It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
Children have been abused in this country for centuries on an industrial scale largely because those in authority have considered the kids suffering the abuse not worth caring about. They look for any excuse not to investigate - and in Rochdale and other places they used the excuse of not wanting to upset community relations. Wicked men exploited this. But they could only use that excuse because it had a foundation in reality. Labour councils were complicit in that. I wish it wasn't true, but it is.
It’s funny how we were happy to stick rainbows on everything and clap for carers. Didn’t hear any complaints about that from the anti woke brigade
Actually, I did. I didn't mind one clap but then as @Dura_Ace said (who I rarely agree with) it all became a bit Juche. I have also criticised OTT poppy fascism.
Woke is a function of disproportionately and dogma, not absolutes.
We should be good at that in this country. We are not Americans.
As someone on the other side of this debate generally to you @Casino_Royale I rather like that post. Agree 100%.
Thanks. To turn it on its head the equivalent criticism of what I've just posted would be: so you hate the NHS and its workers then? Or, you hate those that fought and died for us in the war?
Woke is a function of volume, frequency, hectoring and dogma - not absolutes.
Woke is a diversionary tactic employed by politicians who have no answers to the real problems that people face. It didn't save Trump in America, it didn't save Morrison in Australia and it didn't propel Le Pen to the French Presidency. It won't save the Tories if that's what they focus on either.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Huh? You're blaming the Pakistani-heritage rape gangs on "woke"?
I think he's blaming the Police failure to investigate it on 'woke'. It's been mentioned in multiple public inquiries that local social services and Police were worried about racial 'sensitivities' and so didn't investigate cases as thoroughly as they should for fear of being seen as racist. That's not even addressing the evidence that came out that suggested these men saw white girls as 'trash', which is pretty racist in itself.
What is interesting in this whole debate is that it's showing quite a few on the left are finding it hard to understand that race did play a part in the Police's / social services' actions, even when it has been confirmed by multiple inquiries. If you believe the inquiries are flawed and wrong, then fair enough but these are not Nick Griffin types saying race played a factor, it's official inquiries set up to investigate what happened.
Blaming woke is easier than taking responsibility. The police have never taken child abuse seriously and have always let abused kids down. But in the case of Rochdale and other towns they could only blame woke or political correctness, as it used to be known, because such attitudes were prevalent within local authorities.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Giving women rights has nothing to do with rapists committing rape.
I feel it may be unlikely for the majority of Hunt supporters to go Tugend. There seems little point in hopping from eliminated to soon-to-be-eliminated. I suspect his exit will mainly benefit Sunak, with a few going to Penny.
It also feels likely that when Bravermann exits she will endorse Badenoch rather than Truss.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Huh? You're blaming the Pakistani-heritage rape gangs on "woke"?
I think he's blaming the Police failure to investigate it on 'woke'. It's been mentioned in multiple public inquiries that local social services and Police were worried about racial 'sensitivities' and so didn't investigate cases as thoroughly as they should for fear of being seen as racist. That's not even addressing the evidence that came out that suggested these men saw white girls as 'trash', which is pretty racist in itself.
What is interesting in this whole debate is that it's showing quite a few on the left are finding it hard to understand that race did play a part in the Police's / social services' actions, even when it has been confirmed by multiple inquiries. If you believe the inquiries are flawed and wrong, then fair enough but these are not Nick Griffin types saying race played a factor, it's official inquiries set up to investigate what happened.
The police have covered up the authorities complicity in scandals like this forever. Its hardly new or woke or whatever. The starter for 10 was that women would make complaints to the police. Male coppers with stereotyped views of these women dismissed them out of hand. Giving the green light to the various gangs in the various towns to get on with it.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
I suggest you read Professor Alexis Jay's report. There was absolutely a wilful coverup of child abuse by Pakistani men in Rotherham and we've seen the same in other towns in the UK, now including telford. You, Nige, are part of the problem if you deny this is true.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
What was striking is how flat 'culture war' issues were, how removed so much of the SW1 conversation which dominates politics and a fair bit of the media really is, despite fact it's often done in name of 'real people'. Any clip where a candidate talked about those issues tanked.
It's really interesting, because I am told day after day that I am out of touch with the voters.
Perhaps I am more in touch than many of the "anti-woke" people on here
Also striking was in this Brexit voting group how uninterested they were in the subject now: "it's done." Again, they saw it as a distraction from cost of living and didn't want to hear politicians talking about it any more.
Also again, world away from the contest.
All of the candidates are going about this contest the wrong way.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Giving women rights has nothing to do with rapists committing rape.
I cannot but be slightly surprised at the thought that woke dates back to the suffragettes. In which case it is so vague a term that to be opposed to wokery is to be opposed to at least 94 years' worth of social change. Practically JRM-level anachronism.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Nonsense - it's possible to hate rape and deplore any "insensitivities" (racial or anything else) that led to it not being investigated properly, while simultaneously welcoming modern female emancipation. The two things are quite different, and only seem similar to you because of your apparent general dislike of modern trends.
Misty is making some valid points. But on reflection I think it is possible to embrace gender equality whilst also rejecting 'woke'. Each societal change should really be considered on its own merits. You can support equality for women whilst also rejecting special treatment for certain minorities. Basically, people really need to think for themselves and not just follow the zeitgeist.
...but we should rejoin a Single Market with FOM as soon as we are allowed. We might rejoin the EU in your lifetime, but not in mine. By that time the damage to our nation will be enormous. For that, Boris Johnson deserves to spend the rest of his days and beyond to the end of time in a high rise flat in Nechells.
Seems like a clear contravention of UK GDPR Article 5(1)(b) — ‘collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes…’ https://twitter.com/avmikhailova/status/1547552793996759041
But why don't we implement no planning regs for mobile phone companies so they can build phone masts more easily?
Mobile phone masts already have an easier time than other items.
For instance my wife is dealing with an application at the moment. The mast is a bit of a problem (not surprising it's in a national park, very visible), but the changes required to support the mast are a far bigger problem....
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
I suggest you read Professor Alexis Jay's report. There was absolutely a wilful coverup of child abuse by Pakistani men in Rotherham and we've seen the same in other towns in the UK, now including telford. You, Nige, are part of the problem if you deny this is true.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
So you haven't read the report but then accuse others of having selective reading to suit your agenda? Pull the other one.
What was striking is how flat 'culture war' issues were, how removed so much of the SW1 conversation which dominates politics and a fair bit of the media really is, despite fact it's often done in name of 'real people'. Any clip where a candidate talked about those issues tanked.
It's really interesting, because I am told day after day that I am out of touch with the voters.
Perhaps I am more in touch than many of the "anti-woke" people on here
Without making a specific comment for one side or another in the 'woke' debate, I can't help comparing your comments with those of OGH in the years leading up to the Brexit referendum when, using the monthly 'priorities' polling, he regularly repeated the mantra that the public did not give 'a monkey's' about the issue of EU membership.
I did spend my time trying to point out that people can walk and chew gum at the same time and that just because the EU was not high on their list of immediate priorities it didn't mean that people didn't care about it or would not take it into account i their voting patterns.
It is very dangerous to simply ignore issues because you personally are not othered by them and because they do not rank at the top of people's priorities. All the more so if people feel that neither side/party can or will do much about the big issues in which case they may well look at the 'minor' issues to inform their voting.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Huh? You're blaming the Pakistani-heritage rape gangs on "woke"?
I think he's blaming the Police failure to investigate it on 'woke'. It's been mentioned in multiple public inquiries that local social services and Police were worried about racial 'sensitivities' and so didn't investigate cases as thoroughly as they should for fear of being seen as racist. That's not even addressing the evidence that came out that suggested these men saw white girls as 'trash', which is pretty racist in itself.
What is interesting in this whole debate is that it's showing quite a few on the left are finding it hard to understand that race did play a part in the Police's / social services' actions, even when it has been confirmed by multiple inquiries. If you believe the inquiries are flawed and wrong, then fair enough but these are not Nick Griffin types saying race played a factor, it's official inquiries set up to investigate what happened.
The police have covered up the authorities complicity in scandals like this forever. Its hardly new or woke or whatever. The starter for 10 was that women would make complaints to the police. Male coppers with stereotyped views of these women dismissed them out of hand. Giving the green light to the various gangs in the various towns to get on with it.
Here is what I think/guess happened. Police officers and local authorities were incompetent. Some police officers blamed their lack of action not on their incompetence (no never!) but on their bureaucracy (it's the paperwork init), and the best bureaucracy of all to blame is their requirement not to be racist. "Oh, can't investigate that mate, he is one o' them dark geezers, better have another cuppa. snigger snigger"
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Giving women rights has nothing to do with rapists committing rape.
How come then whilst things have got better for some women, such as yourself, they have got immeasurably worse for others?
That isn't giving women rights. Your proclamations of emancipation are built on a mountain of misery, ignored by you, because the same people who gave you those rights protected the crimes of certain communities against women.
What was striking is how flat 'culture war' issues were, how removed so much of the SW1 conversation which dominates politics and a fair bit of the media really is, despite fact it's often done in name of 'real people'. Any clip where a candidate talked about those issues tanked.
It's really interesting, because I am told day after day that I am out of touch with the voters.
Perhaps I am more in touch than many of the "anti-woke" people on here
Without making a specific comment for one side or another in the 'woke' debate, I can't help comparing your comments with those of OGH in the years leading up to the Brexit referendum when, using the monthly 'priorities' polling, he regularly repeated the mantra that the public did not give 'a monkey's' about the issue of EU membership.
I did spend my time trying to point out that people can walk and chew gum at the same time and that just because the EU was not high on their list of immediate priorities it didn't mean that people didn't care about it or would not take it into account i their voting patterns.
It is very dangerous to simply ignore issues because you personally are not othered by them and because they do not rank at the top of people's priorities. All the more so if people feel that neither side/party can or will do much about the big issues in which case they may well look at the 'minor' issues to inform their voting.
But why don't we implement no planning regs for mobile phone companies so they can build phone masts more easily?
Mobile phone masts already have an easier time than other items.
For instance my wife is dealing with an application at the moment. The mast is a bit of a problem (not surprising it's in a national park, very visible), but the changes required to support the mast are a far bigger problem....
Easier but not easy. They keep getting rejected for "causing cancer".
They should be able to be built on Network Rail land for the railways.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Huh? You're blaming the Pakistani-heritage rape gangs on "woke"?
I think he's blaming the Police failure to investigate it on 'woke'. It's been mentioned in multiple public inquiries that local social services and Police were worried about racial 'sensitivities' and so didn't investigate cases as thoroughly as they should for fear of being seen as racist. That's not even addressing the evidence that came out that suggested these men saw white girls as 'trash', which is pretty racist in itself.
What is interesting in this whole debate is that it's showing quite a few on the left are finding it hard to understand that race did play a part in the Police's / social services' actions, even when it has been confirmed by multiple inquiries. If you believe the inquiries are flawed and wrong, then fair enough but these are not Nick Griffin types saying race played a factor, it's official inquiries set up to investigate what happened.
The police have covered up the authorities complicity in scandals like this forever. Its hardly new or woke or whatever. The starter for 10 was that women would make complaints to the police. Male coppers with stereotyped views of these women dismissed them out of hand. Giving the green light to the various gangs in the various towns to get on with it.
Ok, that seems like a "oh, this has been happening for centuries so it's not an new issue" reply. So, simple question. Do you believe that fear of provoking racial sensitivities played a part in the Police's inaction when it came to cases like Rotherham, Telford etc. Yes or no?
I feel like the markets are currently testing the ability of the ECB to keep bond spreads down, currently Italian yields are up 21bp while German bonds are up just 6pb, increasing the spread by 15bp and the level was already deemed uncomfortable for the ECB.
It feels like while this is brewing in the UK and there is political turmoil all across Europe people are taking their eye off the ball wrt the economies of Europe. Whoever wins needs to have a laser like focus on the economy, cutting waste, speeding up delivery and making the government far more efficient so we can deliver more services per capita at the same or less spent per capita and then allow for the tax burden to fall naturally and for private growth to outstrip state growth. This is also true all across Europe.
Not going to happen in the UK. Raising efficiency requires investment first (IT doesn't come cheap) and that investment just isn't available in Public sector budgets.
Indeed a good, non-paywalled article in the FT on this earlier. The relative performance of UK vs EU rivals over the last 15 years doesn't look great:
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Huh? You're blaming the Pakistani-heritage rape gangs on "woke"?
I think he's blaming the Police failure to investigate it on 'woke'. It's been mentioned in multiple public inquiries that local social services and Police were worried about racial 'sensitivities' and so didn't investigate cases as thoroughly as they should for fear of being seen as racist. That's not even addressing the evidence that came out that suggested these men saw white girls as 'trash', which is pretty racist in itself.
What is interesting in this whole debate is that it's showing quite a few on the left are finding it hard to understand that race did play a part in the Police's / social services' actions, even when it has been confirmed by multiple inquiries. If you believe the inquiries are flawed and wrong, then fair enough but these are not Nick Griffin types saying race played a factor, it's official inquiries set up to investigate what happened.
The police have covered up the authorities complicity in scandals like this forever. Its hardly new or woke or whatever. The starter for 10 was that women would make complaints to the police. Male coppers with stereotyped views of these women dismissed them out of hand. Giving the green light to the various gangs in the various towns to get on with it.
Here is what I think/guess happened. Police officers and local authorities were incompetent. Some police officers blamed their lack of action not on their incompetence (no never!) but on their bureaucracy (it's the paperwork init), and the best bureaucracy of all to blame is their requirement not to be racist. "Oh, can't investigate that mate, he is one o' them dark geezers, better have another cuppa. snigger snigger"
This is a useful insight into your mind, but not into the problem of grooming gangs.
But why don't we implement no planning regs for mobile phone companies so they can build phone masts more easily?
Mobile phone masts already have an easier time than other items.
For instance my wife is dealing with an application at the moment. The mast is a bit of a problem (not surprising it's in a national park, very visible), but the changes required to support the mast are a far bigger problem....
Easier but not easy. They keep getting rejected for "causing cancer".
They should be able to be built on Network Rail land for the railways.
That's not a planning issue - that's a "the councillors on the planning committee are grade A morons" problem....
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
I suggest you read Professor Alexis Jay's report. There was absolutely a wilful coverup of child abuse by Pakistani men in Rotherham and we've seen the same in other towns in the UK, now including telford. You, Nige, are part of the problem if you deny this is true.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
So you haven't read the report but then accuse others of having selective reading to suit your agenda? Pull the other one.
Why were you so motivated to read it? (You can pretend you did if you like - I cant test you - I haven't read it!).
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
I suggest you read Professor Alexis Jay's report. There was absolutely a wilful coverup of child abuse by Pakistani men in Rotherham and we've seen the same in other towns in the UK, now including telford. You, Nige, are part of the problem if you deny this is true.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You don't have to be an abuser to be part of the problem. If you deny there is an issue in the first place - even where the evidence is right in front of your eyes - you are a denier. And that is part of the problem.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
My "... middle class female 'rights' ..." and "rights" in quotes too??
You tosser. They are rights for every woman and girl from beggars in the streets to the Queen herself. Regardless of who we are we have the right not to be beaten, subjegated, raped or treated as second class.
You just don't want to face the truth. Tell that to the people that 'emancipated' you. The same people who lent on the police to ensure rapists and traffickers ruled the roost in certain towns.
Same people.
Its been great for you. But it has been hell for some.
Bluntly, the child trafficing / rape in the UK is an awful, horrible thing & the fact that it happened (& is presumably still happening, somewhere right now) is a moral stain on this country.
But the idea that the 70s/80s were some garden of eden for young women before all this wokeness came along and ruined everything is ludicrous. The number of historical scandals that have come to light suggests that exploitation of children & young people was absolutely rampant. There’s been a never ending series of awful revelations about children’s homes in the 70s, with people scarred for life from the abuse they received & that’s just the stuff we know about.
It seems impossible to say whether one period was worse than the other, but the idea that the 70s were halcyon days for womanhood is madness.
Sorry I never pretended the 1970s and 1980s were a garden of Eden.
Ms Bev claimed that now is a garden of Eden. My point is that is really is not. It is far from a garden of Eden for many, many women in Britain.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
I suggest you read Professor Alexis Jay's report. There was absolutely a wilful coverup of child abuse by Pakistani men in Rotherham and we've seen the same in other towns in the UK, now including telford. You, Nige, are part of the problem if you deny this is true.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You may find it unlikely that concern over racial sensitivities prevented the prosecution of people who ought to have been prosecuted, but that is not the view of those carrying out these investigations. If you think these investigations came to the wrong conclusions, then you need to say why.
But why don't we implement no planning regs for mobile phone companies so they can build phone masts more easily?
Mobile phone masts already have an easier time than other items.
For instance my wife is dealing with an application at the moment. The mast is a bit of a problem (not surprising it's in a national park, very visible), but the changes required to support the mast are a far bigger problem....
Easier but not easy. They keep getting rejected for "causing cancer".
They should be able to be built on Network Rail land for the railways.
That's not a planning issue - that's a "the councillors on the planning committee are grade A morons" problem....
They shouldn't need to go to a committee, should be auto approved wherever they want to build.
But why don't we implement no planning regs for mobile phone companies so they can build phone masts more easily?
Mobile phone masts already have an easier time than other items.
For instance my wife is dealing with an application at the moment. The mast is a bit of a problem (not surprising it's in a national park, very visible), but the changes required to support the mast are a far bigger problem....
Easier but not easy. They keep getting rejected for "causing cancer".
They should be able to be built on Network Rail land for the railways.
That's not a planning issue - that's a "the councillors on the planning committee are grade A morons" problem....
They shouldn't need to go to a committee, should be auto approved wherever they want to build.
They will only be going to committee because they have to - most people don't want the extra work preparing for committee requires.
But why don't we implement no planning regs for mobile phone companies so they can build phone masts more easily?
Mobile phone masts already have an easier time than other items.
For instance my wife is dealing with an application at the moment. The mast is a bit of a problem (not surprising it's in a national park, very visible), but the changes required to support the mast are a far bigger problem....
Easier but not easy. They keep getting rejected for "causing cancer".
They should be able to be built on Network Rail land for the railways.
That's not a planning issue - that's a "the councillors on the planning committee are grade A morons" problem....
They shouldn't need to go to a committee, should be auto approved wherever they want to build.
They will only be going to committee because they have to - most people don't want the extra work preparing for committee requires.
Yes my point is we should change the law. If you want to build a mast you go and build one, end of story.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
I think @MISTY's point is around the blind eye part. The Telford enquiry - as did many of the others - stated that social services and the Police did not want to investigate too closely because of the racial 'sensitivities i.e. it was mainly Pakistani / Bangladeshi heritage men who were raping the girls. Because of that sensitivity, there were far more victims than there should have been.
Look how many wanted to deny the original Rotherham stories because Nick Griffin mentioned them. Were those deniers right or wrong?
"Racial sensitivities" has absolutely nothing to do with sexual equality.
In fact, some "racially sensitive" individuals want to roll back the clock on sexual equality.
Ideally Suella goes out and we can see how the realistically viable candidates fare during a debate.
I have to confess I feel sorry for Liz. I shouldn’t, I know. But she’s spent years planning for this moment; it’s dictated much of her effort at Trade and then at the Foreign Office.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
I suggest you read Professor Alexis Jay's report. There was absolutely a wilful coverup of child abuse by Pakistani men in Rotherham and we've seen the same in other towns in the UK, now including telford. You, Nige, are part of the problem if you deny this is true.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
So you haven't read the report but then accuse others of having selective reading to suit your agenda? Pull the other one.
Why were you so motivated to read it? (You can pretend you did if you like - I cant test you - I haven't read it!).
Why not? It was news of the day and very interesting, though pretty stomach churning in parts. Someone on here linked it iirc and I had nothing to do.
I feel like the markets are currently testing the ability of the ECB to keep bond spreads down, currently Italian yields are up 21bp while German bonds are up just 6pb, increasing the spread by 15bp and the level was already deemed uncomfortable for the ECB.
It feels like while this is brewing in the UK and there is political turmoil all across Europe people are taking their eye off the ball wrt the economies of Europe. Whoever wins needs to have a laser like focus on the economy, cutting waste, speeding up delivery and making the government far more efficient so we can deliver more services per capita at the same or less spent per capita and then allow for the tax burden to fall naturally and for private growth to outstrip state growth. This is also true all across Europe.
Not going to happen in the UK. Raising efficiency requires investment first (IT doesn't come cheap) and that investment just isn't available in Public sector budgets.
Indeed a good, non-paywalled article in the FT on this earlier. The relative performance of UK vs EU rivals over the last 15 years doesn't look great:
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Giving women rights has nothing to do with rapists committing rape.
How come then whilst things have got better for some women, such as yourself, they have got immeasurably worse for others?
That isn't giving women rights. Your proclamations of emancipation are built on a mountain of misery, ignored by you, because the same people who gave you those rights protected the crimes against women of certain communities.
I seriously doubt they have got 'immeasurably worse'. Abuse of women - in fact, abuse of all kinds - has been happening forever.
What is happening now is that it is being reported and, finally, taken seriously.
Unless you are living under a rock, you will know someone who has suffered some form of abuse in the last year. You will know someone who has been raped in their lives. Abuse is frighteningly common, and happens amongst families as well.
These grooming groups need to be tackled and the bas*ards put into jail. But if we do that, we need to follow up on all the other abuse that is going on.
On child sexual abuse alone:
"However, research with 2,275 young people aged 11-17 about their experiences of sexual abuse suggests around 1 in 20 children in the UK have been sexually abused." "Concerns around sexual abuse have been identified for over 2,800 children in the UK who are the subject of a child protection plan or on a child protection register." "The vast majority of children who experience sexual abuse were abused by someone they knew."
But why don't we implement no planning regs for mobile phone companies so they can build phone masts more easily?
Mobile phone masts already have an easier time than other items.
For instance my wife is dealing with an application at the moment. The mast is a bit of a problem (not surprising it's in a national park, very visible), but the changes required to support the mast are a far bigger problem....
Easier but not easy. They keep getting rejected for "causing cancer".
They should be able to be built on Network Rail land for the railways.
Hmm, publicly owned body has to provide sites for commercial companies just whenever the latter wish? And if it's not railway related it does still need planning application.
Ideally Suella goes out and we can see how the realistically viable candidates fare during a debate.
I have to confess I feel sorry for Liz. I shouldn’t, I know. But she’s spent years planning for this moment; it’s dictated much of her effort at Trade and then at the Foreign Office.
In other words, she's not been doing her job properly. No sympathy.
But why don't we implement no planning regs for mobile phone companies so they can build phone masts more easily?
Mobile phone masts already have an easier time than other items.
For instance my wife is dealing with an application at the moment. The mast is a bit of a problem (not surprising it's in a national park, very visible), but the changes required to support the mast are a far bigger problem....
Easier but not easy. They keep getting rejected for "causing cancer".
They should be able to be built on Network Rail land for the railways.
Hmm, publicly owned body has to provide sites for commercial companies just whenever the latter wish? And if it's not railway related it does still need planning application.
Network Rail can build GSM-R masts wherever they like. They should be forced to allow operators to put their equipment on those and operators should be able to build trackside infrastructure with no planning needed.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
I suggest you read Professor Alexis Jay's report. There was absolutely a wilful coverup of child abuse by Pakistani men in Rotherham and we've seen the same in other towns in the UK, now including telford. You, Nige, are part of the problem if you deny this is true.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You don't have to be an abuser to be part of the problem. If you deny there is an issue in the first place - even where the evidence is right in front of your eyes - you are a denier. And that is part of the problem.
Try looking at this the other way round rather than throwing these accusations out there against people simply because they take a slightly different view to you.
Do you think that if Nigel accepted every one of your contentions (and I have a lot of sympathy for them in this specific instance) it would make one single iota of difference to the way the police and authorities behaved in the past or the way they will behave in the future? To take it further, do you believe that your postings and those of others like Max on here on this subject will make one single iota of difference in their behaviour going forward? Not least when it seems that even the public enquiries don't seem to have made much of a difference?
If you decide that no, what you are writing and what Nigel might contend will make no difference to the way in which the authorities behaved or will behave in the future then the claim that Nigel - or anyone else on here - is 'part of the problem' is really nothing more than fatuous and rather offensive nonsense.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Huh? You're blaming the Pakistani-heritage rape gangs on "woke"?
I think he's blaming the Police failure to investigate it on 'woke'. It's been mentioned in multiple public inquiries that local social services and Police were worried about racial 'sensitivities' and so didn't investigate cases as thoroughly as they should for fear of being seen as racist. That's not even addressing the evidence that came out that suggested these men saw white girls as 'trash', which is pretty racist in itself.
What is interesting in this whole debate is that it's showing quite a few on the left are finding it hard to understand that race did play a part in the Police's / social services' actions, even when it has been confirmed by multiple inquiries. If you believe the inquiries are flawed and wrong, then fair enough but these are not Nick Griffin types saying race played a factor, it's official inquiries set up to investigate what happened.
The police have covered up the authorities complicity in scandals like this forever. Its hardly new or woke or whatever. The starter for 10 was that women would make complaints to the police. Male coppers with stereotyped views of these women dismissed them out of hand. Giving the green light to the various gangs in the various towns to get on with it.
Here is what I think/guess happened. Police officers and local authorities were incompetent. Some police officers blamed their lack of action not on their incompetence (no never!) but on their bureaucracy (it's the paperwork init), and the best bureaucracy of all to blame is their requirement not to be racist. "Oh, can't investigate that mate, he is one o' them dark geezers, better have another cuppa. snigger snigger"
Sorry do you know how widespread this is? do you know how many girls are affected?
The problems have to be far more endemic than isolated cases of incompetence and laziness. There was a prevailing climate of fear. Investigating these crimes was a career decision for a policeman, and not a good one.
That climate was determined by politicians who made a show of giving middle class women and girls in Britain a much better life. Which I do not deny they did.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
I suggest you read Professor Alexis Jay's report. There was absolutely a wilful coverup of child abuse by Pakistani men in Rotherham and we've seen the same in other towns in the UK, now including telford. You, Nige, are part of the problem if you deny this is true.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You don't have to be an abuser to be part of the problem. If you deny there is an issue in the first place - even where the evidence is right in front of your eyes - you are a denier. And that is part of the problem.
It's the problem in a nutshell. He's so scared of being called a racist if he says there might be a problem that he actively prefers to let the abuse carry on (as long as it's on someone else's doorstep, obviously). It's sickening.
I feel like the markets are currently testing the ability of the ECB to keep bond spreads down, currently Italian yields are up 21bp while German bonds are up just 6pb, increasing the spread by 15bp and the level was already deemed uncomfortable for the ECB.
It feels like while this is brewing in the UK and there is political turmoil all across Europe people are taking their eye off the ball wrt the economies of Europe. Whoever wins needs to have a laser like focus on the economy, cutting waste, speeding up delivery and making the government far more efficient so we can deliver more services per capita at the same or less spent per capita and then allow for the tax burden to fall naturally and for private growth to outstrip state growth. This is also true all across Europe.
Not going to happen in the UK. Raising efficiency requires investment first (IT doesn't come cheap) and that investment just isn't available in Public sector budgets.
Indeed a good, non-paywalled article in the FT on this earlier. The relative performance of UK vs EU rivals over the last 15 years doesn't look great:
I've only half-listened to it while dozing in bed though so can't say it's good, bad, shallow or deep.
Thanks must listen.
I post often on this subject.
The core issues seem to be:
- lack of capital investment by gov - lack of capital investment by firms - skill issues in workforce - vast regional disparity, ie SE v rest. - planning / housing - some of above made worse by over-centralised governance.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
I suggest you read Professor Alexis Jay's report. There was absolutely a wilful coverup of child abuse by Pakistani men in Rotherham and we've seen the same in other towns in the UK, now including telford. You, Nige, are part of the problem if you deny this is true.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You may find it unlikely that concern over racial sensitivities prevented the prosecution of people who ought to have been prosecuted, but that is not the view of those carrying out these investigations. If you think these investigations came to the wrong conclusions, then you need to say why.
I suspect that people who are obsessed by woke (the original discussion point) are using this as a way of saying that any sensitivity towards race by local authorities and police forces is wrong, when in reality it may be less significant than they would like it to be. I am no lefty, but I don't get stirred up by "woke". What is the one thing that the public sector always wail about if they are caught underperforming? "Resources". What I am suggesting is that this matter has been used by the police to cover up their total ineptitude. Rather than police or local authority laziness, they can pretend it was due to lack of resources and "paperwork". Alternatively, perhaps it was a global conspiracy of paedophiles that included Leon Brittan et al. The idea that it was known that there was an abusive paedo ring that was overlooked only because they were Pakistani is ludicrous.
Ideally Suella goes out and we can see how the realistically viable candidates fare during a debate.
I have to confess I feel sorry for Liz. I shouldn’t, I know. But she’s spent years planning for this moment; it’s dictated much of her effort at Trade and then at the Foreign Office.
In other words, she's not been doing her job properly. No sympathy.
I have no sympathy for Truss. The more she is bombing the happier I feel. I feel so confident the right have blown this, Penny beats Sunak in the member vote is becoming nailed on now. 🥳
What destroyed Truss chances at the end of the day is that she is so utterly rubbish. Why have sympathy for that?
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
Parental costs aren't something a school budget covers - it's usually enough to keep staff paid and things ticking over.
With the cost of energy I suspect even that isn't the case this year and most schools will be running deficits while hoping the cost of energy returns to normal levels next year.
(rolls eyes) Yes obviously the school doesn’t pay out for parental costs.
But the country as a whole does & state school budgets come out of government expenditure.
Which is why BR’s “you should do it if it’s economic” doesn’t work for public health - public health issues are only effectively solved when you intervene across the economy, not piecemeal according to personal whim.
Libertarianism & public health don’t make for good bedfellows & never will.
It does, really. People taking responsibility for themselves works.
If you pick up a virus you might feel like crap for a couple of days, then you almost certainly get back to normal afterwards. That does not justify a "public health" emergency or actions now.
Vaccines were "public health" and that's been done. Spending billions now on filtration out of budgets that don't exist is a waste of money, if its economic then use budgets that do exist, but we have bigger fish to fry than filtration for any new billions available to spend.
2-3 days off work, for every worker in the country costs approx 1% of our GDP (assuming GDP is directly proportional to days worked). UK GDP is £2trillion or so, so 1% is ~ £10billion.
Sounds like £1billion / year to get £10billion in output back is a bargain to me - if we can stop 1 covid infection / year per working person we come out ahead 10x over.
(I have no idea if a filtration / ventilation program would actually cost a £billion, I‘m just taking BR’s figure & running with it.)
What utterly ridiculous numbers.
I think rolling out filtration at a thousand per room would cost many billions, not a billion.
And I doubt that it would achieve 2-3 fewer days off per person, since not only does not every infection lead to people being so sick to take a couple of days off, but the measures won't prevent that many infections anyway. Infections would still happen, but just in different places.
There are 9 million school age children in the UK. If we estimate an average class size of 25 then that would be £360mn just to add filtration to all the classrooms without even considering other rooms, IT rooms, school gyms, corridors or anywhere else. Or anywhere that isn't a school. A billion would not go very far at all.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Huh? You're blaming the Pakistani-heritage rape gangs on "woke"?
I think he's blaming the Police failure to investigate it on 'woke'. It's been mentioned in multiple public inquiries that local social services and Police were worried about racial 'sensitivities' and so didn't investigate cases as thoroughly as they should for fear of being seen as racist. That's not even addressing the evidence that came out that suggested these men saw white girls as 'trash', which is pretty racist in itself.
What is interesting in this whole debate is that it's showing quite a few on the left are finding it hard to understand that race did play a part in the Police's / social services' actions, even when it has been confirmed by multiple inquiries. If you believe the inquiries are flawed and wrong, then fair enough but these are not Nick Griffin types saying race played a factor, it's official inquiries set up to investigate what happened.
The police have covered up the authorities complicity in scandals like this forever. Its hardly new or woke or whatever. The starter for 10 was that women would make complaints to the police. Male coppers with stereotyped views of these women dismissed them out of hand. Giving the green light to the various gangs in the various towns to get on with it.
Here is what I think/guess happened. Police officers and local authorities were incompetent. Some police officers blamed their lack of action not on their incompetence (no never!) but on their bureaucracy (it's the paperwork init), and the best bureaucracy of all to blame is their requirement not to be racist. "Oh, can't investigate that mate, he is one o' them dark geezers, better have another cuppa. snigger snigger"
Sorry do you know how widespread this is? do you know how many girls are affected?
The problems have to be far more endemic than isolated cases of incompetence and laziness. There was a prevailing climate of fear. Investigating these crimes was a career decision for a policeman, and not a good one.
That climate was determined by politicians who made a show of giving middle class women and girls in Britain a much better life. Which I do not deny they did.
You are a very sick person who's real motivations are clear for anyone to see.
Ideally Suella goes out and we can see how the realistically viable candidates fare during a debate.
I have to confess I feel sorry for Liz. I shouldn’t, I know. But she’s spent years planning for this moment; it’s dictated much of her effort at Trade and then at the Foreign Office.
I have zero sympathy for her . Nothing worse than a born again Leaver who now feels the need to overcompensate. Which means another 2 years of EU arguments and divisiveness.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
Parental costs aren't something a school budget covers - it's usually enough to keep staff paid and things ticking over.
With the cost of energy I suspect even that isn't the case this year and most schools will be running deficits while hoping the cost of energy returns to normal levels next year.
(rolls eyes) Yes obviously the school doesn’t pay out for parental costs.
But the country as a whole does & state school budgets come out of government expenditure.
Which is why BR’s “you should do it if it’s economic” doesn’t work for public health - public health issues are only effectively solved when you intervene across the economy, not piecemeal according to personal whim.
Libertarianism & public health don’t make for good bedfellows & never will.
It does, really. People taking responsibility for themselves works.
If you pick up a virus you might feel like crap for a couple of days, then you almost certainly get back to normal afterwards. That does not justify a "public health" emergency or actions now.
Vaccines were "public health" and that's been done. Spending billions now on filtration out of budgets that don't exist is a waste of money, if its economic then use budgets that do exist, but we have bigger fish to fry than filtration for any new billions available to spend.
2-3 days off work, for every worker in the country costs approx 1% of our GDP (assuming GDP is directly proportional to days worked). UK GDP is £2trillion or so, so 1% is ~ £10billion.
Sounds like £1billion / year to get £10billion in output back is a bargain to me - if we can stop 1 covid infection / year per working person we come out ahead 10x over.
(I have no idea if a filtration / ventilation program would actually cost a £billion, I‘m just taking BR’s figure & running with it.)
What utterly ridiculous numbers.
I think rolling out filtration at a thousand per room would cost many billions, not a billion.
And I doubt that it would achieve 2-3 fewer days off per person, since not only does not every infection lead to people being so sick to take a couple of days off, but the measures won't prevent that many infections anyway. Infections would still happen, but just in different places.
There are 9 million school age children in the UK. If we estimate an average class size of 25 then that would be £360mn just to add filtration to all the classrooms without even considering other rooms, IT rooms, school gyms, corridors or anywhere else. Or anywhere that isn't a school. A billion would not go very far at all.
We could save money by abandoning all water filtration and sewage treatment. Those would obviously be unnecessary - people can take responsibility for their own water, and the illnesses that are conveyed may well be unlikely to cost more than the savings incurred.
Having said that, in my view the objectionable parts of so-called-woke are the attempts to change language usage to reflect highly contestable political assertions, some of which are false, and in doing so, attempt to force others to comply with both language and dubious premise underneath it.
This is not “politeness” it’s an attempt to veto “unacceptable” thinking.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Huh? You're blaming the Pakistani-heritage rape gangs on "woke"?
I think he's blaming the Police failure to investigate it on 'woke'. It's been mentioned in multiple public inquiries that local social services and Police were worried about racial 'sensitivities' and so didn't investigate cases as thoroughly as they should for fear of being seen as racist. That's not even addressing the evidence that came out that suggested these men saw white girls as 'trash', which is pretty racist in itself.
What is interesting in this whole debate is that it's showing quite a few on the left are finding it hard to understand that race did play a part in the Police's / social services' actions, even when it has been confirmed by multiple inquiries. If you believe the inquiries are flawed and wrong, then fair enough but these are not Nick Griffin types saying race played a factor, it's official inquiries set up to investigate what happened.
The police have covered up the authorities complicity in scandals like this forever. Its hardly new or woke or whatever. The starter for 10 was that women would make complaints to the police. Male coppers with stereotyped views of these women dismissed them out of hand. Giving the green light to the various gangs in the various towns to get on with it.
Failures to investigate child abuse cases properly clearly pre-date the grooming gangs. The police have never done their job effectively and have always considered the types of children and young people most likely to be abused - those in care and from dysfunctional families - of not being worth the bother. But if they were looking for excuses in Rochdale and elsewhere, they were handed them on a plate. That is utterly unforgiveable and Labour party councils were complicit. There's just no getting around it.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
Parental costs aren't something a school budget covers - it's usually enough to keep staff paid and things ticking over.
With the cost of energy I suspect even that isn't the case this year and most schools will be running deficits while hoping the cost of energy returns to normal levels next year.
(rolls eyes) Yes obviously the school doesn’t pay out for parental costs.
But the country as a whole does & state school budgets come out of government expenditure.
Which is why BR’s “you should do it if it’s economic” doesn’t work for public health - public health issues are only effectively solved when you intervene across the economy, not piecemeal according to personal whim.
Libertarianism & public health don’t make for good bedfellows & never will.
It does, really. People taking responsibility for themselves works.
If you pick up a virus you might feel like crap for a couple of days, then you almost certainly get back to normal afterwards. That does not justify a "public health" emergency or actions now.
Vaccines were "public health" and that's been done. Spending billions now on filtration out of budgets that don't exist is a waste of money, if its economic then use budgets that do exist, but we have bigger fish to fry than filtration for any new billions available to spend.
2-3 days off work, for every worker in the country costs approx 1% of our GDP (assuming GDP is directly proportional to days worked). UK GDP is £2trillion or so, so 1% is ~ £10billion.
Sounds like £1billion / year to get £10billion in output back is a bargain to me - if we can stop 1 covid infection / year per working person we come out ahead 10x over.
(I have no idea if a filtration / ventilation program would actually cost a £billion, I‘m just taking BR’s figure & running with it.)
What utterly ridiculous numbers.
I think rolling out filtration at a thousand per room would cost many billions, not a billion.
And I doubt that it would achieve 2-3 fewer days off per person, since not only does not every infection lead to people being so sick to take a couple of days off, but the measures won't prevent that many infections anyway. Infections would still happen, but just in different places.
There are 9 million school age children in the UK. If we estimate an average class size of 25 then that would be £360mn just to add filtration to all the classrooms without even considering other rooms, IT rooms, school gyms, corridors or anywhere else. Or anywhere that isn't a school. A billion would not go very far at all.
We could save money by abandoning all water filtration and sewage treatment. Those would obviously be unnecessary - people can take responsibility for their own water, and the illnesses that are conveyed may well be unlikely to cost more than the savings incurred.
That's a ridiculous comparison. You've completely lost it mate, COVID is done and we all need to move on. Those last few hold outs can live in fear all masked up to the end of time, the rest of the nation agrees with me, thankfully.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
I suggest you read Professor Alexis Jay's report. There was absolutely a wilful coverup of child abuse by Pakistani men in Rotherham and we've seen the same in other towns in the UK, now including telford. You, Nige, are part of the problem if you deny this is true.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You don't have to be an abuser to be part of the problem. If you deny there is an issue in the first place - even where the evidence is right in front of your eyes - you are a denier. And that is part of the problem.
Try looking at this the other way round rather than throwing these accusations out there against people simply because they take a slightly different view to you.
Do you think that if Nigel accepted every one of your contentions (and I have a lot of sympathy for them in this specific instance) it would make one single iota of difference to the way the police and authorities behaved in the past or the way they will behave in the future? To take it further, do you believe that your postings and those of others like Max on here on this subject will make one single iota of difference in their behaviour going forward? Not least when it seems that even the public enquiries don't seem to have made much of a difference?
If you decide that no, what you are writing and what Nigel might contend will make no difference to the way in which the authorities behaved or will behave in the future then the claim that Nigel - or anyone else on here - is 'part of the problem' is really nothing more than fatuous and rather offensive nonsense.
Thank you Richard. These subjects are somewhat sensitive. The fact that I think they might be a little more nuanced than people might at first believe is a little hard for those that wish to look for evidence to reinforce their own petty prejudices.
But why don't we implement no planning regs for mobile phone companies so they can build phone masts more easily?
Mobile phone masts already have an easier time than other items.
For instance my wife is dealing with an application at the moment. The mast is a bit of a problem (not surprising it's in a national park, very visible), but the changes required to support the mast are a far bigger problem....
Easier but not easy. They keep getting rejected for "causing cancer".
They should be able to be built on Network Rail land for the railways.
Hmm, publicly owned body has to provide sites for commercial companies just whenever the latter wish? And if it's not railway related it does still need planning application.
Network Rail can build GSM-R masts wherever they like. They should be forced to allow operators to put their equipment on those and operators should be able to build trackside infrastructure with no planning needed.
ON point 2 - they have enough trouble with the outside contractors they do employ and have control over. Just think of the damage a comedian with a JCB digging power and data cables could do.
Access is also an issue (especially some way from roads).
On point 1 - does it actually make sense? Are masts in urban areas big enough to contain the kit of all the likely operators demanding access without causing detriment to the railway signal (by masking or interference or power failures)?
So it's likely Braverman goes out, if she doesn't then there is some likely dark arts stuff going on and tactical voting with Tugendhat going out instead?
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Huh? You're blaming the Pakistani-heritage rape gangs on "woke"?
I think he's blaming the Police failure to investigate it on 'woke'. It's been mentioned in multiple public inquiries that local social services and Police were worried about racial 'sensitivities' and so didn't investigate cases as thoroughly as they should for fear of being seen as racist. That's not even addressing the evidence that came out that suggested these men saw white girls as 'trash', which is pretty racist in itself.
What is interesting in this whole debate is that it's showing quite a few on the left are finding it hard to understand that race did play a part in the Police's / social services' actions, even when it has been confirmed by multiple inquiries. If you believe the inquiries are flawed and wrong, then fair enough but these are not Nick Griffin types saying race played a factor, it's official inquiries set up to investigate what happened.
The police have covered up the authorities complicity in scandals like this forever. Its hardly new or woke or whatever. The starter for 10 was that women would make complaints to the police. Male coppers with stereotyped views of these women dismissed them out of hand. Giving the green light to the various gangs in the various towns to get on with it.
Here is what I think/guess happened. Police officers and local authorities were incompetent. Some police officers blamed their lack of action not on their incompetence (no never!) but on their bureaucracy (it's the paperwork init), and the best bureaucracy of all to blame is their requirement not to be racist. "Oh, can't investigate that mate, he is one o' them dark geezers, better have another cuppa. snigger snigger"
Sorry do you know how widespread this is? do you know how many girls are affected?
The problems have to be far more endemic than isolated cases of incompetence and laziness. There was a prevailing climate of fear. Investigating these crimes was a career decision for a policeman, and not a good one.
That climate was determined by politicians who made a show of giving middle class women and girls in Britain a much better life. Which I do not deny they did.
You are a very sick person who's real motivations are clear for anyone to see.
Notice I have not once mentioned or singled out any community or race in any of my comments. I even credited the muslim man who finally said enough was enough and started these prosecutions when many others wouldn't.
Bev wanted to pretend modern Britain is some kind of emancipated nirvana for women.
I merely pointed out that it isn't, citing an example.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
Parental costs aren't something a school budget covers - it's usually enough to keep staff paid and things ticking over.
With the cost of energy I suspect even that isn't the case this year and most schools will be running deficits while hoping the cost of energy returns to normal levels next year.
(rolls eyes) Yes obviously the school doesn’t pay out for parental costs.
But the country as a whole does & state school budgets come out of government expenditure.
Which is why BR’s “you should do it if it’s economic” doesn’t work for public health - public health issues are only effectively solved when you intervene across the economy, not piecemeal according to personal whim.
Libertarianism & public health don’t make for good bedfellows & never will.
It does, really. People taking responsibility for themselves works.
If you pick up a virus you might feel like crap for a couple of days, then you almost certainly get back to normal afterwards. That does not justify a "public health" emergency or actions now.
Vaccines were "public health" and that's been done. Spending billions now on filtration out of budgets that don't exist is a waste of money, if its economic then use budgets that do exist, but we have bigger fish to fry than filtration for any new billions available to spend.
2-3 days off work, for every worker in the country costs approx 1% of our GDP (assuming GDP is directly proportional to days worked). UK GDP is £2trillion or so, so 1% is ~ £10billion.
Sounds like £1billion / year to get £10billion in output back is a bargain to me - if we can stop 1 covid infection / year per working person we come out ahead 10x over.
(I have no idea if a filtration / ventilation program would actually cost a £billion, I‘m just taking BR’s figure & running with it.)
What utterly ridiculous numbers.
I think rolling out filtration at a thousand per room would cost many billions, not a billion.
And I doubt that it would achieve 2-3 fewer days off per person, since not only does not every infection lead to people being so sick to take a couple of days off, but the measures won't prevent that many infections anyway. Infections would still happen, but just in different places.
There are 9 million school age children in the UK. If we estimate an average class size of 25 then that would be £360mn just to add filtration to all the classrooms without even considering other rooms, IT rooms, school gyms, corridors or anywhere else. Or anywhere that isn't a school. A billion would not go very far at all.
We could save money by abandoning all water filtration and sewage treatment. Those would obviously be unnecessary - people can take responsibility for their own water, and the illnesses that are conveyed may well be unlikely to cost more than the savings incurred.
Many people already do privately buy and use water filters.
Sewage treatment of course should reach a minimum standard, but there's no reason for it to be at the same standard as people privately pay for, nor should it be, doing so would be overkill.
Just because something can be done, doesn't mean it should.
Mr. Foremain, I must respectfully disagree with your view on the Rotherham and similar cases.
One major example stands out, from many, as an example why. One girl who was raped was clever enough to retain the clothing, which contained DNA evidence. She handed it over. The police managed to lose it, and nothing happened.
This isn't laziness. And it isn't incompetence (I could buy that for a one-off but in Rotherham alone over a thousand girls and a hundred boys were raped over a period exceeding a decade). This was an approach that it was better to have white working class girls and boys raped by men who were Pakistani/Muslim than to investigate, because being culturally sensitive mattered more than stopping the industrial scale rape of children.
If they had not been working class, and if they had not been white, this would not have been tolerated.
And then a few years later we had the same middle class clowns on those knees apologising for white privilege to American-imported race-baiting imbeciles.
I'm not sure the thousands of girls and hundreds of boys in Rotherham, Telford, Newcastle, Rochdale, Manchester, and elsewhere feel they have an excess of privilege for their skin colour.
But why don't we implement no planning regs for mobile phone companies so they can build phone masts more easily?
Mobile phone masts already have an easier time than other items.
For instance my wife is dealing with an application at the moment. The mast is a bit of a problem (not surprising it's in a national park, very visible), but the changes required to support the mast are a far bigger problem....
Easier but not easy. They keep getting rejected for "causing cancer".
They should be able to be built on Network Rail land for the railways.
Hmm, publicly owned body has to provide sites for commercial companies just whenever the latter wish? And if it's not railway related it does still need planning application.
Network Rail can build GSM-R masts wherever they like. They should be forced to allow operators to put their equipment on those and operators should be able to build trackside infrastructure with no planning needed.
ON point 2 - they have enough trouble with the outside contractors they do employ and have control over. Just think of the damage a comedian with a JCB digging power and data cables could do.
Access is also an issue (especially some way from roads).
On point 1 - does it actually make sense? Are masts in urban areas big enough to contain the kit of all the likely operators demanding access without causing detriment to the railway signal (by masking or interference or power failures)?
Nope but since when has practicality got in the way of a hare-brained scheme
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Yes, we know everyone dies eventually.
Nevertheless, we do choose to have a health service to reduce avoidable deaths and chronic pain.
I doubt you'd advocate abolishing the health service on the grounds that "everyone dies eventually," so that statement doesn't really address the point that our health service has been under incredible strain since the start of the pandemic, and now looks to be under "crisis" level as a default standard going forwards.
Because it's endemic. So it's not going to change. People who want to put their heads in the sand and say that it's all fine now are wrong. It's not. As will be seen when they or their loved ones get ill or injured.
Crisis has been the default standard for the NHS for decades. "Five days to save the NHS" was a quarter of a century ago.
NHS demand will always be infinite. Demand only stops for the NHS when people die. Keeping people alive creates more demand for the NHS and creates a crisis ultimately in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So if you're prepared to see some of the NHS's budget be cut in order to pay for filtration, as that's better value for money, then I'm fine with that. Otherwise, the NHS will have to cope as well as it can, with the resources available to it.
Well, that's okay then. We've had crises in the NHS in the past which have been, whilst crises, far less than this and transient.
Which means it's okay to have a far worse crisis lasting forever.
Okay, we're clear. All crises are the same, so a really bad and permanent one is the same as a far lesser and transient one.
Its always permanent.
How do you propose to end a permanent crisis other than the fact that people die at the end of their life? If you keep people alive, as their minds and bodies are failing, then the NHS has infinite and growing demands place upon it. Demand doesn't end until people die.
For the resources we have, we should keep people alive and comfortable as well as we can, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking we can cheat death. We can't.
Once again, for the apparently hard of hearing: this isn’t about cheating death. This is about taking simple, relatively cheap actions to mitigate a permanent (for the forseable future) reduction in UK GDP, due to the load of continuous waves of Covid infections.
I actually agree with you that we can’t save the very old & sad as it is, covid is going to reduce their life expectancy & apart from vaccination there’s not much we can do about that because they’re probably going to get covid.
But I disagree entirely that that means we should do nothing. Covid is a public health issue - it degrades the entire nation & there are things we could be doing that reduce that impact.
But people just like you in government are bored with Covid & want to “put it behind us”, so we do nothing.
If its cheap, use your existing budget.
If you can't afford it within your budget, then its not cheap.
Either way, it is what it is.
I'm glad people like me, bored of Covid, are in government. Good. We should be doing nothing, Covid is endemic, we need to live with it. Do what you can, with your budget.
Your laissez-faire attitude fails the country, because even cheap, manifestly “profitable” public health measures require co-ordination. Co-ordination that the government could be doing, but cannot be bothered to do.
But you’re bored of Covid & that’s all that matters, right?
Is there much by the way of evidence that NPIs in a population with almost entirely non-naive immune systems gives much in the way of benefit at all? They are not cost free to implement remember, either socially or economically.
The shocking thing is we’ve printed a trillion debt since this started and as far as I can tell, haven’t managed to increase our medical care capacity a jot.
I was shocked to hear a friend the other day, mid 30s, talk about wanting to wear a mask forever to prevent catching any infectious diseases. If we’ve learnt anything from the last two years, surely it’s that there are unforeseen consequences to making such experiments with society’s immune system. I sometimes feel like some people have forgotten how the conquistadors really killed the aztecs.
Regarding your first paragraph, there's some evidence. Japan, for example.
And you'll be shocked to hear that such 'dangerous' experiments have been conducted in that region by some individuals for quite a few years now.
The other experiment that's ongoing, of course, is what the consequences of repeated re-infections with successive Covid variants might be. And what kind of human immune space it stabilises in, once it's current rapid evolutionary course reaches some kind of equilibrium.
Ideally Suella goes out and we can see how the realistically viable candidates fare during a debate.
I have to confess I feel sorry for Liz. I shouldn’t, I know. But she’s spent years planning for this moment; it’s dictated much of her effort at Trade and then at the Foreign Office.
She just doesn’t have “it.” I’ve seen her rise up the ranks and there has always been a buzz about her, but the problem is that presentationally she is shocking and she has not been able to lift it to the next level. Some people have been able to historically. She hasn’t. When you are making Theresa May and Gordon Brown look ten times more charismatic, compelling and engaging than you, you are not doing well enough.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
I suggest you read Professor Alexis Jay's report. There was absolutely a wilful coverup of child abuse by Pakistani men in Rotherham and we've seen the same in other towns in the UK, now including telford. You, Nige, are part of the problem if you deny this is true.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You don't have to be an abuser to be part of the problem. If you deny there is an issue in the first place - even where the evidence is right in front of your eyes - you are a denier. And that is part of the problem.
Try looking at this the other way round rather than throwing these accusations out there against people simply because they take a slightly different view to you.
Do you think that if Nigel accepted every one of your contentions (and I have a lot of sympathy for them in this specific instance) it would make one single iota of difference to the way the police and authorities behaved in the past or the way they will behave in the future? To take it further, do you believe that your postings and those of others like Max on here on this subject will make one single iota of difference in their behaviour going forward? Not least when it seems that even the public enquiries don't seem to have made much of a difference?
If you decide that no, what you are writing and what Nigel might contend will make no difference to the way in which the authorities behaved or will behave in the future then the claim that Nigel - or anyone else on here - is 'part of the problem' is really nothing more than fatuous and rather offensive nonsense.
Actually, what you write is not just bollocks but is also very dangerous.
Let's take the case of the Holocaust. There have been cases of people denying it took place. Under your argument, we shouldn't bother calling people up on the issue and just turn a blind eye because they won't change their behaviour and so what does it matter. But if you tolerate such behaviour, you make it - if not acceptable - then less socially damaging and, over time, it eventually becomes socially acceptable to raise the question (which, funnily enough when it comes to the Holocaust, is what is happening now with certain parts of the hard Left).
You are essentially saying the same thing here. The reason why so many abusers got away with their crimes in the first place was because such behaviour was not seen as wicked enough and therefore it was fine to turn a blind eye. People had suspicions but didn't mention it because they thought "it's not my place to challenge" - or indeed, "what difference would it make?"
People are, by nature, conformist. They want to fit in and not make waves. If the zeitgeist is - encouraged by people like Nigel who won't see the problem - "let's not mention it because we don't want to upset community relations", then that is how people will behave, which is exactly what happened in these places - and which led to many more girls being abused than should have happened.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
I suggest you read Professor Alexis Jay's report. There was absolutely a wilful coverup of child abuse by Pakistani men in Rotherham and we've seen the same in other towns in the UK, now including telford. You, Nige, are part of the problem if you deny this is true.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You may find it unlikely that concern over racial sensitivities prevented the prosecution of people who ought to have been prosecuted, but that is not the view of those carrying out these investigations. If you think these investigations came to the wrong conclusions, then you need to say why.
I suspect that people who are obsessed by woke (the original discussion point) are using this as a way of saying that any sensitivity towards race by local authorities and police forces is wrong, when in reality it may be less significant than they would like it to be. I am no lefty, but I don't get stirred up by "woke". What is the one thing that the public sector always wail about if they are caught underperforming? "Resources". What I am suggesting is that this matter has been used by the police to cover up their total ineptitude. Rather than police or local authority laziness, they can pretend it was due to lack of resources and "paperwork". Alternatively, perhaps it was a global conspiracy of paedophiles that included Leon Brittan et al. The idea that it was known that there was an abusive paedo ring that was overlooked only because they were Pakistani is ludicrous.
The report found: "Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so."
Can Sunak really afford to lend votes to Braverman. This seems stupid , firstly he might then not hit 100 . Secondly why would he want to look like the alleged most left candidate during the debates .
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
Parental costs aren't something a school budget covers - it's usually enough to keep staff paid and things ticking over.
With the cost of energy I suspect even that isn't the case this year and most schools will be running deficits while hoping the cost of energy returns to normal levels next year.
(rolls eyes) Yes obviously the school doesn’t pay out for parental costs.
But the country as a whole does & state school budgets come out of government expenditure.
Which is why BR’s “you should do it if it’s economic” doesn’t work for public health - public health issues are only effectively solved when you intervene across the economy, not piecemeal according to personal whim.
Libertarianism & public health don’t make for good bedfellows & never will.
It does, really. People taking responsibility for themselves works.
If you pick up a virus you might feel like crap for a couple of days, then you almost certainly get back to normal afterwards. That does not justify a "public health" emergency or actions now.
Vaccines were "public health" and that's been done. Spending billions now on filtration out of budgets that don't exist is a waste of money, if its economic then use budgets that do exist, but we have bigger fish to fry than filtration for any new billions available to spend.
2-3 days off work, for every worker in the country costs approx 1% of our GDP (assuming GDP is directly proportional to days worked). UK GDP is £2trillion or so, so 1% is ~ £10billion.
Sounds like £1billion / year to get £10billion in output back is a bargain to me - if we can stop 1 covid infection / year per working person we come out ahead 10x over.
(I have no idea if a filtration / ventilation program would actually cost a £billion, I‘m just taking BR’s figure & running with it.)
What utterly ridiculous numbers.
I think rolling out filtration at a thousand per room would cost many billions, not a billion.
And I doubt that it would achieve 2-3 fewer days off per person, since not only does not every infection lead to people being so sick to take a couple of days off, but the measures won't prevent that many infections anyway. Infections would still happen, but just in different places.
There are 9 million school age children in the UK. If we estimate an average class size of 25 then that would be £360mn just to add filtration to all the classrooms without even considering other rooms, IT rooms, school gyms, corridors or anywhere else. Or anywhere that isn't a school. A billion would not go very far at all.
We could save money by abandoning all water filtration and sewage treatment. Those would obviously be unnecessary - people can take responsibility for their own water, and the illnesses that are conveyed may well be unlikely to cost more than the savings incurred.
That's a ridiculous comparison. You've completely lost it mate, COVID is done and we all need to move on. Those last few hold outs can live in fear all masked up to the end of time, the rest of the nation agrees with me, thankfully.
I'm stone cold certain that when the water filtration and sewage systems were put in to prevent water-borne diseases, BR would have been complaining about the cost and claiming that we'd been living with disease forever, and that we couldn't make everyone live forever.
And, from the sound of it, you'd have been right beside him when the latest cholera epidemic died away for a while.
Do me a favour: when the pressure on the health service causes massive delays or missed treatments for you and your loved ones, don't complain about them.
And when the next pandemic occurs (which it will, although I hope and pray it'll be a long time), don't whine when restrictions are needed because we don't have filtration systems.
Can Sunak really afford to lend votes to Braverman. This seems stupid , firstly he might then not hit 100 . Secondly why would he want to look like the alleged most left candidate during the debates .
Maybe he knows he’s toast but wants the Foreign Sec gig for himself?
I think when TT goes out he will either stay quiet or endorse Mordaunt . Can’t see him endorsing Sunak given their apparent disagreements over defence .
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
Parental costs aren't something a school budget covers - it's usually enough to keep staff paid and things ticking over.
With the cost of energy I suspect even that isn't the case this year and most schools will be running deficits while hoping the cost of energy returns to normal levels next year.
(rolls eyes) Yes obviously the school doesn’t pay out for parental costs.
But the country as a whole does & state school budgets come out of government expenditure.
Which is why BR’s “you should do it if it’s economic” doesn’t work for public health - public health issues are only effectively solved when you intervene across the economy, not piecemeal according to personal whim.
Libertarianism & public health don’t make for good bedfellows & never will.
It does, really. People taking responsibility for themselves works.
If you pick up a virus you might feel like crap for a couple of days, then you almost certainly get back to normal afterwards. That does not justify a "public health" emergency or actions now.
Vaccines were "public health" and that's been done. Spending billions now on filtration out of budgets that don't exist is a waste of money, if its economic then use budgets that do exist, but we have bigger fish to fry than filtration for any new billions available to spend.
2-3 days off work, for every worker in the country costs approx 1% of our GDP (assuming GDP is directly proportional to days worked). UK GDP is £2trillion or so, so 1% is ~ £10billion.
Sounds like £1billion / year to get £10billion in output back is a bargain to me - if we can stop 1 covid infection / year per working person we come out ahead 10x over.
(I have no idea if a filtration / ventilation program would actually cost a £billion, I‘m just taking BR’s figure & running with it.)
What utterly ridiculous numbers.
I think rolling out filtration at a thousand per room would cost many billions, not a billion.
And I doubt that it would achieve 2-3 fewer days off per person, since not only does not every infection lead to people being so sick to take a couple of days off, but the measures won't prevent that many infections anyway. Infections would still happen, but just in different places.
There are 9 million school age children in the UK. If we estimate an average class size of 25 then that would be £360mn just to add filtration to all the classrooms without even considering other rooms, IT rooms, school gyms, corridors or anywhere else. Or anywhere that isn't a school. A billion would not go very far at all.
We could save money by abandoning all water filtration and sewage treatment. Those would obviously be unnecessary - people can take responsibility for their own water, and the illnesses that are conveyed may well be unlikely to cost more than the savings incurred.
And the people who die of cholera and typhoid will only get ill of other things anyway, so it's futile to stop them getting ill due to dirty water.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
Parental costs aren't something a school budget covers - it's usually enough to keep staff paid and things ticking over.
With the cost of energy I suspect even that isn't the case this year and most schools will be running deficits while hoping the cost of energy returns to normal levels next year.
(rolls eyes) Yes obviously the school doesn’t pay out for parental costs.
But the country as a whole does & state school budgets come out of government expenditure.
Which is why BR’s “you should do it if it’s economic” doesn’t work for public health - public health issues are only effectively solved when you intervene across the economy, not piecemeal according to personal whim.
Libertarianism & public health don’t make for good bedfellows & never will.
It does, really. People taking responsibility for themselves works.
If you pick up a virus you might feel like crap for a couple of days, then you almost certainly get back to normal afterwards. That does not justify a "public health" emergency or actions now.
Vaccines were "public health" and that's been done. Spending billions now on filtration out of budgets that don't exist is a waste of money, if its economic then use budgets that do exist, but we have bigger fish to fry than filtration for any new billions available to spend.
2-3 days off work, for every worker in the country costs approx 1% of our GDP (assuming GDP is directly proportional to days worked). UK GDP is £2trillion or so, so 1% is ~ £10billion.
Sounds like £1billion / year to get £10billion in output back is a bargain to me - if we can stop 1 covid infection / year per working person we come out ahead 10x over.
(I have no idea if a filtration / ventilation program would actually cost a £billion, I‘m just taking BR’s figure & running with it.)
What utterly ridiculous numbers.
I think rolling out filtration at a thousand per room would cost many billions, not a billion.
And I doubt that it would achieve 2-3 fewer days off per person, since not only does not every infection lead to people being so sick to take a couple of days off, but the measures won't prevent that many infections anyway. Infections would still happen, but just in different places.
There are 9 million school age children in the UK. If we estimate an average class size of 25 then that would be £360mn just to add filtration to all the classrooms without even considering other rooms, IT rooms, school gyms, corridors or anywhere else. Or anywhere that isn't a school. A billion would not go very far at all.
We could save money by abandoning all water filtration and sewage treatment. Those would obviously be unnecessary - people can take responsibility for their own water, and the illnesses that are conveyed may well be unlikely to cost more than the savings incurred.
That's a ridiculous comparison. You've completely lost it mate, COVID is done and we all need to move on. Those last few hold outs can live in fear all masked up to the end of time, the rest of the nation agrees with me, thankfully.
I'm stone cold certain that when the water filtration and sewage systems were put in to prevent water-borne diseases, BR would have been complaining about the cost and claiming that we'd been living with disease forever, and that we couldn't make everyone live forever.
And, from the sound of it, you'd have been right beside him when the latest cholera epidemic died away for a while.
Do me a favour: when the pressure on the health service causes massive delays or missed treatments for you and your loved ones, don't complain about them.
And when the next pandemic occurs (which it will, although I hope and pray it'll be a long time), don't whine when restrictions are needed because we don't have filtration systems.
"Delays or missed treatments" have been ongoing for as long as the NHS has existed. It always will, since demand is infinite. People only stop presenting demand when they die, but you want to prevent death from ever occurring.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
I suggest you read Professor Alexis Jay's report. There was absolutely a wilful coverup of child abuse by Pakistani men in Rotherham and we've seen the same in other towns in the UK, now including telford. You, Nige, are part of the problem if you deny this is true.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You may find it unlikely that concern over racial sensitivities prevented the prosecution of people who ought to have been prosecuted, but that is not the view of those carrying out these investigations. If you think these investigations came to the wrong conclusions, then you need to say why.
I suspect that people who are obsessed by woke (the original discussion point) are using this as a way of saying that any sensitivity towards race by local authorities and police forces is wrong, when in reality it may be less significant than they would like it to be. I am no lefty, but I don't get stirred up by "woke". What is the one thing that the public sector always wail about if they are caught underperforming? "Resources". What I am suggesting is that this matter has been used by the police to cover up their total ineptitude. Rather than police or local authority laziness, they can pretend it was due to lack of resources and "paperwork". Alternatively, perhaps it was a global conspiracy of paedophiles that included Leon Brittan et al. The idea that it was known that there was an abusive paedo ring that was overlooked only because they were Pakistani is ludicrous.
It's not just the police. It's social services and local councillors. It's similar to the way that Islington and Lambeth councillors were prepared to look the other way when children were being abused in their care homes in the eighties. In the case of the latter, allegations of abuse were dismissed as homophobia. What these cases have in common is people who are charged with child safety being prepared to prioritise politics over and above the welfare of vulnerable children.
Ideally Suella goes out and we can see how the realistically viable candidates fare during a debate.
I have to confess I feel sorry for Liz. I shouldn’t, I know. But she’s spent years planning for this moment; it’s dictated much of her effort at Trade and then at the Foreign Office.
She just doesn’t have “it.” I’ve seen her rise up the ranks and there has always been a buzz about her, but the problem is that presentationally she is shocking and she has not been able to lift it to the next level. Some people have been able to historically. She hasn’t. When you are making Theresa May and Gordon Brown look ten times more charismatic, compelling and engaging than you, you are not doing well enough.
I am surprised to see that peolle think Liz doesn’t have charisma
She certainly does, it’s just that it projects just the slightest tinge of insanity.
Look at that pork speech above, she smiles in all the wrong places.
Can Sunak really afford to lend votes to Braverman. This seems stupid , firstly he might then not hit 100 . Secondly why would he want to look like the alleged most left candidate during the debates .
Maybe he knows he’s toast but wants the Foreign Sec gig for himself?
Doubt it. Hasn't he got young children? Foreign is a nightmare job for a family person.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
I suggest you read Professor Alexis Jay's report. There was absolutely a wilful coverup of child abuse by Pakistani men in Rotherham and we've seen the same in other towns in the UK, now including telford. You, Nige, are part of the problem if you deny this is true.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You may find it unlikely that concern over racial sensitivities prevented the prosecution of people who ought to have been prosecuted, but that is not the view of those carrying out these investigations. If you think these investigations came to the wrong conclusions, then you need to say why.
I suspect that people who are obsessed by woke (the original discussion point) are using this as a way of saying that any sensitivity towards race by local authorities and police forces is wrong, when in reality it may be less significant than they would like it to be. I am no lefty, but I don't get stirred up by "woke". What is the one thing that the public sector always wail about if they are caught underperforming? "Resources". What I am suggesting is that this matter has been used by the police to cover up their total ineptitude. Rather than police or local authority laziness, they can pretend it was due to lack of resources and "paperwork". Alternatively, perhaps it was a global conspiracy of paedophiles that included Leon Brittan et al. The idea that it was known that there was an abusive paedo ring that was overlooked only because they were Pakistani is ludicrous.
It's not just the police. It's social services and local councillors. It's similar to the way that Islington and Lambeth councillors were prepared to look the other way when children were being abused in their care homes in the eighties. In the case of the latter, allegations of abuse were dismissed as homophobia. What these cases have in common is people who are charged with child safety being prepared to prioritise politics over and above the welfare of vulnerable children.
Just the same as the Catholic Church and other abuses throughout time, yes.
Anyone who puts protecting themselves, or their interest, ahead of protecting the vulnerable is scum.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
Parental costs aren't something a school budget covers - it's usually enough to keep staff paid and things ticking over.
With the cost of energy I suspect even that isn't the case this year and most schools will be running deficits while hoping the cost of energy returns to normal levels next year.
(rolls eyes) Yes obviously the school doesn’t pay out for parental costs.
But the country as a whole does & state school budgets come out of government expenditure.
Which is why BR’s “you should do it if it’s economic” doesn’t work for public health - public health issues are only effectively solved when you intervene across the economy, not piecemeal according to personal whim.
Libertarianism & public health don’t make for good bedfellows & never will.
It does, really. People taking responsibility for themselves works.
If you pick up a virus you might feel like crap for a couple of days, then you almost certainly get back to normal afterwards. That does not justify a "public health" emergency or actions now.
Vaccines were "public health" and that's been done. Spending billions now on filtration out of budgets that don't exist is a waste of money, if its economic then use budgets that do exist, but we have bigger fish to fry than filtration for any new billions available to spend.
2-3 days off work, for every worker in the country costs approx 1% of our GDP (assuming GDP is directly proportional to days worked). UK GDP is £2trillion or so, so 1% is ~ £10billion.
Sounds like £1billion / year to get £10billion in output back is a bargain to me - if we can stop 1 covid infection / year per working person we come out ahead 10x over.
(I have no idea if a filtration / ventilation program would actually cost a £billion, I‘m just taking BR’s figure & running with it.)
What utterly ridiculous numbers.
I think rolling out filtration at a thousand per room would cost many billions, not a billion.
And I doubt that it would achieve 2-3 fewer days off per person, since not only does not every infection lead to people being so sick to take a couple of days off, but the measures won't prevent that many infections anyway. Infections would still happen, but just in different places.
There are 9 million school age children in the UK. If we estimate an average class size of 25 then that would be £360mn just to add filtration to all the classrooms without even considering other rooms, IT rooms, school gyms, corridors or anywhere else. Or anywhere that isn't a school. A billion would not go very far at all.
We could save money by abandoning all water filtration and sewage treatment. Those would obviously be unnecessary - people can take responsibility for their own water, and the illnesses that are conveyed may well be unlikely to cost more than the savings incurred.
And the people who die of cholera and typhoid will only get ill of other things anyway, so it's futile to stop them getting ill due to dirty water.
That's right. That evil Dr Snow and that appalling Miss Nightingale. Wanting drains mended and windows opened.
Comments
It's not a cock up. This is people in authority wilfully looking the other way.
Now, I have to take a break from PB for a few hours and try to do something useful. Bye all!
It also feels likely that when Bravermann exits she will endorse Badenoch rather than Truss.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
What was striking is how flat 'culture war' issues were, how removed so much of the SW1 conversation which dominates politics and a fair bit of the media really is, despite fact it's often done in name of 'real people'. Any clip where a candidate talked about those issues tanked.
It's really interesting, because I am told day after day that I am out of touch with the voters.
Perhaps I am more in touch than many of the "anti-woke" people on here
Also striking was in this Brexit voting group how uninterested they were in the subject now: "it's done." Again, they saw it as a distraction from cost of living and didn't want to hear politicians talking about it any more.
Also again, world away from the contest.
All of the candidates are going about this contest the wrong way.
For instance my wife is dealing with an application at the moment. The mast is a bit of a problem (not surprising it's in a national park, very visible), but the changes required to support the mast are a far bigger problem....
I did spend my time trying to point out that people can walk and chew gum at the same time and that just because the EU was not high on their list of immediate priorities it didn't mean that people didn't care about it or would not take it into account i their voting patterns.
It is very dangerous to simply ignore issues because you personally are not othered by them and because they do not rank at the top of people's priorities. All the more so if people feel that neither side/party can or will do much about the big issues in which case they may well look at the 'minor' issues to inform their voting.
That isn't giving women rights. Your proclamations of emancipation are built on a mountain of misery, ignored by you, because the same people who gave you those rights protected the crimes of certain communities against women.
They should be able to be built on Network Rail land for the railways.
Opinion: The UK economy is stagnant — and the reasons run deep https://t.co/Ska65TbqL4
https://twitter.com/FinancialTimes/status/1546498443232919553?t=KyKW8S8aDcruCPZXGN6w6Q&s=19
Ms Bev claimed that now is a garden of Eden. My point is that is really is not. It is far from a garden of Eden for many, many women in Britain.
Women Ms Bev would rather ignore.
The spinning for him barely going forwards has started early I suspect
In fact, some "racially sensitive" individuals want to roll back the clock on sexual equality.
Equality is for everyone or no-one. You can't have some animals more equal than others.
It's why the police assuming allegations of abuse (by white men 30 years ago, obviously...) were true was inherently wrong. Don't trust, verify.
And why they were wrong to let 'cultural sensitivities' get in the way of investigating child abuse/rape over decades in multiple locations.
I have to confess I feel sorry for Liz.
I shouldn’t, I know.
But she’s spent years planning for this moment; it’s dictated much of her effort at Trade and then at the Foreign Office.
https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2022/07/13/whats-behind-britains-growth-crisis
I've only half-listened to it while dozing in bed though so can't say it's good, bad, shallow or deep.
What is happening now is that it is being reported and, finally, taken seriously.
Unless you are living under a rock, you will know someone who has suffered some form of abuse in the last year. You will know someone who has been raped in their lives. Abuse is frighteningly common, and happens amongst families as well.
These grooming groups need to be tackled and the bas*ards put into jail. But if we do that, we need to follow up on all the other abuse that is going on.
On child sexual abuse alone:
"However, research with 2,275 young people aged 11-17 about their experiences of sexual abuse suggests around 1 in 20 children in the UK have been sexually abused."
"Concerns around sexual abuse have been identified for over 2,800 children in the UK who are the subject of a child protection plan or on a child protection register."
"The vast majority of children who experience sexual abuse were abused by someone they knew."
https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/research-resources/statistics-briefings/child-sexual-abuse
That abuse will not all be done by grooming gangs. It'll also be uncles and parents, or friends of the family.
Do you think that if Nigel accepted every one of your contentions (and I have a lot of sympathy for them in this specific instance) it would make one single iota of difference to the way the police and authorities behaved in the past or the way they will behave in the future? To take it further, do you believe that your postings and those of others like Max on here on this subject will make one single iota of difference in their behaviour going forward? Not least when it seems that even the public enquiries don't seem to have made much of a difference?
If you decide that no, what you are writing and what Nigel might contend will make no difference to the way in which the authorities behaved or will behave in the future then the claim that Nigel - or anyone else on here - is 'part of the problem' is really nothing more than fatuous and rather offensive nonsense.
The problems have to be far more endemic than isolated cases of incompetence and laziness. There was a prevailing climate of fear. Investigating these crimes was a career decision for a policeman, and not a good one.
That climate was determined by politicians who made a show of giving middle class women and girls in Britain a much better life. Which I do not deny they did.
I post often on this subject.
The core issues seem to be:
- lack of capital investment by gov
- lack of capital investment by firms
- skill issues in workforce
- vast regional disparity, ie SE v rest.
- planning / housing
- some of above made worse by over-centralised governance.
What destroyed Truss chances at the end of the day is that she is so utterly rubbish. Why have sympathy for that?
You’ve gone soft, Gardenwalker.
I think rolling out filtration at a thousand per room would cost many billions, not a billion.
And I doubt that it would achieve 2-3 fewer days off per person, since not only does not every infection lead to people being so sick to take a couple of days off, but the measures won't prevent that many infections anyway. Infections would still happen, but just in different places.
There are 9 million school age children in the UK. If we estimate an average class size of 25 then that would be £360mn just to add filtration to all the classrooms without even considering other rooms, IT rooms, school gyms, corridors or anywhere else. Or anywhere that isn't a school. A billion would not go very far at all.
Those would obviously be unnecessary - people can take responsibility for their own water, and the illnesses that are conveyed may well be unlikely to cost more than the savings incurred.
Just seen a photo of Braverman and Badenoch together.
Suella is several inches taller.
I'm most surprised.
This is not “politeness” it’s an attempt to veto “unacceptable” thinking.
Sunak/Mordaunt/Truss/Tugendhat/Badenoch/Bravermann
Par scores - Mordaunt basically wins with the members with a Richi Runoff if everything pans out like this
Access is also an issue (especially some way from roads).
On point 1 - does it actually make sense? Are masts in urban areas big enough to contain the kit of all the likely operators demanding access without causing detriment to the railway signal (by masking or interference or power failures)?
Bev wanted to pretend modern Britain is some kind of emancipated nirvana for women.
I merely pointed out that it isn't, citing an example.
Sewage treatment of course should reach a minimum standard, but there's no reason for it to be at the same standard as people privately pay for, nor should it be, doing so would be overkill.
Just because something can be done, doesn't mean it should.
One major example stands out, from many, as an example why. One girl who was raped was clever enough to retain the clothing, which contained DNA evidence. She handed it over. The police managed to lose it, and nothing happened.
This isn't laziness. And it isn't incompetence (I could buy that for a one-off but in Rotherham alone over a thousand girls and a hundred boys were raped over a period exceeding a decade). This was an approach that it was better to have white working class girls and boys raped by men who were Pakistani/Muslim than to investigate, because being culturally sensitive mattered more than stopping the industrial scale rape of children.
If they had not been working class, and if they had not been white, this would not have been tolerated.
And then a few years later we had the same middle class clowns on those knees apologising for white privilege to American-imported race-baiting imbeciles.
I'm not sure the thousands of girls and hundreds of boys in Rotherham, Telford, Newcastle, Rochdale, Manchester, and elsewhere feel they have an excess of privilege for their skin colour.
Japan, for example.
And you'll be shocked to hear that such 'dangerous' experiments have been conducted in that region by some individuals for quite a few years now.
The other experiment that's ongoing, of course, is what the consequences of repeated re-infections with successive Covid variants might be. And what kind of human immune space it stabilises in, once it's current rapid evolutionary course reaches some kind of equilibrium.
Let's take the case of the Holocaust. There have been cases of people denying it took place. Under your argument, we shouldn't bother calling people up on the issue and just turn a blind eye because they won't change their behaviour and so what does it matter. But if you tolerate such behaviour, you make it - if not acceptable - then less socially damaging and, over time, it eventually becomes socially acceptable to raise the question (which, funnily enough when it comes to the Holocaust, is what is happening now with certain parts of the hard Left).
You are essentially saying the same thing here. The reason why so many abusers got away with their crimes in the first place was because such behaviour was not seen as wicked enough and therefore it was fine to turn a blind eye. People had suspicions but didn't mention it because they thought "it's not my place to challenge" - or indeed, "what difference would it make?"
People are, by nature, conformist. They want to fit in and not make waves. If the zeitgeist is - encouraged by people like Nigel who won't see the problem - "let's not mention it because we don't want to upset community relations", then that is how people will behave, which is exactly what happened in these places - and which led to many more girls being abused than should have happened.
The report found: "Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so."
And, from the sound of it, you'd have been right beside him when the latest cholera epidemic died away for a while.
Do me a favour: when the pressure on the health service causes massive delays or missed treatments for you and your loved ones, don't complain about them.
And when the next pandemic occurs (which it will, although I hope and pray it'll be a long time), don't whine when restrictions are needed because we don't have filtration systems.
Conhome deputy ed thinks Mordaunt is too blank a slate
Having said that, it would be good to understand the numbers.
I think that adds up but don't shout at me if it doesn't.
Forget all policies and details - she simply does not come across as a credible PM.
She'll tank in the opinion polls and Con MPs will seriously consider removing her next summer.
She certainly does, it’s just that it projects just the slightest tinge of insanity.
Look at that pork speech above, she smiles in all the wrong places.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/live/cricket/58522536?ns_mchannel=social&ns_source=twitter&ns_campaign=bbc_live&ns_linkname=62d01fab7ee7d84cb22824f8&&2022-07-14T13:53:19.063Z&ns_fee=0&pinned_post_locator=urn:asset:a990b2e9-0d16-4ff9-9390-a59789621628&pinned_post_asset_id=62d01fab7ee7d84cb22824f8&pinned_post_type=share
Anyone who puts protecting themselves, or their interest, ahead of protecting the vulnerable is scum.
What its not is a "woke" or "unwoke" issue.
Conservatives should go back to conservatism to get out of this mess.
They said Penny Mordaunt was the strongest candidate in the Tory leadership contest and the frontrunner to see off Labour
https://twitter.com/ChaplainChloe/status/1547579212487225344