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Apathy in the UK – politicalbetting.com
Apathy in the UK – politicalbetting.com
How would mainland Britons feel if Northern Ireland left the UK?Upset: 22%Pleased: 11%Not bothered either way: 50%https://t.co/wAtWZ6UNBg pic.twitter.com/cKTEYyO3u4
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Better off out.
Other police forces have higher rates of sexual misconduct and racism claims than Met
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/17/police-forces-sexual-misconduct-racism-claims-higher-than-met
What an odd way to describe a situation where people were supportive of a democratic election result being enacted and happy to have other people to make their own democratic choices based on that. What was radical and extremist was the Remainer headbangers who were willing to overturn democracy to stay in their precious project to subjugate the peoples of Europe into a superstate.
One in eight Britons have paid for private health services in the last year, amid frustration with delays in getting NHS treatment and a growing willingness to buy care using salary or savings.
New research by YouGov found that another 27% of people had considered going private, for themselves or a loved one, but decided against it, often because they couldn’t afford it.
Added to the 13% who did pay for care for themselves or someone they live with, that means that two in five people have either resorted to using medical care at private clinics and hospitals or thought about doing so.
NHS campaigners said they feared that the findings show that it is becoming a “two-tier” health service and blamed underfunding and staff shortages for leaving it unable to provide timely care.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/apr/17/one-in-eight-britons-pay-for-private-health-services-survey-shows
This is not a surprise. Have a private health appointment myself tomorrow, as it so happens. The people who've been running all those "seven days to save the NHS"- type stories since the 1980s had it all wrong, it turns out: it's not going to die off through being flogged to the Americans, it's going to end up being abandoned by anyone with money because of increasingly ludicrous waiting times.
Again, don't expect Labour to ride to the rescue. Fixing both the health service itself, and alleviating the poverty that burdens it indirectly (through the consequences of bad diets and extreme levels of obesity,) will take huge amounts of money, which it clearly isn't willing to extract from better off voters. So, if the state won't pay for anything, then people will have to do it themselves - and those without means will have to chance their luck with charity, or just shuffle off into a dark corner and die quietly.
Priti Patel goes in to bat for greater control at Lord’s
Priti Patel spent £45,000 on taking out life membership of Marylebone Cricket Club in 2020 while she was home secretary, enabling her to jump a 25-year waiting list. Now, as if starved of the cut and thrust of debate after returning to the back benches at Westminster, she has put her name to two resolutions by recalcitrant members over the regulations and workings of MCC.
These seek greater accountability in the running of the club. One refers to the threat of disciplinary action in the rules and the other concerns “improving involvement in decision making”, which particularly relates to MCC’s attempt to drop the Eton v Harrow and Varsity match at Lord’s without consulting the membership.
Patel, who resigned as home secretary last September and whose son is a keen cricketer, was on the waiting list for MCC membership for several years. Her chance to join came when funds were swiftly needed to maintain the ground and pay employees when no cricket was possible during the Covid-19 pandemic.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/priti-patel-goes-in-to-bat-for-greater-control-at-lords-mfxnpwvln
Sorry if that's offensive to unionists but I just don't. It's Ireland, part of a separate island. It's when, not if, they unite.
The Conservative Party has sacked security staff and cleaners to try to bolster its election war chest after months of leadership chaos.
The Times has been told that members of security and cleaning teams, some of whom had worked at the Matthew Parker Street headquarters in London for many years, had been let go to save money before local elections next month and the general election, expected in 2024.
Tory sources feared donors might be “spooked” by the move, which is unlikely to save vast sums due to the relatively low salaries the staff were on. One said: “It will be interesting to know what the donors think. If they think, ‘If it’s that bad, why should I waste my money?’ Or will it prompt them to say, ‘I better shore them up with £1 million?’ ” They said: “It’s sad because, obviously, we all want to win the next election, but it’s not a great look.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tory-hq-sacks-cleaners-to-boost-elections-war-chest-hqzr7pjv5
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dafb98e4-dc3a-11ed-9cc2-0f7e26ed83eb?shareToken=5798b1bd05dbd06fcd44c5a94f33496b
Bit like the DfE.
The world would be a much better place if nationhood, flags, and national anthems were entirely abolished.
Have a nice and peace-filled day everyone xx
p.s. perhaps when Leon's aliens come and visit planet earth all this may happen. That was certainly the gist of the wonderful Carl Sagan's theorising.
"I mean, ultimately, if it came to it, Rishi could just put his hand in his pocket."
However, spoiling the ship of state by cutting the tar budget has been fashionable for a while now. (See courts, hospital consultants doing their own secretarial work, anyone in the public sector wrestling with wobbly IT etc).
It's got to be everyone's hope that smallish, well-focused bits of spending can unlock noticeable improvements. Sadly, I don't think Conservatives are interested any more.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/86d24d4c-dc6e-11ed-a0a8-657f9e54fc6a?shareToken=afdd9f784d46b0872e98133cf5b0f6c8
I am ambivalent to Northern Ireland and it has to be upto the populace to decide their future
However, since the benefits they have with access to the single market and the need to keep the peace I expect the present position to continue
Alabama shooting: Four dead at Dadeville 16th birthday party
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65293737
I'd be upset but the most common sentiment towards Northern Ireland on the mainland has been indifference for decades, and most Britons have never been there.
https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/1647763010348253192?t=pgtXpaet11JpRIw49K8KPQ&s=19
"Tucker Carlson pushed a fake version of a U.S. intelligence document about Ukrainian war casualties. It was doctored by a fraud podcaster who claimed to be a Russian woman from Luhansk. In reality, Sarah Bils is a former U.S. Navy clerk from New Jersey—and she pocketed all the money she claimed to raise for Russian causes."
What you're essentially arguing for is the abolition of people's common humanity because you're so blinkered you associate their frailties with the most readily visible totems.
How does that work if Norniron and/or Scotland secede as a result? You no longer have a Britain do you? Why not be honest and replace all references to Britain or the UK with England?
Because that is what the surveys show. Little Englanders not caring one way or another about the union.
Sunak, a former investment banker who devises his own spreadsheets for use in government, will argue that poor maths skills are costing the British economy.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/1b553810-dc9e-11ed-9cc2-0f7e26ed83eb?shareToken=af03f348489fc6e6d8998cc011c7495f
The worst bit of the Good Friday Agreement is how it sets in stone that division, and prevents progress to secular politics.
The rest is simply the extrapolation of present day trends laiden with assumptions and a lack of imagination as to how it could change or fail to change.
Whether it lead to good decision making is a different question.
So they answered reflexively "Brexit" to any and every such question, to get the message across.
I wouldn't take it wholly literally, although people do of course.
WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!
In simple reality though, it IS England not Britain or UK. NornIron and Scotland both voted to remain but get overruled by England. Even now, we have a settlement in Northern Ireland which the people there support, and the English politicians are still trying to overturn it...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/17/judge-delays-dominion-and-fox-news-trial-until-tuesday
I like the way they argue that it would set a terrible precedent were they to be found liable for knowingly peddling defamatory lies.
Fox accuses Dominion of cherrypicking evidence and has argued that it is defending the first amendment, and that a win for Dominion would lead to more lawsuits against media outlets and weaken press protections in the US...
Its the only moral way forward.
Even more depressing, according to the Gunviolence archive, there were 7 mass shootings yesterday (10 killed, 39 injured in toto) - though the one mentioned was the worst, with another 20 people injured on top of the 4 killed.
The criteria is 4 or more people killed or injured in any incident, and there is already another one reported this morning.
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting
(Also, to what extent is not understanding spreadsheets a maths issue and to what extent an IT issue? Finally, who still uses Excel for major databases?)
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/16/ranked-choice-voting-minnesota-00089505
... At issue was ranked choice voting, a wonky reform that advocates are convinced will help drain the toxins from our national politics. Ranked choice voting allows voters to list their top three or more candidates, eliminates the last-place finisher and then redistributes votes to the remaining candidates until one emerges with a majority. The approach has been quietly making gains across the country, but it burst into the public consciousness last year after it helped a centrist Democrat thwart Sarah Palin’s bid for Congress in Alaska.
Though a limited number of cities in Minnesota already use ranked choice voting, the bill before the committee would extend the system to all state and federal elections and give all municipalities the option of adopting the reform. Alaska and Maine also have ranked choice voting, though in both states it was adopted through voter referendums; Minnesota would be the first to establish ranked choice voting through the legislative process...
Mr. Pioneers, you are categorically wrong on a factual basis.
"In simple reality though, it IS England not Britain or UK. NornIron and Scotland both voted to remain but get overruled by England. Even now, we have a settlement in Northern Ireland which the people there support, and the English politicians are still trying to overturn it... "
Every vote counted equally in the referendum. No constituent part (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland) voted as a bloc. There was no electoral college, and this was known about and not contested prior to the vote being held.
Your outrage at the 'overruling' of a minority by a majority in a referendum is absurd, and contrary to democracy and numeracy.
I apologise if that sounds harsh and I am trying to be polite, but while wailing and gnashing of teeth that the electorate voted one way is one thing, claiming somehow it was unfair for a majority vote in a referendum to count is just silly.
Creating spreadsheets really is a poor use of Prime Ministerial time, which is an incredibly scarce resource. If Rishi thinks in spreadsheets, give him a full-time standby Excel bod to create spreadsheets on demand.
Secondly, if a spreadsheet is an important part of Rishi's thought process, then I'm concerned about the job he's in. A lot of what PMs have to do is about judgement calls, adjudicating between two claims that aren't easily expressed as numbers or formulas. It speaks to the image of Sunak as a promising but junior analyst who needs to let go of some things before they're ready for the Big Office.
It's the sort of thing I can imagine Gordon Brown doing.
Spreadsheet skills are key to management of course, though far from all managers can read one. Notably the SNP managers for example.
Can someone explain to me what Rishi meant by everybody doing some sort of maths until 18?
For example, my grandson did four A-levels one of them being physics. Would that count?
And his sister is doing three, including psychology, which I gather includes a certain amount of statistics. Would that count?
Henry II had it invaded to try and provide some land for his last son, John (renowned for being bad at almost everything and for almost everyone).
Sunak is ultimately in charge of the nation's budget which is numbers so I am very happy that he is applying some rigorous thought to it.
If it's a matter of basic numeracy, it should be possible to teach that well before the old school leaving age, and making it compulsory until 18 and devising new qualifications are just political gimmicks springing from a fundamental lack of understanding. And quite frankly I think some people do have a kind of mental block where maths and even arithmetic are concerned, and saying that shouldn't be socially acceptable is no help at all.
If it's a matter of attracting more people to study proper maths at a higher level, then I haven't seen anything in the proposals being floated that would help with that. But I'm not really convinced we need a lot more professional mathematicians, so much as more people just to listen to the ones we have where their work is relevant to other activities.
I seem to remember something about someone being a traitor, a traitor to his prince. He brought strangers into Ireland, and they’ve been there ever, since!
Pure displacement activity.
Excel is a powerful, quick tool for some tasks. Quickly comparing sets of numbers, generate some simple graphs…
I quite often rough out complex calculations using Excel (sort of) as maths paper, for example
I take your point - this was a UK-wide referendum. And that is fine as long as you have the consent of the minority to do as the majority direct them.
The problem is that the minority did not give that consent. And we continue to suffer the political difficulties that arise from a minority having their strongly expressed opinion overruled.
I express no outrage. Merely analysis. Remember that I voted for Brexit, so I am not objecting against a result I voted for. I am highlighting a perception - backed up by an awful lot of evidence including the polls in the OP - that so many people in the majority - England - either do not care about the other home nations or would fling them off to save "Britain"/"the UK" even as they destroy it.
If people are unionists (and I am not) then care and maintenance of the union has to be a priority. We can't just impose the will of England over the others HUYFD-style. Not when part of the Union is now voting more for nationalist parties and has a legal right to a border poll in the peace treaty which binds it...
This time it's the EU in England, independence in Scotland and unification in Ireland.
The United Kingdom has also delivered Brexit as Conservative voters wanted and the UK remains together with Rishi having effectively removed the border in the Irish Sea.
Given Unionist parties combined still win more votes and seats than Nationalist parties at Stormont there is unlikely to be a border poll any time soon anyway even if SF are now largest party. Not least as the Alliance Party of NI still oppose one too
We are remarkably prejudiced against maths, engineering and science in this country.
I know we have noted similar issues in other professions in the past where individuals drummed out of the profession in an area miraculously reappear either elsewhere in this country in positions in related areas or abroad.
Is this a big issue here?
The entire Brexit vote, save for about three people, was about sticking it to The Man. Burn down my house to prove my point? You betcha, where are the Swan Vestas. Amusing and telling that the exception is Jezza - ie if forced to think not of an abstract idea (eg Scottish independence) but a concrete possibility (eg Jezza as PM) then the enthusiasm for Brexit diminishes because the shit just got real, but the sentiment is easy to understand.
Or maybe not!
Unfortunately, Labour's keystone policy of vindictiveness towards private schools will only make it worse.
"Too clever by half" is one of the most damning putdowns an Englishman can use about another.
Mr. Pioneers, but by those terms you effectively ignore the vote so long as the minority refuse to concede defeat.
If we'd voted 52% to Remain, should we have left had the 48% of Leavers refused to consent (to use your term)?
Education: just on maths, I remember Labour's key skills tosh (maths, English, IT, I think). I was spared maths as I took it for A-level but the others were utterly useless.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic must inevitably unite because they are the same island? The SNP should ignore 40-45% wanting independence because Britain is an island and so must always be united? Puerto Rico and Hawaii should not be in the USA because they are separate islands to the mainland? Corsica cannot be part of France since France isn't an island, so its separate?
There are plenty of good reasons why the island of Ireland might or should unify politically. That it should be because it's an island is the dumbest possible reason. You could equally claim Ireland and Britain should reunite because were part of the same island group.
Islands are allowed to be divided politically, and it can be the appropriate choice. The question is whether it is right in this case, to which the GB public are pretty meh about.
I could see a situation where, and thanks to AI perhaps, you could have a number of programs focussed on keeping people’s numeracy active, dealing with basic economic considerations such as applying maths to tax, mortgages, cost of living etc.
These could all be online like the theory test for driving so that each pupil has access to the system (maybe with facial recognition to avoid getting others to take for you) and each module has a learning pack online followed by online testing that doesn’t require teacher marking.
You could have it so that you cannot move on to next module until you have passed your current one and you cannot be considered to have completed your education until you have passed modules.
Probably completely fantastical but I can see how improving practical maths using current tech would be very beneficial to people as individuals and the country without needing huge amounts of human oversight.
Edit to add, one of my nephews was applying for a job in a financial services company (having chosen not to go to university) and prior to interview he had to complete their online test which was questions which were maths problems which he would encounter at work. He had the learning pack online and a series of test papers and a time limit to complete and submit his actual online test. So if an offshore fin services provider can have something suitable created I would hope a government could manage it.
In the 2019 general election after Leave won the EU referendum the DUP and UUP combined got 41% and SF and the SDLP combined got 38%.
So it has actually made sod all difference
That is quite a difference and will percolate through the populations as time goes on.
I wouldn't judge it by the 2019 general election.
As far as I am concerned you can keep your private schools, just force them to provide a decent percentage of bursaries to the genuinely gifted but genuinely poor. Grammar schools on the other hand, be rid. I don't want my tax pounds paying for social climbers. If parents want what they consider to be an elite education they can pay for it themselves, including VAT. I don't want to pay for them.
Fund world beating education provision for all, and we'd leave Germany standing.
Speculate to accumulate.