
If that's protecting the sovereignty of the UK I'd hate to see what not ptotecting it looks like.
Theresa May's backstop.
Infinitely worse.
Perhaps, but isn't relevant to the argument @Aslan was promoting. He said that the current trade deal - which dissolved the UK trading area - "protected our sovereignty". I now need an export license to sell products in my own country. How has that protected our sovereignty to do things like not need an export license to trade inside our own country...
I don't need you to come back in with alternative takes on external sovereignty - you have one perspective on that, I have another. But the ending of the UK as a trading nation is indisputable - we are now split in two with GB as one trading zone and NI as another trading zone. Usually deals that protect a country's sovereignty doesn't split a chunk off it.
It did protect our sovereignty because we had Article 16 so could override it. The ending is not indisputable, we'll see what the situation is post-Article 16.
There are plenty of countries that have had chunks split off, where its convenient to do so, its far from unprecedented.
On that logic while in the EU our sovereignty was protected because we could always leave.
Either in the EU we were sovereign because we could leave and there is no compromise of sovereignty over NI because we can invoke A16; or in the EU we were not sovereign and we are not sovereign now because there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI.
You are a logical debater. Which is it; it can't be both.
We were always technically sovereign, we could only exercise that sovereignty by invoking Article 50 so we rightly did when people wanted to exercise that sovereignty.
Same deal with Article 16 - and I think it should be invoked too.
So as it stands we are not sovereign because we haven't exercised it. Is that right?
If memory serves, you've been trying variants (so to speak) of this line for a couple of years now, and I'm sorry, but I think it's a stupid argument. If we our sovereignty within the EU is only present because we have the option to leave it, then we clearly aren't sovereign while we're in it, and the fact that we assented (implicitly) to that reality is irrelevant.
He who [has to] break[s] a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.
Apology accepted. Although your point is wrong. We were always sovereign whether we decided to exercise it or not. Of course we made compromises but did so as a sovereign nation.
But that is not the point. If we were not sovereign within the EU because we hadn't "proved" it by leaving, then the NI deal means we are not sovereign because as of this moment we haven't exercised A16. It can't be both.
If you think we weren't sovereign while in the EU and aren't sovereign now because the NI deal means that there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI that is fair enough. But you can't argue for one and not the other.
I'm not sure I've followed the detail exactly, but I would argue that:
- We were not sovereign within the EU (at least not "properly") - We still aren't, for the reason you mention - However, the current issues are a direct result of having been in the EU until recently, in particular the mess that was Article 50, and being bound by the ridiculous prevarication by the EU during the negotiations - Also, clearly the situation has been improved substantially by leaving the EU, and there is hope that it will improve further - Therefore, the limits to our current sovereignty are a) acceptable in the short term, b) an improvement, and c) not material - Also also, I don't actually care about Northern Ireland
For all those supporting BoJo - what success has he delivered over the last 2 years?
I am not supporting him, but he got us out of the EU, got a trade deal that protected our sovereignty more than anyone said was possible, and got us a vaccine program earlier than anyone else in Europe
The one that ended the United Kingdom as a trading block and forces GB and NI companies to have export licences to sell things to each other?
If that's protecting the sovereignty of the UK I'd hate to see what not ptotecting it looks like.
Theresa May's backstop.
Infinitely worse.
Perhaps, but isn't relevant to the argument @Aslan was promoting. He said that the current trade deal - which dissolved the UK trading area - "protected our sovereignty". I now need an export license to sell products in my own country. How has that protected our sovereignty to do things like not need an export license to trade inside our own country...
I don't need you to come back in with alternative takes on external sovereignty - you have one perspective on that, I have another. But the ending of the UK as a trading nation is indisputable - we are now split in two with GB as one trading zone and NI as another trading zone. Usually deals that protect a country's sovereignty doesn't split a chunk off it.
It did protect our sovereignty because we had Article 16 so could override it. The ending is not indisputable, we'll see what the situation is post-Article 16.
There are plenty of countries that have had chunks split off, where its convenient to do so, its far from unprecedented.
On that logic while in the EU our sovereignty was protected because we could always leave.
Either in the EU we were sovereign because we could leave and there is no compromise of sovereignty over NI because we can invoke A16; or in the EU we were not sovereign and we are not sovereign now because there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI.
You are a logical debater. Which is it; it can't be both.
We were always technically sovereign, we could only exercise that sovereignty by invoking Article 50 so we rightly did when people wanted to exercise that sovereignty.
Same deal with Article 16 - and I think it should be invoked too.
So as it stands we are not sovereign because we haven't exercised it. Is that right?
No of course not. We were always sovereign.
We have put our sovereignty into abeyance until we invoke the Article. Its still there, like a break glass, but until we want to do so we're simply not exercising it.
So if you want to exercise your sovereignty you can invoke the Article. If you don't and are OK with abeyance, then no need to do so.
Ah ok so our sovereignty is "in abeyance" (a state of temporary disuse or suspension). So our sovereignty has been suspended. But you said that the NI deal protected our sovereignty, not that it was in abeyance. And if protected means we could exercise it at any time thereby becoming sovereign but have not done so yet then that was precisely our situation while in the EU.
So which is it.
Both.
Just as in the EU we had our sovereignty (because we have Article 50/16) but it is in abeyance until we exercise the relevant Article.
Its not precisely the situation while in the EU, because the abeyance only applies to an tiny fraction (NI) and not the whole country.
At least you accept that the NI deal does not protect our sovereignty and our sovereignty is currently in abeyance ie suspended.
What are you talking about. Abeyance is protected.
On topic, the worst thing from this polling is this.
Three in ten say they are less likely to follow Covid rules as a result (29%).
This rises to a third of Labour voters (33%) and those aged 18-34 (33%) who say the same.
Over half say they are just as likely to follow the rules (54%)
Whatever Boris Johnson announces tonight will be ignored by large parts of the country making us less secure.
He needs to go and be replaced by someone with the credibility and authority to launch you new Covid-19 measures.
Except it wouldn't matter if Jesus were to descend from heaven to promote any new Covid measures. First of all, the country, or a large enough fraction of it at any rate, has had enough of Covid measures and will happily ignore them if they think they can get away with it. And secondly, there's probably nothing short of a full lockdown that will do anything to seriously impede the latest version of this bloody virus, it's questionable as to whether or not even that will work, and neither the economy nor wider society can sustain an annual cycle of hokey cokey house arrest for the next thousand years.
The Government can plausibly get away with yet more masks (useless) and WFH (not useful enough,) and after that it is out of options. Reinstating large scale business support and putting about five or six million people back on furlough until various roadmap steps between April and July, let alone shutting all the schools again for the Winter, is a non-starter. And if declining to go to those lengths means, to put it bluntly, tent hospitals and doctors having to decide which Covid patient gets a ventilator and which one gets a big shot of morphine, then that's what's going to end up happening. After all, selectively abandoning non-Covid patients to perish through lack of care capacity is already a reality in the NHS. Why should selectively abandoning Covid patients to perish as well seem so unimaginable?
Basically, if we are fortunate and this latest wave of the disease is moderate then we can all breathe a sigh of relief, and if we aren't and it's bad then there are no workable strategies left for avoiding a massacre. Draconian restrictions are over. Finished.
I'm not sure it's as "mild" as we all hope
Benedict Barclay @BarclayBenedict · 2m Replying to @BarclayBenedict The total number of people in hospital with Covid is 4,252, which is very sharply up on 2,550 last week.
Gauteng has fallen from 72% of cases to 59%, which shows that cases are now rising faster in other provinces.
The report from a couple of days ago was that 76% of the admissions testing positive with Covid were incidental infections i.e. the patient was not being admitted with Covid.
On topic, the worst thing from this polling is this.
Three in ten say they are less likely to follow Covid rules as a result (29%).
This rises to a third of Labour voters (33%) and those aged 18-34 (33%) who say the same.
Over half say they are just as likely to follow the rules (54%)
Whatever Boris Johnson announces tonight will be ignored by large parts of the country making us less secure.
He needs to go and be replaced by someone with the credibility and authority to launch you new Covid-19 measures.
Except it wouldn't matter if Jesus were to descend from heaven to promote any new Covid measures. First of all, the country, or a large enough fraction of it at any rate, has had enough of Covid measures and will happily ignore them if they think they can get away with it. And secondly, there's probably nothing short of a full lockdown that will do anything to seriously impede the latest version of this bloody virus, it's questionable as to whether or not even that will work, and neither the economy nor wider society can sustain an annual cycle of hokey cokey house arrest for the next thousand years.
The Government can plausibly get away with yet more masks (useless) and WFH (not useful enough,) and after that it is out of options. Reinstating large scale business support and putting about five or six million people back on furlough until various roadmap steps between April and July, let alone shutting all the schools again for the Winter, is a non-starter. And if declining to go to those lengths means, to put it bluntly, tent hospitals and doctors having to decide which Covid patient gets a ventilator and which one gets a big shot of morphine, then that's what's going to end up happening. After all, selectively abandoning non-Covid patients to perish through lack of care capacity is already a reality in the NHS. Why should selectively abandoning Covid patients to perish as well seem so unimaginable?
Basically, if we are fortunate and this latest wave of the disease is moderate then we can all breathe a sigh of relief, and if we aren't and it's bad then there are no workable strategies left for avoiding a massacre. Draconian restrictions are over. Finished.
I'm not sure it's as "mild" as we all hope
Benedict Barclay @BarclayBenedict · 2m Replying to @BarclayBenedict The total number of people in hospital with Covid is 4,252, which is very sharply up on 2,550 last week.
Gauteng has fallen from 72% of cases to 59%, which shows that cases are now rising faster in other provinces.
At the same time South Africa is not comparable to the UK, our vaccination rate is higher, 25% of people in SA have got HIV and therefore deficient immune systems and our level of natural immunity is also higher.
Sadly it looks like the decision has been made without actually waiting for any evidence and now because Boris has to change the national agenda we're heading towards another lockdown. The Tory party has to get rid of Boris.
Fans attending sports events including Premier League matches this weekend are expected to be required to have vaccine passports or proof of a negative test as part of new government rules to tackle the Covid pandemic.
The Premier League was in talks with Whitehall officials on Wednesday seeking clarification on the requirements of complying with the government’s plan B, due to be announced to deal with the spread of the Omicron variant.
Glad I went to see Spurs on Sunday, I expect getting into the stadium will now take 2-3h of queuing and checking vaccine status with arguments and fights breaking out.
It'll be interesting to see if they accept the blue cards issued at vaccination rather than an "app" on a phone. I've been surveyed twice so far this season (once at Arsenal and once at Leicester), and on both occasions the blue card was fine.
I still object to them asking, but so long as they aren't insisting on me downloading something on to my phone, then I'm not too worried. But there is bound to be trouble if they actually stop people from entering without proof of being vaccinated.
You can order a paper document from the NHS Hospitals - more official than the card but not linked to the matrix
Whilst I object to Vaxports on principle, they exist and I can't do the things I want to do without them. So I just show the QR code on the app. Why faff with paper documents?
Because the government has tried 3 times to expropriate my health data and I don’t trust them not to try again. Why make it easy for them?
Which is why I am against them in principle. But they exist. And when I go out doormen are insisting I show a QR code or I'm not getting in. When I do get in, knowing that everyone inside is double jabbed gives a little reassurance.
Johnson is such a piece of work. Can anyone with a straight face say they've ever known a more repellent Prime Minister?
I feel sorry for Allegra Stratten. She shouldn't have had anything to do with the ghastly man but she not the first to have been attracted by power
Theresa May. Gordon Brown. Tony Blair.
All far more repellent.
None of them as dangerous as him, nor Thatcher and Major either.
Blair invaded Iraq, sought to be able to imprison people without trials, and abolished the ancient protection of Double Jeopardy. Brown trashed the economy as Chancellor, and slinked off and signed the Lisbon Treaty as PM. May tore the nation apart and tried to sign our sovereignty away with the backstop.
You have to wonder whether we could see cabinet resignations here. If you want out and you want to make a point to win some favours with the public, there’s worse options surely?
For all those supporting BoJo - what success has he delivered over the last 2 years?
I am not supporting him, but he got us out of the EU, got a trade deal that protected our sovereignty more than anyone said was possible, and got us a vaccine program earlier than anyone else in Europe
The one that ended the United Kingdom as a trading block and forces GB and NI companies to have export licences to sell things to each other?
If that's protecting the sovereignty of the UK I'd hate to see what not ptotecting it looks like.
Theresa May's backstop.
Infinitely worse.
Perhaps, but isn't relevant to the argument @Aslan was promoting. He said that the current trade deal - which dissolved the UK trading area - "protected our sovereignty". I now need an export license to sell products in my own country. How has that protected our sovereignty to do things like not need an export license to trade inside our own country...
I don't need you to come back in with alternative takes on external sovereignty - you have one perspective on that, I have another. But the ending of the UK as a trading nation is indisputable - we are now split in two with GB as one trading zone and NI as another trading zone. Usually deals that protect a country's sovereignty doesn't split a chunk off it.
It did protect our sovereignty because we had Article 16 so could override it. The ending is not indisputable, we'll see what the situation is post-Article 16.
There are plenty of countries that have had chunks split off, where its convenient to do so, its far from unprecedented.
On that logic while in the EU our sovereignty was protected because we could always leave.
Either in the EU we were sovereign because we could leave and there is no compromise of sovereignty over NI because we can invoke A16; or in the EU we were not sovereign and we are not sovereign now because there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI.
You are a logical debater. Which is it; it can't be both.
We were always technically sovereign, we could only exercise that sovereignty by invoking Article 50 so we rightly did when people wanted to exercise that sovereignty.
Same deal with Article 16 - and I think it should be invoked too.
So as it stands we are not sovereign because we haven't exercised it. Is that right?
No of course not. We were always sovereign.
We have put our sovereignty into abeyance until we invoke the Article. Its still there, like a break glass, but until we want to do so we're simply not exercising it.
So if you want to exercise your sovereignty you can invoke the Article. If you don't and are OK with abeyance, then no need to do so.
Ah ok so our sovereignty is "in abeyance" (a state of temporary disuse or suspension). So our sovereignty has been suspended. But you said that the NI deal protected our sovereignty, not that it was in abeyance. And if protected means we could exercise it at any time thereby becoming sovereign but have not done so yet then that was precisely our situation while in the EU.
So which is it.
Both.
Just as in the EU we had our sovereignty (because we have Article 50/16) but it is in abeyance until we exercise the relevant Article.
Its not precisely the situation while in the EU, because the abeyance only applies to an tiny fraction (NI) and not the whole country.
At least you accept that the NI deal does not protect our sovereignty and our sovereignty is currently in abeyance ie suspended.
What are you talking about. Abeyance is protected.
Abeyance = suspended = an absence of.
Something can still be protected if its suspended.
If you have something valuable you want to protect and put it into storage instead of using it, then its both protected and its use is suspended.
Likely to be an announcement to Commons tomorrow afternoon with briefing at 5pm tomorrow. NOT CONFIRMED
Will be absolutely laughable if they even think about it. What planet are these people on?
It's completely mental, today Pfizer announce that three doses gives a high level of neutralising protection against Omicron, our booster programme is mostly Pfizer and yet the idiots in charge are desperately looking for a dead cat to distract the nation so we'll end up with completely unnecessary restrictions with no end date because if this is the new normal (COVID being endemic and all that) then these NPIs also become the new normal.
I think the current news makes new restrictions less likely not more likely. A bit like the leaking of Hancock's video. Which is possibly why it was leaked.
This has shot to pieces any moral authority the PM had for new restrictions. I think even if he was planning new restrictions, those now are hopefully stillborn because he knows now he can't do that.
Hope so at least.
I don't think so, Boris likes a big gesture and plan B is a big gesture that will capture the front pages for a few days. It will make precisely zero difference to COVID, one only needs to look at continental Europe where they have got all of the plan B restrictions plus a lot more yet face a worse winter than we do. The only reason to implement plan B is to grab headlines and make it look like they are doing something.
I'm coming to the conclusion that vaxports are pretty pointless now. If they had introduced them 3 months ago (when I was advocating for them on here) they would have done good work: driving up vax uptake. Now? This late in the day? Meh
The other big Plan B measure - Work From Home - will do a lot of economic damage to city centres (at Xmas!) and barely delay Omicron
The focus of the government should instead be on surging the booster campaign to warp speed, and simultaneously preparing the NHS for, potentially, a lot of cases over a fairly short period of time - from now til end Jan?
However I agree with you that they will probably go with Plan B, just because. And I fear that will be a slip road to Lockdown
With vaccine passports what you get is 2-3m into the vaccine funnel at the expense of 8-10m into the natural immunity funnel. The latter is preferable.
But yes, we are heading inexorably to lockdown 4 and this time I have no hope of ever leaving it because there's nothing to save the day. Let the unvaccinated fools die and be done with it.
If, God forbid, there is a fourth lockdown then it can't possibly go on forever. We will eventually run out of money, society will collapse, and most of us will perish in the post-apocalyptic horror.
Johnson is such a piece of work. Can anyone with a straight face say they've ever known a more repellent Prime Minister?
I feel sorry for Allegra Stratten. She shouldn't have had anything to do with the ghastly man but she not the first to have been attracted by power
Theresa May. Gordon Brown. Tony Blair.
All far more repellent.
None of them as dangerous as him, nor Thatcher and Major either.
Blair invaded Iraq, sought to be able to imprison people without trials, and abolished the ancient protection of Double Jeopardy. Brown trashed the economy as Chancellor, and slinked off and signed the Lisbon Treaty as PM. May tore the nation apart and tried to sign our sovereignty away with the backstop.
All far more dangerous.
Boris is the worst Prime Minister in my lifetime by a very wide margin.
For all those supporting BoJo - what success has he delivered over the last 2 years?
I am not supporting him, but he got us out of the EU, got a trade deal that protected our sovereignty more than anyone said was possible, and got us a vaccine program earlier than anyone else in Europe
The one that ended the United Kingdom as a trading block and forces GB and NI companies to have export licences to sell things to each other?
If that's protecting the sovereignty of the UK I'd hate to see what not ptotecting it looks like.
Theresa May's backstop.
Infinitely worse.
Perhaps, but isn't relevant to the argument @Aslan was promoting. He said that the current trade deal - which dissolved the UK trading area - "protected our sovereignty". I now need an export license to sell products in my own country. How has that protected our sovereignty to do things like not need an export license to trade inside our own country...
I don't need you to come back in with alternative takes on external sovereignty - you have one perspective on that, I have another. But the ending of the UK as a trading nation is indisputable - we are now split in two with GB as one trading zone and NI as another trading zone. Usually deals that protect a country's sovereignty doesn't split a chunk off it.
It did protect our sovereignty because we had Article 16 so could override it. The ending is not indisputable, we'll see what the situation is post-Article 16.
There are plenty of countries that have had chunks split off, where its convenient to do so, its far from unprecedented.
On that logic while in the EU our sovereignty was protected because we could always leave.
Either in the EU we were sovereign because we could leave and there is no compromise of sovereignty over NI because we can invoke A16; or in the EU we were not sovereign and we are not sovereign now because there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI.
You are a logical debater. Which is it; it can't be both.
We were always technically sovereign, we could only exercise that sovereignty by invoking Article 50 so we rightly did when people wanted to exercise that sovereignty.
Same deal with Article 16 - and I think it should be invoked too.
So as it stands we are not sovereign because we haven't exercised it. Is that right?
If memory serves, you've been trying variants (so to speak) of this line for a couple of years now, and I'm sorry, but I think it's a stupid argument. If we our sovereignty within the EU is only present because we have the option to leave it, then we clearly aren't sovereign while we're in it, and the fact that we assented (implicitly) to that reality is irrelevant.
He who [has to] break[s] a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.
Apology accepted. Although your point is wrong. We were always sovereign whether we decided to exercise it or not. Of course we made compromises but did so as a sovereign nation.
But that is not the point. If we were not sovereign within the EU because we hadn't "proved" it by leaving, then the NI deal means we are not sovereign because as of this moment we haven't exercised A16. It can't be both.
If you think we weren't sovereign while in the EU and aren't sovereign now because the NI deal means that there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI that is fair enough. But you can't argue for one and not the other.
I'm not sure I've followed the detail exactly, but I would argue that:
- We were not sovereign within the EU (at least not "properly") - We still aren't, for the reason you mention - However, the current issues are a direct result of having been in the EU until recently, in particular the mess that was Article 50, and being bound by the ridiculous prevarication by the EU during the negotiations - Also, clearly the situation has been improved substantially by leaving the EU, and there is hope that it will improve further - Therefore, the limits to our current sovereignty are a) acceptable in the short term, b) an improvement, and c) not material - Also also, I don't actually care about Northern Ireland
Thank you. Yes if you believe we weren't sovereign then and aren't sovereign now that is entirely consistent. Philip, for example, believes the exact opposite. We were sovereign then and are sovereign now.
You seem also to be another person who doesn't care about Northern Ireland which is strange because it is part of the UK. Assuming you voted for the UK to leave the EU then it seems that you should be happy with NI being a de facto part of the EU. Good riddance in your book, I imagine.
On topic, the worst thing from this polling is this.
Three in ten say they are less likely to follow Covid rules as a result (29%).
This rises to a third of Labour voters (33%) and those aged 18-34 (33%) who say the same.
Over half say they are just as likely to follow the rules (54%)
Whatever Boris Johnson announces tonight will be ignored by large parts of the country making us less secure.
He needs to go and be replaced by someone with the credibility and authority to launch you new Covid-19 measures.
Except it wouldn't matter if Jesus were to descend from heaven to promote any new Covid measures. First of all, the country, or a large enough fraction of it at any rate, has had enough of Covid measures and will happily ignore them if they think they can get away with it. And secondly, there's probably nothing short of a full lockdown that will do anything to seriously impede the latest version of this bloody virus, it's questionable as to whether or not even that will work, and neither the economy nor wider society can sustain an annual cycle of hokey cokey house arrest for the next thousand years.
The Government can plausibly get away with yet more masks (useless) and WFH (not useful enough,) and after that it is out of options. Reinstating large scale business support and putting about five or six million people back on furlough until various roadmap steps between April and July, let alone shutting all the schools again for the Winter, is a non-starter. And if declining to go to those lengths means, to put it bluntly, tent hospitals and doctors having to decide which Covid patient gets a ventilator and which one gets a big shot of morphine, then that's what's going to end up happening. After all, selectively abandoning non-Covid patients to perish through lack of care capacity is already a reality in the NHS. Why should selectively abandoning Covid patients to perish as well seem so unimaginable?
Basically, if we are fortunate and this latest wave of the disease is moderate then we can all breathe a sigh of relief, and if we aren't and it's bad then there are no workable strategies left for avoiding a massacre. Draconian restrictions are over. Finished.
I'm not sure it's as "mild" as we all hope
Benedict Barclay @BarclayBenedict · 2m Replying to @BarclayBenedict The total number of people in hospital with Covid is 4,252, which is very sharply up on 2,550 last week.
Gauteng has fallen from 72% of cases to 59%, which shows that cases are now rising faster in other provinces.
At the same time South Africa is not comparable to the UK, our vaccination rate is higher, 25% of people in SA have got HIV and therefore deficient immune systems and our level of natural immunity is also higher.
Sadly it looks like the decision has been made without actually waiting for any evidence and now because Boris has to change the national agenda we're heading towards another lockdown. The Tory party has to get rid of Boris.
I was going to say similar but you beat me to it. Only 25% vaccinated in SA.
Johnson is such a piece of work. Can anyone with a straight face say they've ever known a more repellent Prime Minister?
I feel sorry for Allegra Stratten. She shouldn't have had anything to do with the ghastly man but she not the first to have been attracted by power
Theresa May. Gordon Brown. Tony Blair.
All far more repellent.
None of them as dangerous as him, nor Thatcher and Major either.
Blair invaded Iraq, sought to be able to imprison people without trials, and abolished the ancient protection of Double Jeopardy. Brown trashed the economy as Chancellor, and slinked off and signed the Lisbon Treaty as PM. May tore the nation apart and tried to sign our sovereignty away with the backstop.
All far more dangerous.
None of them threatened to unravel our entire democratic framework, and crucially with no concept of moral, personal or social consequences. He's uniquely unsuited to being PM.
You have to wonder whether we could see cabinet resignations here. If you want out and you want to make a point to win some favours with the public, there’s worse options surely?
I'd say the time to do it was over the Owen Patterson thing. That was a far more obvious thing to resign over.
Likely to be an announcement to Commons tomorrow afternoon with briefing at 5pm tomorrow. NOT CONFIRMED
Will be absolutely laughable if they even think about it. What planet are these people on?
It's completely mental, today Pfizer announce that three doses gives a high level of neutralising protection against Omicron, our booster programme is mostly Pfizer and yet the idiots in charge are desperately looking for a dead cat to distract the nation so we'll end up with completely unnecessary restrictions with no end date because if this is the new normal (COVID being endemic and all that) then these NPIs also become the new normal.
I think the current news makes new restrictions less likely not more likely. A bit like the leaking of Hancock's video. Which is possibly why it was leaked.
This has shot to pieces any moral authority the PM had for new restrictions. I think even if he was planning new restrictions, those now are hopefully stillborn because he knows now he can't do that.
Hope so at least.
I don't think so, Boris likes a big gesture and plan B is a big gesture that will capture the front pages for a few days. It will make precisely zero difference to COVID, one only needs to look at continental Europe where they have got all of the plan B restrictions plus a lot more yet face a worse winter than we do. The only reason to implement plan B is to grab headlines and make it look like they are doing something.
I'm coming to the conclusion that vaxports are pretty pointless now. If they had introduced them 3 months ago (when I was advocating for them on here) they would have done good work: driving up vax uptake. Now? This late in the day? Meh
The other big Plan B measure - Work From Home - will do a lot of economic damage to city centres (at Xmas!) and barely delay Omicron
The focus of the government should instead be on surging the booster campaign to warp speed, and simultaneously preparing the NHS for, potentially, a lot of cases over a fairly short period of time - from now til end Jan?
However I agree with you that they will probably go with Plan B, just because. And I fear that will be a slip road to Lockdown
With vaccine passports what you get is 2-3m into the vaccine funnel at the expense of 8-10m into the natural immunity funnel. The latter is preferable.
But yes, we are heading inexorably to lockdown 4 and this time I have no hope of ever leaving it because there's nothing to save the day. Let the unvaccinated fools die and be done with it.
Must say there is a terrible sense of inevitability about where we are headed. Again.
I'm very low about it all to be honest.
I'm not - and thats despite losing one of last week's planned piss-ups to the pox. Off to that London at the weekend for another gig and more beer. Unless or until they actually lock us down why be down? Wearing a mask is not enough of an imposition to mean you can't go out and do stuff
I think the paraphernalia of the PM standing up at the lectern announcing restrictions of freedom is enough to upset/depress people. Because they feel they are not in control. As indeed we are not. WFH tonight, why not full lockdown tomorrow? There is no future point, now that we have vaccines, that we can look forward to and say - it would end there.
On topic, the worst thing from this polling is this.
Three in ten say they are less likely to follow Covid rules as a result (29%).
This rises to a third of Labour voters (33%) and those aged 18-34 (33%) who say the same.
Over half say they are just as likely to follow the rules (54%)
Whatever Boris Johnson announces tonight will be ignored by large parts of the country making us less secure.
He needs to go and be replaced by someone with the credibility and authority to launch you new Covid-19 measures.
Except it wouldn't matter if Jesus were to descend from heaven to promote any new Covid measures. First of all, the country, or a large enough fraction of it at any rate, has had enough of Covid measures and will happily ignore them if they think they can get away with it. And secondly, there's probably nothing short of a full lockdown that will do anything to seriously impede the latest version of this bloody virus, it's questionable as to whether or not even that will work, and neither the economy nor wider society can sustain an annual cycle of hokey cokey house arrest for the next thousand years.
The Government can plausibly get away with yet more masks (useless) and WFH (not useful enough,) and after that it is out of options. Reinstating large scale business support and putting about five or six million people back on furlough until various roadmap steps between April and July, let alone shutting all the schools again for the Winter, is a non-starter. And if declining to go to those lengths means, to put it bluntly, tent hospitals and doctors having to decide which Covid patient gets a ventilator and which one gets a big shot of morphine, then that's what's going to end up happening. After all, selectively abandoning non-Covid patients to perish through lack of care capacity is already a reality in the NHS. Why should selectively abandoning Covid patients to perish as well seem so unimaginable?
Basically, if we are fortunate and this latest wave of the disease is moderate then we can all breathe a sigh of relief, and if we aren't and it's bad then there are no workable strategies left for avoiding a massacre. Draconian restrictions are over. Finished.
I'm not sure it's as "mild" as we all hope
Benedict Barclay @BarclayBenedict · 2m Replying to @BarclayBenedict The total number of people in hospital with Covid is 4,252, which is very sharply up on 2,550 last week.
Gauteng has fallen from 72% of cases to 59%, which shows that cases are now rising faster in other provinces.
At the same time South Africa is not comparable to the UK, our vaccination rate is higher, 25% of people in SA have got HIV and therefore deficient immune systems and our level of natural immunity is also higher.
Sadly it looks like the decision has been made without actually waiting for any evidence and now because Boris has to change the national agenda we're heading towards another lockdown. The Tory party has to get rid of Boris.
Sure, but SA - Gauteng in particular - is also much much younger than the UK (or other developed countries). So you would expect much milder outcomes
There are too many variables to truly know what is going on. What little we do know is that Omicron infects a lot of people, and puts quite a few in hospital, unfortunately including kids
In about ten days or so we will see the first death rates?
I confess the picture for me is quite depressing, this evening. Another lockdown seems inevitable, as it is the only tool in the UK government's box, alongside vaccines, and they will feel obliged to do *something*. Ditto every other country on earth
The government turning out to be a caravan of fools is not helping my mood
On topic, the worst thing from this polling is this.
Three in ten say they are less likely to follow Covid rules as a result (29%).
This rises to a third of Labour voters (33%) and those aged 18-34 (33%) who say the same.
Over half say they are just as likely to follow the rules (54%)
Whatever Boris Johnson announces tonight will be ignored by large parts of the country making us less secure.
He needs to go and be replaced by someone with the credibility and authority to launch you new Covid-19 measures.
Except it wouldn't matter if Jesus were to descend from heaven to promote any new Covid measures. First of all, the country, or a large enough fraction of it at any rate, has had enough of Covid measures and will happily ignore them if they think they can get away with it. And secondly, there's probably nothing short of a full lockdown that will do anything to seriously impede the latest version of this bloody virus, it's questionable as to whether or not even that will work, and neither the economy nor wider society can sustain an annual cycle of hokey cokey house arrest for the next thousand years.
The Government can plausibly get away with yet more masks (useless) and WFH (not useful enough,) and after that it is out of options. Reinstating large scale business support and putting about five or six million people back on furlough until various roadmap steps between April and July, let alone shutting all the schools again for the Winter, is a non-starter. And if declining to go to those lengths means, to put it bluntly, tent hospitals and doctors having to decide which Covid patient gets a ventilator and which one gets a big shot of morphine, then that's what's going to end up happening. After all, selectively abandoning non-Covid patients to perish through lack of care capacity is already a reality in the NHS. Why should selectively abandoning Covid patients to perish as well seem so unimaginable?
Basically, if we are fortunate and this latest wave of the disease is moderate then we can all breathe a sigh of relief, and if we aren't and it's bad then there are no workable strategies left for avoiding a massacre. Draconian restrictions are over. Finished.
I'm not sure it's as "mild" as we all hope
Benedict Barclay @BarclayBenedict · 2m Replying to @BarclayBenedict The total number of people in hospital with Covid is 4,252, which is very sharply up on 2,550 last week.
Gauteng has fallen from 72% of cases to 59%, which shows that cases are now rising faster in other provinces.
At the same time South Africa is not comparable to the UK, our vaccination rate is higher, 25% of people in SA have got HIV and therefore deficient immune systems and our level of natural immunity is also higher.
Sadly it looks like the decision has been made without actually waiting for any evidence and now because Boris has to change the national agenda we're heading towards another lockdown. The Tory party has to get rid of Boris.
I was going to say similar but you beat me to it. Only 25% vaccinated in SA.
Indeed, the UK is at 32% triple dosed with more than 90% of over 70s done.
For all those supporting BoJo - what success has he delivered over the last 2 years?
I am not supporting him, but he got us out of the EU, got a trade deal that protected our sovereignty more than anyone said was possible, and got us a vaccine program earlier than anyone else in Europe
The one that ended the United Kingdom as a trading block and forces GB and NI companies to have export licences to sell things to each other?
If that's protecting the sovereignty of the UK I'd hate to see what not ptotecting it looks like.
Theresa May's backstop.
Infinitely worse.
Perhaps, but isn't relevant to the argument @Aslan was promoting. He said that the current trade deal - which dissolved the UK trading area - "protected our sovereignty". I now need an export license to sell products in my own country. How has that protected our sovereignty to do things like not need an export license to trade inside our own country...
I don't need you to come back in with alternative takes on external sovereignty - you have one perspective on that, I have another. But the ending of the UK as a trading nation is indisputable - we are now split in two with GB as one trading zone and NI as another trading zone. Usually deals that protect a country's sovereignty doesn't split a chunk off it.
It did protect our sovereignty because we had Article 16 so could override it. The ending is not indisputable, we'll see what the situation is post-Article 16.
There are plenty of countries that have had chunks split off, where its convenient to do so, its far from unprecedented.
On that logic while in the EU our sovereignty was protected because we could always leave.
Either in the EU we were sovereign because we could leave and there is no compromise of sovereignty over NI because we can invoke A16; or in the EU we were not sovereign and we are not sovereign now because there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI.
You are a logical debater. Which is it; it can't be both.
We were always technically sovereign, we could only exercise that sovereignty by invoking Article 50 so we rightly did when people wanted to exercise that sovereignty.
Same deal with Article 16 - and I think it should be invoked too.
So as it stands we are not sovereign because we haven't exercised it. Is that right?
If memory serves, you've been trying variants (so to speak) of this line for a couple of years now, and I'm sorry, but I think it's a stupid argument. If we our sovereignty within the EU is only present because we have the option to leave it, then we clearly aren't sovereign while we're in it, and the fact that we assented (implicitly) to that reality is irrelevant.
He who [has to] break[s] a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.
Apology accepted. Although your point is wrong. We were always sovereign whether we decided to exercise it or not. Of course we made compromises but did so as a sovereign nation.
But that is not the point. If we were not sovereign within the EU because we hadn't "proved" it by leaving, then the NI deal means we are not sovereign because as of this moment we haven't exercised A16. It can't be both.
If you think we weren't sovereign while in the EU and aren't sovereign now because the NI deal means that there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI that is fair enough. But you can't argue for one and not the other.
We were always sovereign for both. The question is if you wanted to exercise your sovereignty or not.
The English and Welsh voted to exercise their sovereignty, hence invoking Article 50. The NI did not, hence the special arrangements.
Now if the NI wish to exercise theirs, then A16 is the right answer for them, just as it was for the UK as a whole. For the same reasons. Using the same logic.
No inconsistencies.
Excellent. So we were sovereign while in the EU: tick. And we are sovereign with this NI deal: tick.
So why all the fuss about leaving the EU to reclaim our sovereignty.
Because we wanted to exercise our sovereignty.
Not just have it in abeyance.
But the precise same situation, having our sovereignty in abeyance now is fine by you.
Feel rather sorry for Stratton. This will haunt her, as she tearfully says, for the rest of her life
This gives the lie to any idea this is some kind of internal Spectator/ITV plot. She is married to James Forsyth, the Spec's political ed, he won't be happy seeing his wife in bits, nor will their kids be overjoyed at the sight of Mum weeping on telly
Bollocks, she's crying because she got caught, no sympathy.
No, she isn't. She has been painted as a heartless witch in front of an entire country...
By the PM himself during PMQs, the hypocritical fncker.
Watching the video I thought the laughter was a lot more out of embarrassment than amusement, FWIW.
Exactly. Laughing and saying "what's the answer?" Damned if I know. What IS the answer?
Delete the recording of you laughing is first answer.
Do we know who had control over the recording?
No, then. But you instinctively blamed today's scapegoat anyway.
You have to wonder whether we could see cabinet resignations here. If you want out and you want to make a point to win some favours with the public, there’s worse options surely?
I think that would be rather irresponsible. More likely is the cabinet tell Boris that he has to go. There's a very tiny chance that's what they're doing now.
Three years to run, a good majority. No time to start undermining your own party, which is of course precisely why everyone's so annoyed in that doing exactly that seems to be Boris' modus operandi.
Johnson is such a piece of work. Can anyone with a straight face say they've ever known a more repellent Prime Minister?
I feel sorry for Allegra Stratten. She shouldn't have had anything to do with the ghastly man but she not the first to have been attracted by power
Theresa May. Gordon Brown. Tony Blair.
All far more repellent.
None of them as dangerous as him, nor Thatcher and Major either.
Blair invaded Iraq, sought to be able to imprison people without trials, and abolished the ancient protection of Double Jeopardy. Brown trashed the economy as Chancellor, and slinked off and signed the Lisbon Treaty as PM. May tore the nation apart and tried to sign our sovereignty away with the backstop.
All far more dangerous.
Boris is the worst Prime Minister in my lifetime by a very wide margin.
That narrows down your age to within a couple of hundred years.
On topic, the worst thing from this polling is this.
Three in ten say they are less likely to follow Covid rules as a result (29%).
This rises to a third of Labour voters (33%) and those aged 18-34 (33%) who say the same.
Over half say they are just as likely to follow the rules (54%)
Whatever Boris Johnson announces tonight will be ignored by large parts of the country making us less secure.
He needs to go and be replaced by someone with the credibility and authority to launch you new Covid-19 measures.
Except it wouldn't matter if Jesus were to descend from heaven to promote any new Covid measures. First of all, the country, or a large enough fraction of it at any rate, has had enough of Covid measures and will happily ignore them if they think they can get away with it. And secondly, there's probably nothing short of a full lockdown that will do anything to seriously impede the latest version of this bloody virus, it's questionable as to whether or not even that will work, and neither the economy nor wider society can sustain an annual cycle of hokey cokey house arrest for the next thousand years.
The Government can plausibly get away with yet more masks (useless) and WFH (not useful enough,) and after that it is out of options. Reinstating large scale business support and putting about five or six million people back on furlough until various roadmap steps between April and July, let alone shutting all the schools again for the Winter, is a non-starter. And if declining to go to those lengths means, to put it bluntly, tent hospitals and doctors having to decide which Covid patient gets a ventilator and which one gets a big shot of morphine, then that's what's going to end up happening. After all, selectively abandoning non-Covid patients to perish through lack of care capacity is already a reality in the NHS. Why should selectively abandoning Covid patients to perish as well seem so unimaginable?
Basically, if we are fortunate and this latest wave of the disease is moderate then we can all breathe a sigh of relief, and if we aren't and it's bad then there are no workable strategies left for avoiding a massacre. Draconian restrictions are over. Finished.
I'm not sure it's as "mild" as we all hope
Benedict Barclay @BarclayBenedict · 2m Replying to @BarclayBenedict The total number of people in hospital with Covid is 4,252, which is very sharply up on 2,550 last week.
Gauteng has fallen from 72% of cases to 59%, which shows that cases are now rising faster in other provinces.
At the same time South Africa is not comparable to the UK, our vaccination rate is higher, 25% of people in SA have got HIV and therefore deficient immune systems and our level of natural immunity is also higher.
Sadly it looks like the decision has been made without actually waiting for any evidence and now because Boris has to change the national agenda we're heading towards another lockdown. The Tory party has to get rid of Boris.
Sure, but SA - Gauteng in particular - is also much much younger than the UK (or other developed countries). So you would expect much milder outcomes
There are too many variables to truly know what is going on. What little we do know is that Omicron infects a lot of people, and puts quite a few in hospital, unfortunately including kids
In about ten days or so we will see the first death rates?
I confess the picture for me is quite depressing, this evening. Another lockdown seems inevitable, as it is the only tool in the UK government's box, alongside vaccines, and they will feel obliged to do *something*. Ditto every other country on earth
The government turning out to be a caravan of fools is not helping my mood
Not necessarily, the spread of HIV positive people is among younger and middle aged people rather than the old so that again makes it less like the UK.
On topic, the worst thing from this polling is this.
Three in ten say they are less likely to follow Covid rules as a result (29%).
This rises to a third of Labour voters (33%) and those aged 18-34 (33%) who say the same.
Over half say they are just as likely to follow the rules (54%)
Whatever Boris Johnson announces tonight will be ignored by large parts of the country making us less secure.
He needs to go and be replaced by someone with the credibility and authority to launch you new Covid-19 measures.
Except it wouldn't matter if Jesus were to descend from heaven to promote any new Covid measures. First of all, the country, or a large enough fraction of it at any rate, has had enough of Covid measures and will happily ignore them if they think they can get away with it. And secondly, there's probably nothing short of a full lockdown that will do anything to seriously impede the latest version of this bloody virus, it's questionable as to whether or not even that will work, and neither the economy nor wider society can sustain an annual cycle of hokey cokey house arrest for the next thousand years.
The Government can plausibly get away with yet more masks (useless) and WFH (not useful enough,) and after that it is out of options. Reinstating large scale business support and putting about five or six million people back on furlough until various roadmap steps between April and July, let alone shutting all the schools again for the Winter, is a non-starter. And if declining to go to those lengths means, to put it bluntly, tent hospitals and doctors having to decide which Covid patient gets a ventilator and which one gets a big shot of morphine, then that's what's going to end up happening. After all, selectively abandoning non-Covid patients to perish through lack of care capacity is already a reality in the NHS. Why should selectively abandoning Covid patients to perish as well seem so unimaginable?
Basically, if we are fortunate and this latest wave of the disease is moderate then we can all breathe a sigh of relief, and if we aren't and it's bad then there are no workable strategies left for avoiding a massacre. Draconian restrictions are over. Finished.
I'm not sure it's as "mild" as we all hope
Benedict Barclay @BarclayBenedict · 2m Replying to @BarclayBenedict The total number of people in hospital with Covid is 4,252, which is very sharply up on 2,550 last week.
Gauteng has fallen from 72% of cases to 59%, which shows that cases are now rising faster in other provinces.
The report from a couple of days ago was that 76% of the admissions testing positive with Covid were incidental infections i.e. the patient was not being admitted with Covid.
I believe that turned out to be wishful thinking bolleaux
On topic, the worst thing from this polling is this.
Three in ten say they are less likely to follow Covid rules as a result (29%).
This rises to a third of Labour voters (33%) and those aged 18-34 (33%) who say the same.
Over half say they are just as likely to follow the rules (54%)
Whatever Boris Johnson announces tonight will be ignored by large parts of the country making us less secure.
He needs to go and be replaced by someone with the credibility and authority to launch you new Covid-19 measures.
Except it wouldn't matter if Jesus were to descend from heaven to promote any new Covid measures. First of all, the country, or a large enough fraction of it at any rate, has had enough of Covid measures and will happily ignore them if they think they can get away with it. And secondly, there's probably nothing short of a full lockdown that will do anything to seriously impede the latest version of this bloody virus, it's questionable as to whether or not even that will work, and neither the economy nor wider society can sustain an annual cycle of hokey cokey house arrest for the next thousand years.
The Government can plausibly get away with yet more masks (useless) and WFH (not useful enough,) and after that it is out of options. Reinstating large scale business support and putting about five or six million people back on furlough until various roadmap steps between April and July, let alone shutting all the schools again for the Winter, is a non-starter. And if declining to go to those lengths means, to put it bluntly, tent hospitals and doctors having to decide which Covid patient gets a ventilator and which one gets a big shot of morphine, then that's what's going to end up happening. After all, selectively abandoning non-Covid patients to perish through lack of care capacity is already a reality in the NHS. Why should selectively abandoning Covid patients to perish as well seem so unimaginable?
Basically, if we are fortunate and this latest wave of the disease is moderate then we can all breathe a sigh of relief, and if we aren't and it's bad then there are no workable strategies left for avoiding a massacre. Draconian restrictions are over. Finished.
I'm not sure it's as "mild" as we all hope
Benedict Barclay @BarclayBenedict · 2m Replying to @BarclayBenedict The total number of people in hospital with Covid is 4,252, which is very sharply up on 2,550 last week.
Gauteng has fallen from 72% of cases to 59%, which shows that cases are now rising faster in other provinces.
The report from a couple of days ago was that 76% of the admissions testing positive with Covid were incidental infections i.e. the patient was not being admitted with Covid.
*Exactly*
This is not 4,252 people in hospital seriously ill with Covid, it's 3,000 people with broken legs, and various other ailments, who happen to have Covid.
And 1,000 people who have been hospitalised because of Covid.
Now, this still isn't great, because hospitals have to separate Covid and non-Covid patients, to avoid additional infections, but it is massively better than 4,000 people being hospitalised due to Covid.
You have to wonder whether we could see cabinet resignations here. If you want out and you want to make a point to win some favours with the public, there’s worse options surely?
"I have decided to resign as Secretary of State for Fucking About a Bit". I was at both the party in question but also at the previous No10 party in late November. I cannot in good conscience continue in office knowing that I have been part of a conspiracy of silence".
Comments
If however they were just wargaming and a christmas party was something thrown at her our of the blue then it is better verging on nothing to see here.
Now that's going to be a harder sell when people turn around and say "but why should we listen to you?"
This video leak has neutered Boris. Just as the HandsFaceArse video did for Hancock and freed Javid up to do differently.
If it turns out that she herself never attended any of these events in No10 & has simply been unlucky enough to be filmed making a joke about how indefensible they are & no one else takes any consequences then yes, she will absolutely have been hard done by though.
I was told an external contractor did the recordings.
The other big Plan B measure - Work From Home - will do a lot of economic damage to city centres (at Xmas!) and barely delay Omicron
The focus of the government should instead be on surging the booster campaign to warp speed, and simultaneously preparing the NHS for, potentially, a lot of cases over a fairly short period of time - from now til end Jan?
However I agree with you that they will probably go with Plan B, just because. And I fear that will be a slip road to Lockdown
Without being too harsh, I would expect someone potentially the public face of a government to be a little bit more, what is the word, serious in their approach to this role. The occasion seemed like kids having fun, playing at the office.
Whilst you would have to be cold not to feel some sympathy. It's hard to be too sympathetic towards someone who failed at the very skill they were employed to provide.
Yet the real villain of the story is not her. She is yet another casualty left in Boris' wake...
So which is it.
https://twitter.com/Torcuil/status/1468626322033369090
Desperate to grasp any fig leaf, no matter how flimsy.
I laugh inappropriately and make stupid jokes all the time, as I am sure most people do, but there is no money to be made leaking a video of me at work.
Boris to hold press conference at 6.00pm tonight
He who [has to] break[s] a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.
But yes, we are heading inexorably to lockdown 4 and this time I have no hope of ever leaving it because there's nothing to save the day. Let the unvaccinated fools die and be done with it.
Just as in the EU we had our sovereignty (because we have Article 50/16) but it is in abeyance until we exercise the relevant Article.
Its not precisely the situation while in the EU, because the abeyance only applies to an tiny fraction (NI) and not the whole country.
The party during lockdown and Johnson's knowledge of what was going on remains the question. The media however have their scalp and are happy to move on.
Johnson lives another day...but... let's just hope Ant and Dec don't skewer Johnson tonight... again
Breaking
?
The rise returns, but is not yet explosive
https://twitter.com/Gab_H_R/status/1468627753616523264?s=20
Tho how reliable their testing is, who knows
Hence, if you can't get R below 1 and keep it there, trouble.
Data from Pfizer-BioNTech indicates three doses is as good against the new mutation as two doses is against the original virus"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/12/08/three-doses-pfizer-vaccine-effective-against-omicron-covid-variant/
But that is not the point. If we were not sovereign within the EU because we hadn't "proved" it by leaving, then the NI deal means we are not sovereign because as of this moment we haven't exercised A16. It can't be both.
If you think we weren't sovereign while in the EU and aren't sovereign now because the NI deal means that there is no free movement of goods between GB and NI that is fair enough. But you can't argue for one and not the other.
Also, hello David! Welcome back!
"Ed (questioner in
@itvnews
video) Oldfield's CV looks v thin and short to be Head of Broadcast at No.10 with no broadcast/journalistic experience. He was apparently a transcriber in CCHQ previously but his father has donated tens of thousands to party so mystery solved I guess..."
I'm very low about it all to be honest.
The Government can plausibly get away with yet more masks (useless) and WFH (not useful enough,) and after that it is out of options. Reinstating large scale business support and putting about five or six million people back on furlough until various roadmap steps between April and July, let alone shutting all the schools again for the Winter, is a non-starter. And if declining to go to those lengths means, to put it bluntly, tent hospitals and doctors having to decide which Covid patient gets a ventilator and which one gets a big shot of morphine, then that's what's going to end up happening. After all, selectively abandoning non-Covid patients to perish through lack of care capacity is already a reality in the NHS. Why should selectively abandoning Covid patients to perish as well seem so unimaginable?
Basically, if we are fortunate and this latest wave of the disease is moderate then we can all breathe a sigh of relief, and if we aren't and it's bad then there are no workable strategies left for avoiding a massacre. Draconian restrictions are over. Finished.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/dec/08/how-allegra-strattons-struggles-kept-press-briefing-project-off-air
The English and Welsh voted to exercise their sovereignty, hence invoking Article 50.
The NI did not, hence the special arrangements.
Now if the NI wish to exercise theirs, then A16 is the right answer for them, just as it was for the UK as a whole. For the same reasons. Using the same logic.
No inconsistencies.
Space
As was reported yesterday, Michelle was among twelve businesses who last week were invited by the UK Government to set up market stalls in Downing street to showcase the best of British produce....Within hours, Michelle’s Facebook page received a series of appalling threats and abuse in a series of private messages from people who saw her trade visit not as a useful attempt to boost Scottish produce but as a kind of treacherous endorsement for Mr Johnson’s leadership.
....Yet it is an indisputable fact that the majority of prominent Scottish nationalists in recent years have sought to frame their pursuit of independence in an overtly nationalist manner – as a constant struggle between insiders and outsiders, between them and us, between the oppressed and the oppressors.
https://medium.com/@malinieddie23/dont-be-a-dumpling-f9e2dc940847
I feel sorry for Allegra Stratten. She shouldn't have had anything to do with the ghastly man but she not the first to have been attracted by power
Benedict Barclay
@BarclayBenedict
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Replying to
@BarclayBenedict
The total number of people in hospital with Covid is 4,252, which is very sharply up on 2,550 last week.
Gauteng has fallen from 72% of cases to 59%, which shows that cases are now rising faster in other provinces.
But we are talking about the UK Government here. Because that is the entity that is conducting these deals. So we were sovereign while in the EU: tick. And we are sovereign with this NI deal: tick.
So why all the fuss about leaving the EU to reclaim our sovereignty.
Gordon Brown.
Tony Blair.
All far more repellent.
Not just have it in abeyance.
Our snap poll from today also concluded:
Working from home where possible
Support - 74%
Oppose - 10%
Vaccine-only certification for nightclubs and large gatherings
Support - 69%
Oppose - 16%
https://twitter.com/SavantaComRes/status/1468629331647905804?s=20
- We were not sovereign within the EU (at least not "properly")
- We still aren't, for the reason you mention
- However, the current issues are a direct result of having been in the EU until recently, in particular the mess that was Article 50, and being bound by the ridiculous prevarication by the EU during the negotiations
- Also, clearly the situation has been improved substantially by leaving the EU, and there is hope that it will improve further
- Therefore, the limits to our current sovereignty are a) acceptable in the short term, b) an improvement, and c) not material
- Also also, I don't actually care about Northern Ireland
Sadly it looks like the decision has been made without actually waiting for any evidence and now because Boris has to change the national agenda we're heading towards another lockdown. The Tory party has to get rid of Boris.
Brown trashed the economy as Chancellor, and slinked off and signed the Lisbon Treaty as PM.
May tore the nation apart and tried to sign our sovereignty away with the backstop.
All far more dangerous.
If you have something valuable you want to protect and put it into storage instead of using it, then its both protected and its use is suspended.
You seem also to be another person who doesn't care about Northern Ireland which is strange because it is part of the UK. Assuming you voted for the UK to leave the EU then it seems that you should be happy with NI being a de facto part of the EU. Good riddance in your book, I imagine.
You Brexiters are very funny.
There are too many variables to truly know what is going on. What little we do know is that Omicron infects a lot of people, and puts quite a few in hospital, unfortunately including kids
In about ten days or so we will see the first death rates?
I confess the picture for me is quite depressing, this evening. Another lockdown seems inevitable, as it is the only tool in the UK government's box, alongside vaccines, and they will feel obliged to do *something*. Ditto every other country on earth
The government turning out to be a caravan of fools is not helping my mood
Three years to run, a good majority. No time to start undermining your own party, which is of course precisely why everyone's so annoyed in that doing exactly that seems to be Boris' modus operandi.
This is not 4,252 people in hospital seriously ill with Covid, it's 3,000 people with broken legs, and various other ailments, who happen to have Covid.
And 1,000 people who have been hospitalised because of Covid.
Now, this still isn't great, because hospitals have to separate Covid and non-Covid patients, to avoid additional infections, but it is massively better than 4,000 people being hospitalised due to Covid.