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Today reconfirmed why the Tories were right to ditch Boris Johnson – politicalbetting.com
Today reconfirmed why the Tories were right to ditch Boris Johnson – politicalbetting.com
Shocking evidence heard at the #CovidInquiry today, according to Patrick Vallance diaries from 2020, Boris Johnson believed old people should "accept their fate" and get Covid @theipaper https://t.co/LPPepyPBHU
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Presumably the then Chancellor knew about all of this and approved. Otherwise he would have resigned at the time or would at the very least have spoken up later on. Now what was his name again...
BBC said to have used similar ‘diversity training’ – take our quiz to see how you would you fare"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/31/conservative-interns-privilege-test-patchwork-foundation/
You know, all I needed from,Corbyn back in the day for his party splitting foibles was a credible explanation, in a speech for example, of his years as a "peace activist" and how he ended up.in the situations he had. I was more than willing to give him a hearing. But instead we got passive resistance and Occam's razor had to apply.
As someone has already commented, what we should be doing with the enquiry is establishing whether we took the best approach to Covid in the round, and what should the policy be if similar circumstances arise again. It seems to be more an airing of tittle tattle, which is a pity.
I still don't buy the 'Britain Trump' attempted comparisons. At the end of the day Boris is a good bullshitter, a good salesman, and has some areas where is makes the right call, but he is also very much a figure of the establishment mainstream (just with Brexit part of a fight within the mainstream party). Wild hair and bloviating remarks don't turn him into a dangerous radical, even if reports of stuff like this would hardly inspire confidence.
Some observations.
1. It was much hotter on the Northern Line than likely any day this year on Brighton beach;
2. I saw one of those The Dyke Project (for that is it) posters. "It's hard being gay in Gaza but I kissed lots of boys and now the nasty Israelis are bombing us" vibe. The poster said also no one is free until everyone is free and exhorted the UK to"stop funding Israel and the Israeli military". A very global gay concern I'm sure;
3. In Golders Green itself there were plenty of policemen and private security types around; and
4. I saw a group of presumably Jewish primary school age children trick or treating along the main road. With a police escort.
AN APOLOGY TO MISTER @Richard_Tyndall
Sorry old bean, constantly telling you to Shut the Fuck Up on the last thread was not my finest moment. Two LARGE gin and tonics and a dreamlike twilight at The Temple of Concord, Agrigento, got me over excited. Yes, I stand by my statement, you REALLY need to go the Tas Tepeler to understand how revolutionary they are (and I’ve been to pre-ceramic sites all over the Mid East) but phrasing it as YOU ARE A MORON, MOFO, SO STFU was less then elegant
I make no such apology to @bondegezou and I hope he is soon replaced by AI. GPT2 should easily suffice, indeed I already wonder if he is some kind of low-grade bot
Give these people a bit of a break for things said in the heat of the moment, even Boris.
You scored 15 / 20
According to this BBC measure, you're more privileged compared to others. Does this match your experience?
Me? privileged?
I am the grandson of humble immigrants to this country.
What Johnson loses in terms of the grey vote, could well be balanced by what he gains in terms of the type of cold eyed psychos who think Ayn Rand was a hopeless bleeding heart, and want to kill grandma immediately.
It's very much swings and roundabouts.
4. Primary school children should never need a police escort to be children. Intolerance needs to be challenged.
nothing about school, nothing really that would separate me from an Etonian, yet there is a clear opportunity divide between the lower middle and the top.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/31/conservative-interns-privilege-test-patchwork-foundation/
I presume it is this,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/creativediversity/allyshipapp
If you have a lockdown to bring down the incidence of the virus in this country, then having people travel through crowded airports, on planes, or into other countries is making it far more likely that the virus will be imported than that it will be exported.
Not sealing the border defeats the entire purpose of having a lockdown.
My view is lockdowns were a mistake but even if you still say we should have had one, it was done wrong. Schools should be the last place to close and the first to reopen, the border should be the other way around.
But the UK was locked down for, what, four months out of the 18 of covid, and there were severe travel restrictions throughout that period. (The US was worse, of course)
Bringing triumphs of policy ever since a bloke failed to consider the wider implications of half inching some fruit from a tree.
Most assessments wouldn't consider, for example, the societal costs of the op that means 12 weeks of work compared to the op that means two weeks off work. Some do, since health economists are interested in such things, but core NICE requirements don't tend to require it. It's muddied, of course, because if most people having said op are retired then the costs are less clear anyway.
I'm not arguing for or against letting the oldies have it (that argument has been done) or taking into account the wider societal costs, just that NICE, as a clinical and healthcare body, would not have it within their remit. I also appreciate the original comment was, of course, flippant.
Is voting LD a one of the markers? Voting intention might be a signifier of privilege but it is not a determinant.
hmmm, I think the authors of that test have a very narrow definition of not privileged!
Who didn't have an overwhelming feeling of dead when tightening was rumoured.
That alone is ample reason why we should never have had compulsory lockdowns albeit I understand why the government mandated the first one.
It was my time at university that gave me the self confidence that you see today.
The epiphanies you have when you realise you are the smartest person in most, if not all, rooms is life changing.
If you can't go to a nightclub in your own town, but can in Ibiza, there's something deeply wrong.
Especially when in your own town, you can't just not go clubbing, but can't go to restaurants, or other people's houses or much more. The restrictions on visiting people went way beyond four months.
Since the virus discriminated visciously by age it might have seemed bleeding obvious.
Government has a degree of accountability, not least to the electorate, and transparency, so we know the reasons why decisions were taken in our name.
Many individuals have kept diaries as their record of events - perhaps less for future inquiries as for future memoirs. It's been possible for those cited unfavourably in said diaries to deny what was said or suggest an agenda or to be more charitable claim a misinterpretation.
WhatsApp isn't any of that - it enables people to record their most personal thoughts and to share them. Should it be the kind of medium used in a professional working environment? If Cummings or others used WhatsApp in lieu of a diary they can't be surprised if one day what they said comes to light.
Yes, it was a very difficult time but this is Government - these are professional people trained to "make impossible decisions". Johnson schemed and manoeuvred for 20 years to become Conservative leader and Prime Minister - this was the job he always wanted. He was no political novice - neither was Cummings.
Not a dreadful way of calculating it before everyone goes all four Yorkshiremen.
The public will accept hard choices, sometimes, if their leaders are honest about the decisions. When they dissemble about it, they’re rightly condemned as cowards.
Acting the hard man, in secret, is just contemptible.
It seems that some people are reaching for the moral heights of the Holy Cross dispute in Northern Ireland.
I've been at meetings where I was the only white person present. Does that mean I'm [A] privileged, [B] not privileged, or [C] it doesn't make any difference at all?
At 21 I had a mortgage before I started my first job.
(Granny Eagles also contributed, but died before I could pay her back, although she would have refused the money, as did my parents.)