Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
No Reform aren't old school Tories, Churchill, Macmillan or Baldwin or Disraeli are not who Reform are emulating.
What they are is a populist party of the nationalist right primarily, combining some of the jingiostic British patriotism and suspicion of foreigners which could occasionally be found in some Tory leaders like Salisbury and Thatcher with some of the small state, low tax policies of Thatcher on economics. Thatcher was more of a pragmatist than Farage on issues like the EEA though and nor would be she have gone in for removing the 2 child benefit cap as a sop to working class voters with children on benefits funded by middle class taxpayers and she was never as anti immigrant as many in Reform are either, indeed she welcomed immigrants who contributed to our country regardless of their ethnicity or religion who worked hard
That's,a good assessment. Reform are much closer to MAGA then they are to "old school tories". To suggest otherwise is absurd and misleading.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
"Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War", chapter 4:
As with pertussis, the DHSS took the JCVI’s advice that it should intensify the anti-CRS [Congenital Rubella Syndrome] campaign, but that it should do so by getting local Area Health Authorities to work with women, rather than through a ‘crash’ national campaign. Implementation was delayed by the general election, but the plans were carried through by the new Thatcher administration in June 1979. As an interim measure, the government tried to ensure that immunisation rates remained as high as possible among school girls by distributing information leaflets through the Health Education Council in November 1978. The DHSS also made a concerted effort to target immigrant communities where the rates of rubella were known to be higher and potential mothers were much less likely to have come through the school system or to have been in contact with health services before and during the early stages of pregnancy.
Looks to me like @rcs1000 's imputation was spot on.
So you are saying that because Thatcher supported vaccination against rubella, she would also have supported any and all vaccine programmes thereafter, regardless of the facts of the case.
It's a bit like the term 'conspiracy theorist' - not being a 'conspiracy theorist' means you can never again identify something as a conspiracy. Not being an 'anti-vaxxer' apparently means unstinting support for any vaccination programme that might ever be devised. If one decides that one campaign was a good thing, but one might not be such a good thing, one has fallen off the wagon.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
Fear can be about things other than death in a concentration camp. After all I’m a straight white British born male so I’m not in anyone’s sights. No, the fear is of the sort of slow (or fast) erosion of the rule of law, of evidence based policy on health or the environment, and the rights of minorities or less fortunate people in society, that equivalents of Reform have overseen in Turkey, Hungary, Slovakia, India, Israel, Belarus and Georgia. And, as we’re seeing slowly unfold, in the USA.
Might be misplaced, might not, but again I need more than others’ enthusiasm to convince me. I need living examples of populist right wing movements actually doing good for a developed country rather than following the usual playbook. Argentina and Italy are ones to watch, but Argentina is not a developed country (and needed radical, destructive reform) and Italy remains TBD.
And all the fear of what has happened in Trump's USA is entirely reasonable. Because Farage explicity portrays Trump as a model to follow, and is happy to present himself as his biggest fan.
What else could people reasonably think? There is a lot of self-delusion at large currently on this, both in the media and in broader society.
+100
Anyone who welcomes the rise of Reform is either stupid, or wicked, or both.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
Where does Freeland call essentially for Starmer to quit?
He says Rayner's loss is a fucking nightmare for Labour and it is.
“her fall will exacerbate all the doubts about the PM and his ability to keep Labour in power”
Whatever the Blessed Margaret would have thought about Covid jabs is spectacularly irrelevant since she's long dead. Quite why she would have been infallible on this anyway when she was wrong about so much else is another question.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
I don’t work in Finance, and I left the UK for a job opportunity.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
"Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War", chapter 4:
As with pertussis, the DHSS took the JCVI’s advice that it should intensify the anti-CRS [Congenital Rubella Syndrome] campaign, but that it should do so by getting local Area Health Authorities to work with women, rather than through a ‘crash’ national campaign. Implementation was delayed by the general election, but the plans were carried through by the new Thatcher administration in June 1979. As an interim measure, the government tried to ensure that immunisation rates remained as high as possible among school girls by distributing information leaflets through the Health Education Council in November 1978. The DHSS also made a concerted effort to target immigrant communities where the rates of rubella were known to be higher and potential mothers were much less likely to have come through the school system or to have been in contact with health services before and during the early stages of pregnancy.
Looks to me like @rcs1000 's imputation was spot on.
So you are saying that because Thatcher supported vaccination against rubella, she would also have supported any and all vaccine programmes thereafter, regardless of the facts of the case.
It's a bit like the term 'conspiracy theorist' - not being a 'conspiracy theorist' means you can never again identify something as a conspiracy. Not being an 'anti-vaxxer' apparently means unstinting support for any vaccination programme that might ever be devised. If one decides that one campaign was a good thing, but one might not be such a good thing, one has fallen off the wagon.
It's extraordinarily stupid.
Go on, then, provide an example of Thatcher not supporting vaccination.
We call you a conspiracy theorist because you seem to believe most of them. MH17, Ukrainian bioweapon labs, climate change is a hoax... and now anti-vax too.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
I don’t work in Finance, and I left the UK for a job opportunity.
Next.
You said you left "partly because of Brexit" on several occasions. Do I have to find the quotations?
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
Trump has a cure for autism? That really is fantastic news. My autistic son will be relieved.
To be fair to President Trump, at least he is questioning why autism rates have rocketed. It has been reported that RFK blames paracetamol in pregnancy, and a report is expected soon.
Are autism rates rocketing?
Or do we just diagnose it now when it wouldn't have been in the past?
Yes and yes. The definition of autism is now much wider than it was in the past. Think Sherlock Holmes (or any character really) as played by Benedict Cumberbatch, rather than the Rain Man. But even allowing for that, diagnostic rates have been rocketing.
I'd suggest it has almost become fashionable too. Endless magazine articles, usually women, how I realised why I was the way I was at forty... (Autism, natch).
A bit like being gluten I tolerant be ame very much a fashionable thing. Helpful for those who are genuinely gluten intolerant.
I am a little suspicious of upper middle class friends who suddenly find their kid has ADHD / are on the autistic spectrum after a private assessment when they hit their A-Levels and tell me all about how useful all the extra time little Timmy will be getting in exams.
Is it so odd? It passes the sniff test aka order of magnitude check. Prevalence in children is about 1-2%, so maybe 2-4% of families.
I've related on pb before just how many of my pharmacy students get extra time in exams for one thing or another. Not all autism for sure, but anxiety, and other conditions. Many hard to prove. It's not 1-2 percent. For all reasons id say 20 percent are getting extra time for 'reasons'. My belief is most are gaming a very lenient system.
Why wouldn’t they? See also, the benefits system.
Yes - I think the ones who don't are fools. See also mitigating circumstances in exams. If your claim is accepted and you fail (under 40 percent) you get a free hit at the exam. Claims can be as simple as bad back, migraine, x relative is ill/dying etc. Just claim. Nothing to lose.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place
Trump has a cure for autism? That really is fantastic news. My autistic son will be relieved.
To be fair to President Trump, at least he is questioning why autism rates have rocketed. It has been reported that RFK blames paracetamol in pregnancy, and a report is expected soon.
Are autism rates rocketing?
Or do we just diagnose it now when it wouldn't have been in the past?
Yes and yes. The definition of autism is now much wider than it was in the past. Think Sherlock Holmes (or any character really) as played by Benedict Cumberbatch, rather than the Rain Man. But even allowing for that, diagnostic rates have been rocketing.
I'd suggest it has almost become fashionable too. Endless magazine articles, usually women, how I realised why I was the way I was at forty... (Autism, natch).
A bit like being gluten I tolerant be ame very much a fashionable thing. Helpful for those who are genuinely gluten intolerant.
I am a little suspicious of upper middle class friends who suddenly find their kid has ADHD / are on the autistic spectrum after a private assessment when they hit their A-Levels and tell me all about how useful all the extra time little Timmy will be getting in exams.
Is it so odd? It passes the sniff test aka order of magnitude check. Prevalence in children is about 1-2%, so maybe 2-4% of families.
I've related on pb before just how many of my pharmacy students get extra time in exams for one thing or another. Not all autism for sure, but anxiety, and other conditions. Many hard to prove. It's not 1-2 percent. For all reasons id say 20 percent are getting extra time for 'reasons'. My belief is most are gaming a very lenient system.
While I'm sure that's true, there's also lots of evidence that extra time and the like have very little impact on actual student output.
(This is true to an extraordinary extent. If you share exam questions the night before, it makes essentially no difference to results the next day,)
Trump has a cure for autism? That really is fantastic news. My autistic son will be relieved.
To be fair to President Trump, at least he is questioning why autism rates have rocketed. It has been reported that RFK blames paracetamol in pregnancy, and a report is expected soon.
Are autism rates rocketing?
Or do we just diagnose it now when it wouldn't have been in the past?
Yes and yes. The definition of autism is now much wider than it was in the past. Think Sherlock Holmes (or any character really) as played by Benedict Cumberbatch, rather than the Rain Man. But even allowing for that, diagnostic rates have been rocketing.
I'd suggest it has almost become fashionable too. Endless magazine articles, usually women, how I realised why I was the way I was at forty... (Autism, natch).
A bit like being gluten I tolerant be ame very much a fashionable thing. Helpful for those who are genuinely gluten intolerant.
I am a little suspicious of upper middle class friends who suddenly find their kid has ADHD / are on the autistic spectrum after a private assessment when they hit their A-Levels and tell me all about how useful all the extra time little Timmy will be getting in exams.
Is it so odd? It passes the sniff test aka order of magnitude check. Prevalence in children is about 1-2%, so maybe 2-4% of families.
I've related on pb before just how many of my pharmacy students get extra time in exams for one thing or another. Not all autism for sure, but anxiety, and other conditions. Many hard to prove. It's not 1-2 percent. For all reasons id say 20 percent are getting extra time for 'reasons'. My belief is most are gaming a very lenient system.
Shouldn't pharamacists take as much time as needed to be right? Why not give 'em all the extra time and see what happens...
Most of our exams are not time limited. You should be able to complete well within the time.
However have you seen patients in pharmacies? They hate being made to wait for the prescriptions... Speed is everything!
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
"Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War", chapter 4:
As with pertussis, the DHSS took the JCVI’s advice that it should intensify the anti-CRS [Congenital Rubella Syndrome] campaign, but that it should do so by getting local Area Health Authorities to work with women, rather than through a ‘crash’ national campaign. Implementation was delayed by the general election, but the plans were carried through by the new Thatcher administration in June 1979. As an interim measure, the government tried to ensure that immunisation rates remained as high as possible among school girls by distributing information leaflets through the Health Education Council in November 1978. The DHSS also made a concerted effort to target immigrant communities where the rates of rubella were known to be higher and potential mothers were much less likely to have come through the school system or to have been in contact with health services before and during the early stages of pregnancy.
Looks to me like @rcs1000 's imputation was spot on.
So you are saying that because Thatcher supported vaccination against rubella, she would also have supported any and all vaccine programmes thereafter, regardless of the facts of the case.
It's a bit like the term 'conspiracy theorist' - not being a 'conspiracy theorist' means you can never again identify something as a conspiracy. Not being an 'anti-vaxxer' apparently means unstinting support for any vaccination programme that might ever be devised. If one decides that one campaign was a good thing, but one might not be such a good thing, one has fallen off the wagon.
It's extraordinarily stupid.
Quite...
Does anybody know what the grift is with the anti-vax ?
Is there a financial gain? That was Wakefield's motivation from the very beginning. Or is it political support? A way of corralling the gullible and easily manipulated.
Trump has a cure for autism? That really is fantastic news. My autistic son will be relieved.
To be fair to President Trump, at least he is questioning why autism rates have rocketed. It has been reported that RFK blames paracetamol in pregnancy, and a report is expected soon.
Are autism rates rocketing?
Or do we just diagnose it now when it wouldn't have been in the past?
Yes and yes. The definition of autism is now much wider than it was in the past. Think Sherlock Holmes (or any character really) as played by Benedict Cumberbatch, rather than the Rain Man. But even allowing for that, diagnostic rates have been rocketing.
I'd suggest it has almost become fashionable too. Endless magazine articles, usually women, how I realised why I was the way I was at forty... (Autism, natch).
A bit like being gluten I tolerant be ame very much a fashionable thing. Helpful for those who are genuinely gluten intolerant.
I am a little suspicious of upper middle class friends who suddenly find their kid has ADHD / are on the autistic spectrum after a private assessment when they hit their A-Levels and tell me all about how useful all the extra time little Timmy will be getting in exams.
Is it so odd? It passes the sniff test aka order of magnitude check. Prevalence in children is about 1-2%, so maybe 2-4% of families.
I've related on pb before just how many of my pharmacy students get extra time in exams for one thing or another. Not all autism for sure, but anxiety, and other conditions. Many hard to prove. It's not 1-2 percent. For all reasons id say 20 percent are getting extra time for 'reasons'. My belief is most are gaming a very lenient system.
Shouldn't pharamacists take as much time as needed to be right? Why not give 'em all the extra time and see what happens...
Most of our exams are not time limited. You should be able to complete well within the time.
However have you seen patients in pharmacies? They hate being made to wait for the prescriptions... Speed is everything!
Mine are sent by the GP. By the time I arrive it's already done. But I know there are other circumstances, of course.
Trump has a cure for autism? That really is fantastic news. My autistic son will be relieved.
To be fair to President Trump, at least he is questioning why autism rates have rocketed. It has been reported that RFK blames paracetamol in pregnancy, and a report is expected soon.
Are autism rates rocketing?
Or do we just diagnose it now when it wouldn't have been in the past?
Yes and yes. The definition of autism is now much wider than it was in the past. Think Sherlock Holmes (or any character really) as played by Benedict Cumberbatch, rather than the Rain Man. But even allowing for that, diagnostic rates have been rocketing.
I'd suggest it has almost become fashionable too. Endless magazine articles, usually women, how I realised why I was the way I was at forty... (Autism, natch).
A bit like being gluten I tolerant be ame very much a fashionable thing. Helpful for those who are genuinely gluten intolerant.
I am a little suspicious of upper middle class friends who suddenly find their kid has ADHD / are on the autistic spectrum after a private assessment when they hit their A-Levels and tell me all about how useful all the extra time little Timmy will be getting in exams.
Is it so odd? It passes the sniff test aka order of magnitude check. Prevalence in children is about 1-2%, so maybe 2-4% of families.
I've related on pb before just how many of my pharmacy students get extra time in exams for one thing or another. Not all autism for sure, but anxiety, and other conditions. Many hard to prove. It's not 1-2 percent. For all reasons id say 20 percent are getting extra time for 'reasons'. My belief is most are gaming a very lenient system.
Shouldn't pharamacists take as much time as needed to be right? Why not give 'em all the extra time and see what happens...
Most of our exams are not time limited. You should be able to complete well within the time.
However have you seen patients in pharmacies? They hate being made to wait for the prescriptions... Speed is everything!
Trump has a cure for autism? That really is fantastic news. My autistic son will be relieved.
To be fair to President Trump, at least he is questioning why autism rates have rocketed. It has been reported that RFK blames paracetamol in pregnancy, and a report is expected soon.
Are autism rates rocketing?
Or do we just diagnose it now when it wouldn't have been in the past?
Yes and yes. The definition of autism is now much wider than it was in the past. Think Sherlock Holmes (or any character really) as played by Benedict Cumberbatch, rather than the Rain Man. But even allowing for that, diagnostic rates have been rocketing.
I'd suggest it has almost become fashionable too. Endless magazine articles, usually women, how I realised why I was the way I was at forty... (Autism, natch).
A bit like being gluten I tolerant be ame very much a fashionable thing. Helpful for those who are genuinely gluten intolerant.
I am a little suspicious of upper middle class friends who suddenly find their kid has ADHD / are on the autistic spectrum after a private assessment when they hit their A-Levels and tell me all about how useful all the extra time little Timmy will be getting in exams.
Is it so odd? It passes the sniff test aka order of magnitude check. Prevalence in children is about 1-2%, so maybe 2-4% of families.
I've related on pb before just how many of my pharmacy students get extra time in exams for one thing or another. Not all autism for sure, but anxiety, and other conditions. Many hard to prove. It's not 1-2 percent. For all reasons id say 20 percent are getting extra time for 'reasons'. My belief is most are gaming a very lenient system.
While I'm sure that's true, there's also lots of evidence that extra time and the like have very little impact on actual student output.
(This is true to an extraordinary extent. If you share exam questions the night before, it makes essentially no difference to results the next day,)
On the last point - is that still true in the world of AI?
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Trump has a cure for autism? That really is fantastic news. My autistic son will be relieved.
To be fair to President Trump, at least he is questioning why autism rates have rocketed. It has been reported that RFK blames paracetamol in pregnancy, and a report is expected soon.
Are autism rates rocketing?
Or do we just diagnose it now when it wouldn't have been in the past?
Yes and yes. The definition of autism is now much wider than it was in the past. Think Sherlock Holmes (or any character really) as played by Benedict Cumberbatch, rather than the Rain Man. But even allowing for that, diagnostic rates have been rocketing.
I'd suggest it has almost become fashionable too. Endless magazine articles, usually women, how I realised why I was the way I was at forty... (Autism, natch).
A bit like being gluten I tolerant be ame very much a fashionable thing. Helpful for those who are genuinely gluten intolerant.
I am a little suspicious of upper middle class friends who suddenly find their kid has ADHD / are on the autistic spectrum after a private assessment when they hit their A-Levels and tell me all about how useful all the extra time little Timmy will be getting in exams.
Is it so odd? It passes the sniff test aka order of magnitude check. Prevalence in children is about 1-2%, so maybe 2-4% of families.
I've related on pb before just how many of my pharmacy students get extra time in exams for one thing or another. Not all autism for sure, but anxiety, and other conditions. Many hard to prove. It's not 1-2 percent. For all reasons id say 20 percent are getting extra time for 'reasons'. My belief is most are gaming a very lenient system.
Why wouldn’t they? See also, the benefits system.
Yes - I think the ones who don't are fools. See also mitigating circumstances in exams. If your claim is accepted and you fail (under 40 percent) you get a free hit at the exam. Claims can be as simple as bad back, migraine, x relative is ill/dying etc. Just claim. Nothing to lose.
Rather a bleak way of looking at life. Some people have pride in themselves and see themselves as honest, confidence in their ability and are content with failing a test if they don't meet the mark.
Trump has a cure for autism? That really is fantastic news. My autistic son will be relieved.
To be fair to President Trump, at least he is questioning why autism rates have rocketed. It has been reported that RFK blames paracetamol in pregnancy, and a report is expected soon.
Are autism rates rocketing?
Or do we just diagnose it now when it wouldn't have been in the past?
Yes and yes. The definition of autism is now much wider than it was in the past. Think Sherlock Holmes (or any character really) as played by Benedict Cumberbatch, rather than the Rain Man. But even allowing for that, diagnostic rates have been rocketing.
I'd suggest it has almost become fashionable too. Endless magazine articles, usually women, how I realised why I was the way I was at forty... (Autism, natch).
A bit like being gluten I tolerant be ame very much a fashionable thing. Helpful for those who are genuinely gluten intolerant.
I am a little suspicious of upper middle class friends who suddenly find their kid has ADHD / are on the autistic spectrum after a private assessment when they hit their A-Levels and tell me all about how useful all the extra time little Timmy will be getting in exams.
Is it so odd? It passes the sniff test aka order of magnitude check. Prevalence in children is about 1-2%, so maybe 2-4% of families.
I've related on pb before just how many of my pharmacy students get extra time in exams for one thing or another. Not all autism for sure, but anxiety, and other conditions. Many hard to prove. It's not 1-2 percent. For all reasons id say 20 percent are getting extra time for 'reasons'. My belief is most are gaming a very lenient system.
While I'm sure that's true, there's also lots of evidence that extra time and the like have very little impact on actual student output.
(This is true to an extraordinary extent. If you share exam questions the night before, it makes essentially no difference to results the next day,)
I agree. In practice many or most of the extra timers don't need or use it. On type of exam, an OSCE (Foxy will know) is like a mini consultation. Normally 10 mins, extra timers get twelve and a half. Almost always done in under ten.
There were 890 people arrested at a demonstration against the ban on the group Palestine Action in London on Saturday, the Metropolitan Police say.
The majority of the arrests were for supporting a proscribed group under the Terrorism Act, while police said 17 were also arrested for assaults on police officers "after the protest turned violent".
I think there is some talk of the accused refusing the bail conditions and therefore clogging up remand with thousands of pensioners.
The excuse Government ministers are now giving for the arrests that there is something that they are unable to disclose to us something that makes supporting Palestine Action a genuinely awful terrorist activity. Now, there might be something some members of the core group have planned to do, like killing a soldier or burning a synagogue, but how the hell are these protestors supposed to know that?
There are going to be loads of pensioners coming up in front of a judge who - for the first time - finally find out the nature of the group they are supporting as the CPS/Crown Office makes a case behind closed doors. Surely there is something for the defence there? Or worse - ministers have simply made this up and there is no real underlying reason for it, and they are just trying to scare people into not protesting with these vague allusions.
I don't actually get what they are protesting about. It's not Palestine/Gaza per se, because you can protest about that just fine, every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Is it free speech? I bet none of them cared a fig for Connolly. Is it government overstepping the mark? I can understand if people don't trust the government. The Southport case had huge issues with that. I also sense that even if it does come out that P A were planning a 'genuine' act a lot of this mob wouldn't care, just as many reformers are in love with Connolly.
The perception is the government is using the Terrorism Act to suppress peaceful protest for Gaza. There is nothing special about Palestine Action themselves - there are n+1 pro-Palestine action groups in the UK, so the whole point is to protest the gross mischaracterisation of peaceful protest as terrorism.
The Connolly case is a silly comparison. She incited people to kill - read the tweet - something that has been an offence in E&W for centuries. The PA protestors are wearing t-shirts with the name of a group that the government has banned but has refused to explain why.
To say that the government is suppressing peaceful protest on Gaza is just weird. Is that what it's about? Connolly did a stupid thing and has been punished. My point was that some free speech means different things. Is what she posted fine and dandy? No, of course not. But neither are millions of other tweets that don't get persued by the police.
Frankly I think anyone deliberately getting arrested for supporting PA is guilty of wasting police time.
I'm sure we are all curious as to government reasons. It must come out at some point. But if people are required not to know facts in criminal trials as it may endanger the process then we must wait, no matter how frustrating it is.
Well that really is authoritarian. Why wouldn't that apply to all people committing criminal offences?
What you're effectively arguing for is government-approved peaceful protest. You must understand the implications of that.
It's an interesting point. Most protests tend to be legal. And yes of course sometimes people will feel that their cause justifies breaking the law. I do understand that. But how far can you go? Did the IRA get power sharing for Sein Fein by killing people?
To some the actions of PA have already crossed the threshold for terrorism but I sense that is not a majority view on pb. The government claims there is something that cannot be told about why they have been prosrcribed. And until that is revealed we are in limbo.
I do not accept that protesting about Gaza has been restricted. And I do think that these people deliberately getting arrested are being stupid, but again I sense I am in a minority on pb.
The people who are deliberately getting arrested have been manipulated. It’s up to you whether you think that makes them stupid or not
Trump has a cure for autism? That really is fantastic news. My autistic son will be relieved.
To be fair to President Trump, at least he is questioning why autism rates have rocketed. It has been reported that RFK blames paracetamol in pregnancy, and a report is expected soon.
Are autism rates rocketing?
Or do we just diagnose it now when it wouldn't have been in the past?
Yes and yes. The definition of autism is now much wider than it was in the past. Think Sherlock Holmes (or any character really) as played by Benedict Cumberbatch, rather than the Rain Man. But even allowing for that, diagnostic rates have been rocketing.
I'd suggest it has almost become fashionable too. Endless magazine articles, usually women, how I realised why I was the way I was at forty... (Autism, natch).
A bit like being gluten I tolerant be ame very much a fashionable thing. Helpful for those who are genuinely gluten intolerant.
I am a little suspicious of upper middle class friends who suddenly find their kid has ADHD / are on the autistic spectrum after a private assessment when they hit their A-Levels and tell me all about how useful all the extra time little Timmy will be getting in exams.
Is it so odd? It passes the sniff test aka order of magnitude check. Prevalence in children is about 1-2%, so maybe 2-4% of families.
I've related on pb before just how many of my pharmacy students get extra time in exams for one thing or another. Not all autism for sure, but anxiety, and other conditions. Many hard to prove. It's not 1-2 percent. For all reasons id say 20 percent are getting extra time for 'reasons'. My belief is most are gaming a very lenient system.
Why wouldn’t they? See also, the benefits system.
Yes - I think the ones who don't are fools. See also mitigating circumstances in exams. If your claim is accepted and you fail (under 40 percent) you get a free hit at the exam. Claims can be as simple as bad back, migraine, x relative is ill/dying etc. Just claim. Nothing to lose.
Rather a bleak way of looking at life. Some people have pride in themselves and see themselves as honest, confidence in their ability and are content with failing a test if they don't meet the mark.
Sadly such people (and I am among their number) get trampled by life, by and large.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
"Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War", chapter 4:
As with pertussis, the DHSS took the JCVI’s advice that it should intensify the anti-CRS [Congenital Rubella Syndrome] campaign, but that it should do so by getting local Area Health Authorities to work with women, rather than through a ‘crash’ national campaign. Implementation was delayed by the general election, but the plans were carried through by the new Thatcher administration in June 1979. As an interim measure, the government tried to ensure that immunisation rates remained as high as possible among school girls by distributing information leaflets through the Health Education Council in November 1978. The DHSS also made a concerted effort to target immigrant communities where the rates of rubella were known to be higher and potential mothers were much less likely to have come through the school system or to have been in contact with health services before and during the early stages of pregnancy.
Looks to me like @rcs1000 's imputation was spot on.
So you are saying that because Thatcher supported vaccination against rubella, she would also have supported any and all vaccine programmes thereafter, regardless of the facts of the case.
It's a bit like the term 'conspiracy theorist' - not being a 'conspiracy theorist' means you can never again identify something as a conspiracy. Not being an 'anti-vaxxer' apparently means unstinting support for any vaccination programme that might ever be devised. If one decides that one campaign was a good thing, but one might not be such a good thing, one has fallen off the wagon.
It's extraordinarily stupid.
Quite...
Does anybody know what the grift is with the anti-vax ?
Is there a financial gain? That was Wakefield's motivation from the very beginning. Or is it political support? A way of corralling the gullible and easily manipulated.
Is that true on Wakefield? I always thought he was a true believer.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place
AND SO CLOSE TO TEBAY SERVICES
Is it your birthplace or some cherished memory?
That there are people who don't know that Carnforth is an actual place by virtue of the fact that much of Brief Encounter was filmed there suggests a rapidly advancing collapse of civilization. To reach middle age in ignorance of Tebay services is bad too, but not as troubling for the future of civilization..
Trump has a cure for autism? That really is fantastic news. My autistic son will be relieved.
To be fair to President Trump, at least he is questioning why autism rates have rocketed. It has been reported that RFK blames paracetamol in pregnancy, and a report is expected soon.
Are autism rates rocketing?
Or do we just diagnose it now when it wouldn't have been in the past?
Yes and yes. The definition of autism is now much wider than it was in the past. Think Sherlock Holmes (or any character really) as played by Benedict Cumberbatch, rather than the Rain Man. But even allowing for that, diagnostic rates have been rocketing.
I'd suggest it has almost become fashionable too. Endless magazine articles, usually women, how I realised why I was the way I was at forty... (Autism, natch).
A bit like being gluten I tolerant be ame very much a fashionable thing. Helpful for those who are genuinely gluten intolerant.
I am a little suspicious of upper middle class friends who suddenly find their kid has ADHD / are on the autistic spectrum after a private assessment when they hit their A-Levels and tell me all about how useful all the extra time little Timmy will be getting in exams.
Is it so odd? It passes the sniff test aka order of magnitude check. Prevalence in children is about 1-2%, so maybe 2-4% of families.
I've related on pb before just how many of my pharmacy students get extra time in exams for one thing or another. Not all autism for sure, but anxiety, and other conditions. Many hard to prove. It's not 1-2 percent. For all reasons id say 20 percent are getting extra time for 'reasons'. My belief is most are gaming a very lenient system.
Why wouldn’t they? See also, the benefits system.
Yes - I think the ones who don't are fools. See also mitigating circumstances in exams. If your claim is accepted and you fail (under 40 percent) you get a free hit at the exam. Claims can be as simple as bad back, migraine, x relative is ill/dying etc. Just claim. Nothing to lose.
Rather a bleak way of looking at life. Some people have pride in themselves and see themselves as honest, confidence in their ability and are content with failing a test if they don't meet the mark.
It's the system. It became so bad at Portsmouth Uni that they changed it to 'Fit to sit'. Essentially if you say the exam you were saying that there was no reason for mitigation. I can see Bath doing similar at some point.
Trump has a cure for autism? That really is fantastic news. My autistic son will be relieved.
To be fair to President Trump, at least he is questioning why autism rates have rocketed. It has been reported that RFK blames paracetamol in pregnancy, and a report is expected soon.
Are autism rates rocketing?
Or do we just diagnose it now when it wouldn't have been in the past?
Yes and yes. The definition of autism is now much wider than it was in the past. Think Sherlock Holmes (or any character really) as played by Benedict Cumberbatch, rather than the Rain Man. But even allowing for that, diagnostic rates have been rocketing.
I'd suggest it has almost become fashionable too. Endless magazine articles, usually women, how I realised why I was the way I was at forty... (Autism, natch).
A bit like being gluten I tolerant be ame very much a fashionable thing. Helpful for those who are genuinely gluten intolerant.
I am a little suspicious of upper middle class friends who suddenly find their kid has ADHD / are on the autistic spectrum after a private assessment when they hit their A-Levels and tell me all about how useful all the extra time little Timmy will be getting in exams.
Is it so odd? It passes the sniff test aka order of magnitude check. Prevalence in children is about 1-2%, so maybe 2-4% of families.
I've related on pb before just how many of my pharmacy students get extra time in exams for one thing or another. Not all autism for sure, but anxiety, and other conditions. Many hard to prove. It's not 1-2 percent. For all reasons id say 20 percent are getting extra time for 'reasons'. My belief is most are gaming a very lenient system.
Shouldn't pharamacists take as much time as needed to be right? Why not give 'em all the extra time and see what happens...
Most of our exams are not time limited. You should be able to complete well within the time.
However have you seen patients in pharmacies? They hate being made to wait for the prescriptions... Speed is everything!
You can get that in Pharmacies?
In the 1980s you could definitely get it in pharmacies. Awkwardly they were in Bangkok, mainly around the Patpong area
But the speed was brilliant. It was called Captagon and it was made in Germany, I bought many hundreds then sold them back in the UK. But I was such a shit drug dealer I contrived to make a loss, because I got so buzzed I ended up enthusiastically giving them away so everyone had a good time
Weirdly, decades later Assad’s Syria became THE global source of illicit Captagon, which is much abused in strictly Islamic countries (Iran, Saudi) where you can’t easily get drunk
I'm reading about the early 80s a lot at the moment and the comparison with the Alliance gives me hope. At times before 1983 it looked as if the Alliance would sweep to power but it all evaporated in the end. Most right thinking people hope the same happens to the racists too.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
"Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War", chapter 4:
As with pertussis, the DHSS took the JCVI’s advice that it should intensify the anti-CRS [Congenital Rubella Syndrome] campaign, but that it should do so by getting local Area Health Authorities to work with women, rather than through a ‘crash’ national campaign. Implementation was delayed by the general election, but the plans were carried through by the new Thatcher administration in June 1979. As an interim measure, the government tried to ensure that immunisation rates remained as high as possible among school girls by distributing information leaflets through the Health Education Council in November 1978. The DHSS also made a concerted effort to target immigrant communities where the rates of rubella were known to be higher and potential mothers were much less likely to have come through the school system or to have been in contact with health services before and during the early stages of pregnancy.
Looks to me like @rcs1000 's imputation was spot on.
So you are saying that because Thatcher supported vaccination against rubella, she would also have supported any and all vaccine programmes thereafter, regardless of the facts of the case.
It's a bit like the term 'conspiracy theorist' - not being a 'conspiracy theorist' means you can never again identify something as a conspiracy. Not being an 'anti-vaxxer' apparently means unstinting support for any vaccination programme that might ever be devised. If one decides that one campaign was a good thing, but one might not be such a good thing, one has fallen off the wagon.
It's extraordinarily stupid.
Quite...
Does anybody know what the grift is with the anti-vax ?
Is there a financial gain? That was Wakefield's motivation from the very beginning. Or is it political support? A way of corralling the gullible and easily manipulated.
Is that true on Wakefield? I always thought he was a true believer.
It's been said that the first sale the really top con-artists make, is to themselves.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
"Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War", chapter 4:
As with pertussis, the DHSS took the JCVI’s advice that it should intensify the anti-CRS [Congenital Rubella Syndrome] campaign, but that it should do so by getting local Area Health Authorities to work with women, rather than through a ‘crash’ national campaign. Implementation was delayed by the general election, but the plans were carried through by the new Thatcher administration in June 1979. As an interim measure, the government tried to ensure that immunisation rates remained as high as possible among school girls by distributing information leaflets through the Health Education Council in November 1978. The DHSS also made a concerted effort to target immigrant communities where the rates of rubella were known to be higher and potential mothers were much less likely to have come through the school system or to have been in contact with health services before and during the early stages of pregnancy.
Looks to me like @rcs1000 's imputation was spot on.
So you are saying that because Thatcher supported vaccination against rubella, she would also have supported any and all vaccine programmes thereafter, regardless of the facts of the case.
It's a bit like the term 'conspiracy theorist' - not being a 'conspiracy theorist' means you can never again identify something as a conspiracy. Not being an 'anti-vaxxer' apparently means unstinting support for any vaccination programme that might ever be devised. If one decides that one campaign was a good thing, but one might not be such a good thing, one has fallen off the wagon.
It's extraordinarily stupid.
Quite...
Does anybody know what the grift is with the anti-vax ?
Is there a financial gain? That was Wakefield's motivation from the very beginning. Or is it political support? A way of corralling the gullible and easily manipulated.
Is that true on Wakefield? I always thought he was a true believer.
It's been said that the first sale the really top con-artists make, is to themselves.
I've no time for him but I did believe he thought he had found something important.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place
AND SO CLOSE TO TEBAY SERVICES
Is it your birthplace or some cherished memory?
We’ve all got to be conceived somewhere. For me it was probably a cabin on the Glasgow to Belfast ferry, or less romantically a Belfast B&B.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Great idea. How about inviting RFK jnr to run the NHS? He'll surely haul it out of its managed decline. (Probably by drastically reducing the headcount of sick uns that its looking after by virtue of his brilliant, original thinking).
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Malhotra claims to be citing the UKHSA's own data. He claims that in the 70+ cohort, you had to vaccinate 2500 people to prevent a single Covid hospitalisation, with the numbers increasing massively for anyone under that age.
I think that some people having an adverse reaction to a new but necessary treatment is a sad but inevitable fact. However, I also think that if true, that's a very low level of effectiveness for what is a tested but still untried medicine. If true, it indicates that a more nuanced approach might have been desirable - though obviously this could not have been known at the time.
Anyway, the topic doesn't particularly interest me - it's certainly not a hill I'm interested in defending.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Great idea. How about inviting RFK jnr to run the NHS? He'll surely haul it out of its managed decline. (Probably by drastically reducing the headcount of sick uns that its looking after by virtue of his brilliant, original thinking).
Do you not understand there’s a difference between “someone who speaks at a party conference” and “someone appointed to run the entire NHS”?
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
I never believe anyone who talks about peak Reform.
Further to our brief SW Norfolk discussion yesterday, Thetford Castle ward is up on Weds 24 Sept. Shouid be a Reform gain, theyll want to be 15 points clear or so to be on target to gain the seat, anything over 10 and they are 'ahead'. Tories absolutely must come second if their vote is recovering at all and at 25% plus and be as close to Ref as possible
I'm reading about the early 80s a lot at the moment and the comparison with the Alliance gives me hope. At times before 1983 it looked as if the Alliance would sweep to power but it all evaporated in the end. Most right thinking people hope the same happens to the racists too.
Ah, "breaking the mould". It would indeed be ironic if jackanapes like Farage, Dorries and Jenkyns manage to do what Owen, Jenkins and Williams fell short of.
Trump has a cure for autism? That really is fantastic news. My autistic son will be relieved.
To be fair to President Trump, at least he is questioning why autism rates have rocketed. It has been reported that RFK blames paracetamol in pregnancy, and a report is expected soon.
Are autism rates rocketing?
Or do we just diagnose it now when it wouldn't have been in the past?
Yes and yes. The definition of autism is now much wider than it was in the past. Think Sherlock Holmes (or any character really) as played by Benedict Cumberbatch, rather than the Rain Man. But even allowing for that, diagnostic rates have been rocketing.
I'd suggest it has almost become fashionable too. Endless magazine articles, usually women, how I realised why I was the way I was at forty... (Autism, natch).
A bit like being gluten I tolerant be ame very much a fashionable thing. Helpful for those who are genuinely gluten intolerant.
I am a little suspicious of upper middle class friends who suddenly find their kid has ADHD / are on the autistic spectrum after a private assessment when they hit their A-Levels and tell me all about how useful all the extra time little Timmy will be getting in exams.
Is it so odd? It passes the sniff test aka order of magnitude check. Prevalence in children is about 1-2%, so maybe 2-4% of families.
I've related on pb before just how many of my pharmacy students get extra time in exams for one thing or another. Not all autism for sure, but anxiety, and other conditions. Many hard to prove. It's not 1-2 percent. For all reasons id say 20 percent are getting extra time for 'reasons'. My belief is most are gaming a very lenient system.
Shouldn't pharamacists take as much time as needed to be right? Why not give 'em all the extra time and see what happens...
Most of our exams are not time limited. You should be able to complete well within the time.
However have you seen patients in pharmacies? They hate being made to wait for the prescriptions... Speed is everything!
Mine are sent by the GP. By the time I arrive it's already done. But I know there are other circumstances, of course.
You’re lucky. It takes our surgery three or four days to deliver prescriptions the half mile to the pharmacy.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place
AND SO CLOSE TO TEBAY SERVICES
Is it your birthplace or some cherished memory?
We’ve all got to be conceived somewhere. For me it was probably a cabin on the Glasgow to Belfast ferry, or less romantically a Belfast B&B.
Well, something, or someone was going up and down.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place
AND SO CLOSE TO TEBAY SERVICES
Is it your birthplace or some cherished memory?
We’ve all got to be conceived somewhere. For me it was probably a cabin on the Glasgow to Belfast ferry, or less romantically a Belfast B&B.
I find both quite romantic
I’ve never thought to ask where I was conceived. Now it’s too late (Dad dead, mum gaga)
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Great idea. How about inviting RFK jnr to run the NHS? He'll surely haul it out of its managed decline. (Probably by drastically reducing the headcount of sick uns that its looking after by virtue of his brilliant, original thinking).
Do you not understand there’s a difference between “someone who speaks at a party conference” and “someone appointed to run the entire NHS”?
What are you? Six years old?
LOL. Giving a platform at a conference which is supposed to be a platform for government to a nutjob recycling conspiracy theories is the sort of thing that has given us the Trump administration. These things have consequences, old boy.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place
AND SO CLOSE TO TEBAY SERVICES
Is it your birthplace or some cherished memory?
We’ve all got to be conceived somewhere. For me it was probably a cabin on the Glasgow to Belfast ferry, or less romantically a Belfast B&B.
I find both quite romantic
I’ve never thought to ask where I was conceived. Now it’s too late (Dad dead, mum gaga)
Probably quite boring TBH. “Upstairs at home”
Camborne or Newent. The choice is yours. Unless they were on honeymoon in Wick.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
"Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War", chapter 4:
As with pertussis, the DHSS took the JCVI’s advice that it should intensify the anti-CRS [Congenital Rubella Syndrome] campaign, but that it should do so by getting local Area Health Authorities to work with women, rather than through a ‘crash’ national campaign. Implementation was delayed by the general election, but the plans were carried through by the new Thatcher administration in June 1979. As an interim measure, the government tried to ensure that immunisation rates remained as high as possible among school girls by distributing information leaflets through the Health Education Council in November 1978. The DHSS also made a concerted effort to target immigrant communities where the rates of rubella were known to be higher and potential mothers were much less likely to have come through the school system or to have been in contact with health services before and during the early stages of pregnancy.
Looks to me like @rcs1000 's imputation was spot on.
So you are saying that because Thatcher supported vaccination against rubella, she would also have supported any and all vaccine programmes thereafter, regardless of the facts of the case.
It's a bit like the term 'conspiracy theorist' - not being a 'conspiracy theorist' means you can never again identify something as a conspiracy. Not being an 'anti-vaxxer' apparently means unstinting support for any vaccination programme that might ever be devised. If one decides that one campaign was a good thing, but one might not be such a good thing, one has fallen off the wagon.
It's extraordinarily stupid.
Go on, then, provide an example of Thatcher not supporting vaccination.
We call you a conspiracy theorist because you seem to believe most of them. MH17, Ukrainian bioweapon labs, climate change is a hoax... and now anti-vax too.
You still don't seem to have realised the utter stupidity of your position. Thatcher could have supported, having looked at the science, any and all vaccine programmes that happened during her lifetime and before it. That does not mean that she would have accepted any and all programmes that took place after her death, given that every circumstance is different, every assessment of risks and harms is different, every medicine is different. We do not, and cannot know how she would have handled a public health crisis like Covid, and it is completely foolish to suggest that we do.
What is worse than foolish is your attitude, which is that one's belief or non-belief in completely different scenarios can be a facet of one's identity. Sometimes things are not conspiracies, sometimes they are. Sometimes vaccine programmes are essential, efficacious and effective, and sometimes they are not. You use judgement and intelligence and rigour to know which are which - you don't switch your brain off and decide 'I am not a conspiracy theorist; therefore I will not use my brain in this instance'.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place
AND SO CLOSE TO TEBAY SERVICES
Is it your birthplace or some cherished memory?
We’ve all got to be conceived somewhere. For me it was probably a cabin on the Glasgow to Belfast ferry, or less romantically a Belfast B&B.
Incidentally I’ve been driving around East Fife all day. It is really a beautiful corner of the world. Handsome little stone built villages and towns, misty rolling countryside - with dramatic hills in the distance
Also a brilliant Italian restaurant in “Kettlebridge”, which has won awards and everything yet did us a cracking lunch for 3 (plus some wine) for £80!
It made me happy you voted No, so this is still part of OUR beautiful shared country. You may feel differently
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place
AND SO CLOSE TO TEBAY SERVICES
Is it your birthplace or some cherished memory?
We’ve all got to be conceived somewhere. For me it was probably a cabin on the Glasgow to Belfast ferry, or less romantically a Belfast B&B.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Great idea. How about inviting RFK jnr to run the NHS? He'll surely haul it out of its managed decline. (Probably by drastically reducing the headcount of sick uns that its looking after by virtue of his brilliant, original thinking).
Do you not understand there’s a difference between “someone who speaks at a party conference” and “someone appointed to run the entire NHS”?
What are you? Six years old?
LOL. Giving a platform at a conference which is supposed to be a platform for government to a nutjob recycling conspiracy theories is the sort of thing that has given us the Trump administration. These things have consequences, old boy.
No, they don’t. It’s an opinion expressed at a podium about four years from the next election. Not a policy document, let alone some draft legislation
This centrist dad bed-wetting about Reform is as tedious as it is embarrassing
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place
AND SO CLOSE TO TEBAY SERVICES
Is it your birthplace or some cherished memory?
We’ve all got to be conceived somewhere. For me it was probably a cabin on the Glasgow to Belfast ferry, or less romantically a Belfast B&B.
I find both quite romantic
I’ve never thought to ask where I was conceived. Now it’s too late (Dad dead, mum gaga)
Trump has a cure for autism? That really is fantastic news. My autistic son will be relieved.
To be fair to President Trump, at least he is questioning why autism rates have rocketed. It has been reported that RFK blames paracetamol in pregnancy, and a report is expected soon.
Are autism rates rocketing?
Or do we just diagnose it now when it wouldn't have been in the past?
Yes and yes. The definition of autism is now much wider than it was in the past. Think Sherlock Holmes (or any character really) as played by Benedict Cumberbatch, rather than the Rain Man. But even allowing for that, diagnostic rates have been rocketing.
I'd suggest it has almost become fashionable too. Endless magazine articles, usually women, how I realised why I was the way I was at forty... (Autism, natch).
A bit like being gluten I tolerant be ame very much a fashionable thing. Helpful for those who are genuinely gluten intolerant.
I am a little suspicious of upper middle class friends who suddenly find their kid has ADHD / are on the autistic spectrum after a private assessment when they hit their A-Levels and tell me all about how useful all the extra time little Timmy will be getting in exams.
Is it so odd? It passes the sniff test aka order of magnitude check. Prevalence in children is about 1-2%, so maybe 2-4% of families.
I've related on pb before just how many of my pharmacy students get extra time in exams for one thing or another. Not all autism for sure, but anxiety, and other conditions. Many hard to prove. It's not 1-2 percent. For all reasons id say 20 percent are getting extra time for 'reasons'. My belief is most are gaming a very lenient system.
Shouldn't pharamacists take as much time as needed to be right? Why not give 'em all the extra time and see what happens...
Most of our exams are not time limited. You should be able to complete well within the time.
However have you seen patients in pharmacies? They hate being made to wait for the prescriptions... Speed is everything!
Mine are sent by the GP. By the time I arrive it's already done. But I know there are other circumstances, of course.
You’re lucky. It takes our surgery three or four days to deliver prescriptions the half mile to the pharmacy.
Repeat prescriptions are all on the NHS app now, request, GP approve, Pharmacy prepare and patient collect.
Trump has a cure for autism? That really is fantastic news. My autistic son will be relieved.
To be fair to President Trump, at least he is questioning why autism rates have rocketed. It has been reported that RFK blames paracetamol in pregnancy, and a report is expected soon.
Are autism rates rocketing?
Or do we just diagnose it now when it wouldn't have been in the past?
Yes and yes. The definition of autism is now much wider than it was in the past. Think Sherlock Holmes (or any character really) as played by Benedict Cumberbatch, rather than the Rain Man. But even allowing for that, diagnostic rates have been rocketing.
I'd suggest it has almost become fashionable too. Endless magazine articles, usually women, how I realised why I was the way I was at forty... (Autism, natch).
A bit like being gluten I tolerant be ame very much a fashionable thing. Helpful for those who are genuinely gluten intolerant.
I am a little suspicious of upper middle class friends who suddenly find their kid has ADHD / are on the autistic spectrum after a private assessment when they hit their A-Levels and tell me all about how useful all the extra time little Timmy will be getting in exams.
Is it so odd? It passes the sniff test aka order of magnitude check. Prevalence in children is about 1-2%, so maybe 2-4% of families.
I've related on pb before just how many of my pharmacy students get extra time in exams for one thing or another. Not all autism for sure, but anxiety, and other conditions. Many hard to prove. It's not 1-2 percent. For all reasons id say 20 percent are getting extra time for 'reasons'. My belief is most are gaming a very lenient system.
Shouldn't pharamacists take as much time as needed to be right? Why not give 'em all the extra time and see what happens...
Most of our exams are not time limited. You should be able to complete well within the time.
However have you seen patients in pharmacies? They hate being made to wait for the prescriptions... Speed is everything!
Mine are sent by the GP. By the time I arrive it's already done. But I know there are other circumstances, of course.
You’re lucky. It takes our surgery three or four days to deliver prescriptions the half mile to the pharmacy.
Repeat prescriptions are all on the NHS app now, request, GP approve, Pharmacy prepare and patient collect.
All true, but our pharmacy still says allow five working days...
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place
AND SO CLOSE TO TEBAY SERVICES
Is it your birthplace or some cherished memory?
We’ve all got to be conceived somewhere. For me it was probably a cabin on the Glasgow to Belfast ferry, or less romantically a Belfast B&B.
I was born in India, but conceived in the UK.
Did your parents go back to India so you could play cricket for the motherland? They must have been disappointed when you became a trainspotter instead.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Great idea. How about inviting RFK jnr to run the NHS? He'll surely haul it out of its managed decline. (Probably by drastically reducing the headcount of sick uns that its looking after by virtue of his brilliant, original thinking).
Do you not understand there’s a difference between “someone who speaks at a party conference” and “someone appointed to run the entire NHS”?
What are you? Six years old?
LOL. Giving a platform at a conference which is supposed to be a platform for government to a nutjob recycling conspiracy theories is the sort of thing that has given us the Trump administration. These things have consequences, old boy.
No, they don’t. It’s an opinion expressed at a podium about four years from the next election. Not a policy document, let alone some draft legislation
This centrist dad bed-wetting about Reform is as tedious as it is embarrassing
It really isn't. It's how this stuff gets normalised and enters the political bloodstream. Farage & co are attempting to do to the mainstream right what Trump/MAGA have done in the US, ie, supplant it with a grisly form of populism.
It's potentially disastrous and needs to be challenged at every opportunity. At least, then, we can't say we weren't warned.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place
AND SO CLOSE TO TEBAY SERVICES
Is it your birthplace or some cherished memory?
We’ve all got to be conceived somewhere. For me it was probably a cabin on the Glasgow to Belfast ferry, or less romantically a Belfast B&B.
Incidentally I’ve been driving around East Fife all day. It is really a beautiful corner of the world. Handsome little stone built villages and towns, misty rolling countryside - with dramatic hills in the distance
Also a brilliant Italian restaurant in “Kettlebridge”, which has won awards and everything yet did us a cracking lunch for 3 (plus some wine) for £80!
It made me happy you voted No, so this is still part of OUR beautiful shared country. You may feel differently
Well, I didn’t vote No of course, but I’m pretty sure normal service would have continued with nice restaurants in douce parts of Fife even if Scotland had voted Yes. We might even have let Spectator hacks through the barbed wire fence at the border (as promised by Ed Miliband of all people).
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Great idea. How about inviting RFK jnr to run the NHS? He'll surely haul it out of its managed decline. (Probably by drastically reducing the headcount of sick uns that its looking after by virtue of his brilliant, original thinking).
Do you not understand there’s a difference between “someone who speaks at a party conference” and “someone appointed to run the entire NHS”?
What are you? Six years old?
What a Pillock. Who next David Icke? What about Tommy Robinson? There are consequences to inviting nutters to speak at your conference.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
"Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War", chapter 4:
As with pertussis, the DHSS took the JCVI’s advice that it should intensify the anti-CRS [Congenital Rubella Syndrome] campaign, but that it should do so by getting local Area Health Authorities to work with women, rather than through a ‘crash’ national campaign. Implementation was delayed by the general election, but the plans were carried through by the new Thatcher administration in June 1979. As an interim measure, the government tried to ensure that immunisation rates remained as high as possible among school girls by distributing information leaflets through the Health Education Council in November 1978. The DHSS also made a concerted effort to target immigrant communities where the rates of rubella were known to be higher and potential mothers were much less likely to have come through the school system or to have been in contact with health services before and during the early stages of pregnancy.
Looks to me like @rcs1000 's imputation was spot on.
So you are saying that because Thatcher supported vaccination against rubella, she would also have supported any and all vaccine programmes thereafter, regardless of the facts of the case.
It's a bit like the term 'conspiracy theorist' - not being a 'conspiracy theorist' means you can never again identify something as a conspiracy. Not being an 'anti-vaxxer' apparently means unstinting support for any vaccination programme that might ever be devised. If one decides that one campaign was a good thing, but one might not be such a good thing, one has fallen off the wagon.
It's extraordinarily stupid.
Quite...
Does anybody know what the grift is with the anti-vax ?
Is there a financial gain? That was Wakefield's motivation from the very beginning. Or is it political support? A way of corralling the gullible and easily manipulated.
Is that true on Wakefield? I always thought he was a true believer.
According to the origin story podcast on anti-vax. He'd registered a patent for a single measles vaccine a few months prior to his paper on MMR and he manipulated his MMR research data. Later on he made money as an expert witness for claims against the vaccine manufacturers. He's still peddling his anti-vax lies in the states years after being totally discredited and struck-off.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Only a few thousand kids dead along the way I guess. Or no decent telecoms coverage in Essex because they're scared of 5G.
I kinda support your point, but don't pretend there aren't significant costs to going in this direction. I'm an off-the-shelf kind of guy - have a look at those countries doing better at stuff than the UK and copy that; recognise what we are doing well and keep going.
Suggesting that the COVID-19 vaccine gave the Queen cancer is not one of the most brilliant ideas of all time, imo, and one likely to kill people.
Before railway privatisation they used to have "priv" travel - most retired railway workers will have priv discount on tfl.
And with the railways being nationalised again I can see why they are trying to get the old perk back because it's been slowly given to rail workers over the past 5 years...
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place
AND SO CLOSE TO TEBAY SERVICES
Is it your birthplace or some cherished memory?
We’ve all got to be conceived somewhere. For me it was probably a cabin on the Glasgow to Belfast ferry, or less romantically a Belfast B&B.
Incidentally I’ve been driving around East Fife all day. It is really a beautiful corner of the world. Handsome little stone built villages and towns, misty rolling countryside - with dramatic hills in the distance
Also a brilliant Italian restaurant in “Kettlebridge”, which has won awards and everything yet did us a cracking lunch for 3 (plus some wine) for £80!
It made me happy you voted No, so this is still part of OUR beautiful shared country. You may feel differently
Well, I didn’t vote No of course, but I’m pretty sure normal service would have continued with nice restaurants in douce parts of Fife even if Scotland had voted Yes. We might even have let Spectator hacks through the barbed wire fence at the border (as promised by Ed Miliband of all people).
Makes you wonder how Leon can find a crust in places such as the US and India and so on which broke their links decades, even centuries, ago.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
"Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War", chapter 4:
As with pertussis, the DHSS took the JCVI’s advice that it should intensify the anti-CRS [Congenital Rubella Syndrome] campaign, but that it should do so by getting local Area Health Authorities to work with women, rather than through a ‘crash’ national campaign. Implementation was delayed by the general election, but the plans were carried through by the new Thatcher administration in June 1979. As an interim measure, the government tried to ensure that immunisation rates remained as high as possible among school girls by distributing information leaflets through the Health Education Council in November 1978. The DHSS also made a concerted effort to target immigrant communities where the rates of rubella were known to be higher and potential mothers were much less likely to have come through the school system or to have been in contact with health services before and during the early stages of pregnancy.
Looks to me like @rcs1000 's imputation was spot on.
So you are saying that because Thatcher supported vaccination against rubella, she would also have supported any and all vaccine programmes thereafter, regardless of the facts of the case.
It's a bit like the term 'conspiracy theorist' - not being a 'conspiracy theorist' means you can never again identify something as a conspiracy. Not being an 'anti-vaxxer' apparently means unstinting support for any vaccination programme that might ever be devised. If one decides that one campaign was a good thing, but one might not be such a good thing, one has fallen off the wagon.
It's extraordinarily stupid.
Quite...
Does anybody know what the grift is with the anti-vax ?
Is there a financial gain? That was Wakefield's motivation from the very beginning. Or is it political support? A way of corralling the gullible and easily manipulated.
Is that true on Wakefield? I always thought he was a true believer.
According to the origin story podcast on anti-vax. He'd registered a patent for a single measles vaccine a few months prior to his paper on MMR and he manipulated his MMR research data. Later on he made money as an expert witness for claims against the vaccine manufacturers. He's still peddling his anti-vax lies in the states years after being totally discredited and struck-off.
I've not listened to that but I'd suggest registering a few months before the paper isn't a slam dunk. Papers take time to write and often can be a struggle to publish. It's also possible that he truly believed it sensible to go for single vaccines and thought he would be wise to get on board....
Actually as I write that last bit, it does seem a bit odd!
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Only a few thousand kids dead along the way I guess. Or no decent telecoms coverage in Essex because they're scared of 5G.
I kinda support your point, but don't pretend there aren't significant costs to going in this direction. I'm an off-the-shelf kind of guy - have a look at those countries doing better at stuff than the UK and copy that; recognise what we are doing well and keep going.
Suggesting that the COVID-19 vaccine gave the Queen cancer is not one of the most brilliant ideas of all time, imo, and one likely to kill people.
The queen? I thought it was Charlie and Catherine.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place
AND SO CLOSE TO TEBAY SERVICES
Is it your birthplace or some cherished memory?
That there are people who don't know that Carnforth is an actual place by virtue of the fact that much of Brief Encounter was filmed there suggests a rapidly advancing collapse of civilization. To reach middle age in ignorance of Tebay services is bad too, but not as troubling for the future of civilization..
You probably won't be delighted by the existence of the "Brief Encounter Refreshment Room Bistro and Bar" there ?
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Great idea. How about inviting RFK jnr to run the NHS? He'll surely haul it out of its managed decline. (Probably by drastically reducing the headcount of sick uns that its looking after by virtue of his brilliant, original thinking).
Do you not understand there’s a difference between “someone who speaks at a party conference” and “someone appointed to run the entire NHS”?
What are you? Six years old?
LOL. Giving a platform at a conference which is supposed to be a platform for government to a nutjob recycling conspiracy theories is the sort of thing that has given us the Trump administration. These things have consequences, old boy.
No, they don’t. It’s an opinion expressed at a podium about four years from the next election. Not a policy document, let alone some draft legislation
This centrist dad bed-wetting about Reform is as tedious as it is embarrassing
It really isn't. It's how this stuff gets normalised and enters the political bloodstream. Farage & co are attempting to do to the mainstream right what Trump/MAGA have done in the US, ie, supplant it with a grisly form of populism.
It's potentially disastrous and needs to be challenged at every opportunity. At least, then, we can't say we weren't warned.
This discourse is effeminate and dull, but you do you
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Only a few thousand kids dead along the way I guess. Or no decent telecoms coverage in Essex because they're scared of 5G.
I kinda support your point, but don't pretend there aren't significant costs to going in this direction. I'm an off-the-shelf kind of guy - have a look at those countries doing better at stuff than the UK and copy that; recognise what we are doing well and keep going.
Suggesting that the COVID-19 vaccine gave the Queen cancer is not one of the most brilliant ideas of all time, imo, and one likely to kill people.
You're right, which is why I'm OK with Darwin Award winners taking themselves out of the electorate.
Its past the lagershed so to be blunt, if people want to be utter morons, and die as a result, then that's their choice - and once they don't get to vote anymore.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Only a few thousand kids dead along the way I guess. Or no decent telecoms coverage in Essex because they're scared of 5G.
I kinda support your point, but don't pretend there aren't significant costs to going in this direction. I'm an off-the-shelf kind of guy - have a look at those countries doing better at stuff than the UK and copy that; recognise what we are doing well and keep going.
Suggesting that the COVID-19 vaccine gave the Queen cancer is not one of the most brilliant ideas of all time, imo, and one likely to kill people.
The queen? I thought it was Charlie and Catherine.
You'll have to ask him. I think it's widely known the Queen had a particularly grim form of bone cancer, hence the mobility issues.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
"Covid vaccine gave KCIII cancer" is not "really fresh, original thinking" It's fucking bonkers and massively dangerous to public health.
It's actually more bonkers than Liz "I'll tell the bond market how much debt interest we'll pay them" Truss.
You do not legitimise those views by giving them a platform on the main stage at your conference. Not unless you're a shameless grifter who doesn't give a shit about the ordinary Britons whose lives you will blight along the way.
It's interesting how you're desperate to explain this away, when you would be all over a flat earth nutter (or similar) speaking at a fringe event at Labour conference. It's clear that you've already decided to vote Reform, and therefore you have to reject any scintilla of doubt as to whether you're going to do something monumentally damaging. There are a couple of ways this goes. Either you will rationalise this by starting to spout the anti-vax nonsense yourself, or you will contort yourself to deny that Farage and Reform are pushing anti-vax nonsense as part of a general anti-establishment crusade.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Great idea. How about inviting RFK jnr to run the NHS? He'll surely haul it out of its managed decline. (Probably by drastically reducing the headcount of sick uns that its looking after by virtue of his brilliant, original thinking).
Do you not understand there’s a difference between “someone who speaks at a party conference” and “someone appointed to run the entire NHS”?
What are you? Six years old?
LOL. Giving a platform at a conference which is supposed to be a platform for government to a nutjob recycling conspiracy theories is the sort of thing that has given us the Trump administration. These things have consequences, old boy.
No, they don’t. It’s an opinion expressed at a podium about four years from the next election. Not a policy document, let alone some draft legislation
This centrist dad bed-wetting about Reform is as tedious as it is embarrassing
I presume you have read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science. This is not bed wetting. It has real consequences, regardless of whether Reform comes to power or even adopt the ideas. Conspiracy theories on medical stuff causes people to die through ignorance and sometimes in their millions. This matters.
I was a complete twat tonight and thought the lunar eclipse would start at 7.30pm! Anyway, I took this shot (using a bog standard bridge camera) around 8.50pm as the eclipse was ending
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Only a few thousand kids dead along the way I guess. Or no decent telecoms coverage in Essex because they're scared of 5G.
I kinda support your point, but don't pretend there aren't significant costs to going in this direction. I'm an off-the-shelf kind of guy - have a look at those countries doing better at stuff than the UK and copy that; recognise what we are doing well and keep going.
Suggesting that the COVID-19 vaccine gave the Queen cancer is not one of the most brilliant ideas of all time, imo, and one likely to kill people.
The queen? I thought it was Charlie and Catherine.
You'll have to ask him. I think it's widely known the Queen had a particularly grim form of bone cancer, hence the mobility issues.
Is it? Mobility issues correlate pretty well with old age too.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Only a few thousand kids dead along the way I guess. Or no decent telecoms coverage in Essex because they're scared of 5G.
I kinda support your point, but don't pretend there aren't significant costs to going in this direction. I'm an off-the-shelf kind of guy - have a look at those countries doing better at stuff than the UK and copy that; recognise what we are doing well and keep going.
Suggesting that the COVID-19 vaccine gave the Queen cancer is not one of the most brilliant ideas of all time, imo, and one likely to kill people.
You're right, which is why I'm OK with Darwin Award winners taking themselves out of the electorate.
Its past the lagershed so to be blunt, if people want to be utter morons, and die as a result, then that's their choice - and once they don't get to vote anymore.
You're working under the assumption that this conspiracy theory applies to just the COVID-19 vaccine. It simply doesn't work like that; all vaccination rates has fallen off in MAGA areas.
The poor kid can't help it if their parents are anti-vaxxers, and the gradual loss of herd immunity for stuff like measles is killing vaccinated kids too.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.
Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd
As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)
He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026
On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.
It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham
But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is
The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.
I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks
I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.
Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?
lol
Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.
Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place
AND SO CLOSE TO TEBAY SERVICES
Is it your birthplace or some cherished memory?
We’ve all got to be conceived somewhere. For me it was probably a cabin on the Glasgow to Belfast ferry, or less romantically a Belfast B&B.
Incidentally I’ve been driving around East Fife all day. It is really a beautiful corner of the world. Handsome little stone built villages and towns, misty rolling countryside - with dramatic hills in the distance
Also a brilliant Italian restaurant in “Kettlebridge”, which has won awards and everything yet did us a cracking lunch for 3 (plus some wine) for £80!
It made me happy you voted No, so this is still part of OUR beautiful shared country. You may feel differently
Well, I didn’t vote No of course, but I’m pretty sure normal service would have continued with nice restaurants in douce parts of Fife even if Scotland had voted Yes. We might even have let Spectator hacks through the barbed wire fence at the border (as promised by Ed Miliband of all people).
But I like our Britishness…. I appreciate you do not!
St Andrews itself is bloody weird. As it is SO tiny and so dominated by a large university (much more than Oxford or Cambridge, which have actual towns beyond the gown) it is - by my reckoning - the youngest town in the UK? By median age?
Also the most beautiful. As in: human beauty. Every ten yards there’s another stunning 19 year old girl
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
"Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War", chapter 4:
As with pertussis, the DHSS took the JCVI’s advice that it should intensify the anti-CRS [Congenital Rubella Syndrome] campaign, but that it should do so by getting local Area Health Authorities to work with women, rather than through a ‘crash’ national campaign. Implementation was delayed by the general election, but the plans were carried through by the new Thatcher administration in June 1979. As an interim measure, the government tried to ensure that immunisation rates remained as high as possible among school girls by distributing information leaflets through the Health Education Council in November 1978. The DHSS also made a concerted effort to target immigrant communities where the rates of rubella were known to be higher and potential mothers were much less likely to have come through the school system or to have been in contact with health services before and during the early stages of pregnancy.
Looks to me like @rcs1000 's imputation was spot on.
So you are saying that because Thatcher supported vaccination against rubella, she would also have supported any and all vaccine programmes thereafter, regardless of the facts of the case.
It's a bit like the term 'conspiracy theorist' - not being a 'conspiracy theorist' means you can never again identify something as a conspiracy. Not being an 'anti-vaxxer' apparently means unstinting support for any vaccination programme that might ever be devised. If one decides that one campaign was a good thing, but one might not be such a good thing, one has fallen off the wagon.
It's extraordinarily stupid.
Quite...
Does anybody know what the grift is with the anti-vax ?
Is there a financial gain? That was Wakefield's motivation from the very beginning. Or is it political support? A way of corralling the gullible and easily manipulated.
Is that true on Wakefield? I always thought he was a true believer.
Wakefield held the patent for a single use measles vaccine.
He was also paid more than 400k from lawyers in lawsuits against the manufactures of the MMR vaccine for his "expert" testimony.
Here's the thing, though. I'm sure he was utterly sincere. It's just that -like all humans- he will have unconsciously sought out things that were convenient to him.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
"Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War", chapter 4:
As with pertussis, the DHSS took the JCVI’s advice that it should intensify the anti-CRS [Congenital Rubella Syndrome] campaign, but that it should do so by getting local Area Health Authorities to work with women, rather than through a ‘crash’ national campaign. Implementation was delayed by the general election, but the plans were carried through by the new Thatcher administration in June 1979. As an interim measure, the government tried to ensure that immunisation rates remained as high as possible among school girls by distributing information leaflets through the Health Education Council in November 1978. The DHSS also made a concerted effort to target immigrant communities where the rates of rubella were known to be higher and potential mothers were much less likely to have come through the school system or to have been in contact with health services before and during the early stages of pregnancy.
Looks to me like @rcs1000 's imputation was spot on.
So you are saying that because Thatcher supported vaccination against rubella, she would also have supported any and all vaccine programmes thereafter, regardless of the facts of the case.
It's a bit like the term 'conspiracy theorist' - not being a 'conspiracy theorist' means you can never again identify something as a conspiracy. Not being an 'anti-vaxxer' apparently means unstinting support for any vaccination programme that might ever be devised. If one decides that one campaign was a good thing, but one might not be such a good thing, one has fallen off the wagon.
It's extraordinarily stupid.
Quite...
Does anybody know what the grift is with the anti-vax ?
Is there a financial gain? That was Wakefield's motivation from the very beginning. Or is it political support? A way of corralling the gullible and easily manipulated.
Is that true on Wakefield? I always thought he was a true believer.
Wakefield held the patent for a single use measles vaccine.
Slight conflict of interest then... But is it unreasonable to argue he genuinely believed it the right thing? Or is it ALL grift?
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Great idea. How about inviting RFK jnr to run the NHS? He'll surely haul it out of its managed decline. (Probably by drastically reducing the headcount of sick uns that its looking after by virtue of his brilliant, original thinking).
Do you not understand there’s a difference between “someone who speaks at a party conference” and “someone appointed to run the entire NHS”?
What are you? Six years old?
LOL. Giving a platform at a conference which is supposed to be a platform for government to a nutjob recycling conspiracy theories is the sort of thing that has given us the Trump administration. These things have consequences, old boy.
No, they don’t. It’s an opinion expressed at a podium about four years from the next election. Not a policy document, let alone some draft legislation
This centrist dad bed-wetting about Reform is as tedious as it is embarrassing
I presume you have read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science. This is not bed wetting. It has real consequences, regardless of whether Reform comes to power or even adopt the ideas. Conspiracy theories on medical stuff causes people to die through ignorance and sometimes in their millions. This matters.
I refer you to the Lab Leak hypothesis, and the highly likely fact that science has already killed 20 million people, and destroyed entire economies, in this decade. A hypothesis which was vigorously, outrageously and scandalously repressed by who? Oh yes, the “good” scientists
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
"Covid vaccine gave KCIII cancer" is not "really fresh, original thinking" It's fucking bonkers and massively dangerous to public health.
It's actually more bonkers than Liz "I'll tell the bond market how much debt interest we'll pay them" Truss.
You do not legitimise those views by giving them a platform on the main stage at your conference. Not unless you're a shameless grifter who doesn't give a shit about the ordinary Britons whose lives you will blight along the way.
It's interesting how you're desperate to explain this away, when you would be all over a flat earth nutter (or similar) speaking at a fringe event at Labour conference. It's clear that you've already decided to vote Reform, and therefore you have to reject any scintilla of doubt as to whether you're going to do something monumentally damaging. There are a couple of ways this goes. Either you will rationalise this by starting to spout the anti-vax nonsense yourself, or you will contort yourself to deny that Farage and Reform are pushing anti-vax nonsense as part of a general anti-establishment crusade.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
"Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War", chapter 4:
As with pertussis, the DHSS took the JCVI’s advice that it should intensify the anti-CRS [Congenital Rubella Syndrome] campaign, but that it should do so by getting local Area Health Authorities to work with women, rather than through a ‘crash’ national campaign. Implementation was delayed by the general election, but the plans were carried through by the new Thatcher administration in June 1979. As an interim measure, the government tried to ensure that immunisation rates remained as high as possible among school girls by distributing information leaflets through the Health Education Council in November 1978. The DHSS also made a concerted effort to target immigrant communities where the rates of rubella were known to be higher and potential mothers were much less likely to have come through the school system or to have been in contact with health services before and during the early stages of pregnancy.
Looks to me like @rcs1000 's imputation was spot on.
So you are saying that because Thatcher supported vaccination against rubella, she would also have supported any and all vaccine programmes thereafter, regardless of the facts of the case.
It's a bit like the term 'conspiracy theorist' - not being a 'conspiracy theorist' means you can never again identify something as a conspiracy. Not being an 'anti-vaxxer' apparently means unstinting support for any vaccination programme that might ever be devised. If one decides that one campaign was a good thing, but one might not be such a good thing, one has fallen off the wagon.
It's extraordinarily stupid.
Quite...
Does anybody know what the grift is with the anti-vax ?
Is there a financial gain? That was Wakefield's motivation from the very beginning. Or is it political support? A way of corralling the gullible and easily manipulated.
Is that true on Wakefield? I always thought he was a true believer.
Wakefield held the patent for a single use measles vaccine.
Slight conflict of interest then... But is it unreasonable to argue he genuinely believed it the right thing? Or is it ALL grift?
Oh, I'm sure he was utterly sincere.
But people will always seek out things that are convenient to them. If you own an oil field, you will be naturally predisposed to think oil doesn't cause global warming. That's just regular cognitive dissonance.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Great idea. How about inviting RFK jnr to run the NHS? He'll surely haul it out of its managed decline. (Probably by drastically reducing the headcount of sick uns that its looking after by virtue of his brilliant, original thinking).
Do you not understand there’s a difference between “someone who speaks at a party conference” and “someone appointed to run the entire NHS”?
What are you? Six years old?
LOL. Giving a platform at a conference which is supposed to be a platform for government to a nutjob recycling conspiracy theories is the sort of thing that has given us the Trump administration. These things have consequences, old boy.
No, they don’t. It’s an opinion expressed at a podium about four years from the next election. Not a policy document, let alone some draft legislation
This centrist dad bed-wetting about Reform is as tedious as it is embarrassing
I presume you have read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science. This is not bed wetting. It has real consequences, regardless of whether Reform comes to power or even adopt the ideas. Conspiracy theories on medical stuff causes people to die through ignorance and sometimes in their millions. This matters.
I refer you to the Lab Leak hypothesis, and the highly likely fact that science has already killed 20 million people, and destroyed entire economies, in this decade. A hypothesis which was vigorously, outrageously and scandalously repressed by who? Oh yes, the “good” scientists
Who was the conspiracy theorist there, you moron?
When you add up penicillin, etc., science is probably up about 3-4 billion lives overall.
Sounds like a good trade. No one's right all the time.
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Great idea. How about inviting RFK jnr to run the NHS? He'll surely haul it out of its managed decline. (Probably by drastically reducing the headcount of sick uns that its looking after by virtue of his brilliant, original thinking).
Do you not understand there’s a difference between “someone who speaks at a party conference” and “someone appointed to run the entire NHS”?
What are you? Six years old?
LOL. Giving a platform at a conference which is supposed to be a platform for government to a nutjob recycling conspiracy theories is the sort of thing that has given us the Trump administration. These things have consequences, old boy.
No, they don’t. It’s an opinion expressed at a podium about four years from the next election. Not a policy document, let alone some draft legislation
This centrist dad bed-wetting about Reform is as tedious as it is embarrassing
I presume you have read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science. This is not bed wetting. It has real consequences, regardless of whether Reform comes to power or even adopt the ideas. Conspiracy theories on medical stuff causes people to die through ignorance and sometimes in their millions. This matters.
I refer you to the Lab Leak hypothesis, and the highly likely fact that science has already killed 20 million people, and destroyed entire economies, in this decade. A hypothesis which was vigorously, outrageously and scandalously repressed by who? Oh yes, the “good” scientists
Who was the conspiracy theorist there, you moron?
When you add up penicillin, etc., science is probably up about 3-4 billion lives overall.
Sounds like a good trade. No one's right all the time.
John Harris more or less echoing what I said about Starmer since 2020 - in a political world that is dominated more than ever by the cult of personality, a charisma free zone like Sir Keir is a lame duck. Events somehow conspired to hand him the keys to no10 on a plate, but I don’t really take back anything I said about the importance of personality ratings and charisma on politicians chances of winning office
Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform. Pa Woolie for the win.
We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.
You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it. Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.
Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.
Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.
Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.
Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.
Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.
I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.
It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.
Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.
Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.
Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.
Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.
The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.
Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist. I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.
I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
Great idea. How about inviting RFK jnr to run the NHS? He'll surely haul it out of its managed decline. (Probably by drastically reducing the headcount of sick uns that its looking after by virtue of his brilliant, original thinking).
Do you not understand there’s a difference between “someone who speaks at a party conference” and “someone appointed to run the entire NHS”?
What are you? Six years old?
LOL. Giving a platform at a conference which is supposed to be a platform for government to a nutjob recycling conspiracy theories is the sort of thing that has given us the Trump administration. These things have consequences, old boy.
No, they don’t. It’s an opinion expressed at a podium about four years from the next election. Not a policy document, let alone some draft legislation
This centrist dad bed-wetting about Reform is as tedious as it is embarrassing
I presume you have read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science. This is not bed wetting. It has real consequences, regardless of whether Reform comes to power or even adopt the ideas. Conspiracy theories on medical stuff causes people to die through ignorance and sometimes in their millions. This matters.
I refer you to the Lab Leak hypothesis, and the highly likely fact that science has already killed 20 million people, and destroyed entire economies, in this decade. A hypothesis which was vigorously, outrageously and scandalously repressed by who? Oh yes, the “good” scientists
Who was the conspiracy theorist there, you moron?
When you add up penicillin, etc., science is probably up about 3-4 billion lives overall.
Sounds like a good trade. No one's right all the time.
"Why is everyone so fucking stupid? Why aren't more people interrigent? Rike me?"
"I'm so Ronery So ronery So ronery and sadry arone There's no one Just me onry Sitting on my rittle throne I work rearry hard and make up get prans but, nobody listens, no one understands Seems rike no one takes me serirousry And so, I'm ronery A rittle ronery Poor rittle me There's no one I can rerate to Feewr rike a biwd in a cage It's kinda siwry but, not reawry because, it's fiwring my body with rage I'm the smartest, most crever, most physicawry fit but, nobody erse seems to rearrize it When I can the worrd maybe they'rr notice me And untiwr then, I'wr be ronery Yeaaaaah, a rittle ronery Poor rittle me..."
Why do you remain here if it’s so frustrating to have to deal with so many of us who are apparently stupid ?
Aren’t there other forums where your intellect is matched ? Or are you trying to show us the way to the light of true understanding?
Stop whining about the so called stupidity of others , you obviously love this forum !
I do love this forum
You shouldn’t take me TOO seriously
I’ve been busy all weekend doing family stuff and I’ve only had a chance to catch up with threads tonight (in a weird little hotel on the A1 in Northumberland)
The threads struck me as monumentally boring - lots of centrist dorks agreeing about the awfulness of Reform, and other stuff even less imaginative - so I thought I’d wade in and start a fight with everyone, to liven things up
Comments
It's a bit like the term 'conspiracy theorist' - not being a 'conspiracy theorist' means you can never again identify something as a conspiracy. Not being an 'anti-vaxxer' apparently means unstinting support for any vaccination programme that might ever be devised. If one decides that one campaign was a good thing, but one might not be such a good thing, one has fallen off the wagon.
It's extraordinarily stupid.
Anyone who welcomes the rise of Reform is either stupid, or wicked, or both.
I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/05/angela-rayner-exit-keir-starmer-labour-power
Quite why she would have been infallible on this anyway when she was wrong about so much else is another question.
Next.
We call you a conspiracy theorist because you seem to believe most of them. MH17, Ukrainian bioweapon labs, climate change is a hoax... and now anti-vax too.
Marketing, right?
AND SO CLOSE TO TEBAY SERVICES
Is it your birthplace or some cherished memory?
(This is true to an extraordinary extent. If you share exam questions the night before, it makes essentially no difference to results the next day,)
Late starting because of Trump, for a political angle.
However have you seen patients in pharmacies? They hate being made to wait for the prescriptions... Speed is everything!
Does anybody know what the grift is with the anti-vax ?
Is there a financial gain? That was Wakefield's motivation from the very beginning.
Or is it political support? A way of corralling the gullible and easily manipulated.
That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true
Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain
https://gloucesterservices.com/
Same firm, and there are four more.
But the speed was brilliant. It was called Captagon and it was made in Germany, I bought many hundreds then sold them back in the UK. But I was such a shit drug dealer I contrived to make a loss, because I got so buzzed I ended up enthusiastically giving them away so everyone had a good time
Weirdly, decades later Assad’s Syria became THE global source of illicit Captagon, which is much abused in strictly Islamic countries (Iran, Saudi) where you can’t easily get drunk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba'athist_Syrian_Captagon_industry
Most right thinking people hope the same happens to the racists too.
For me it was probably a cabin on the Glasgow to Belfast ferry, or less romantically a Belfast B&B.
Underground workers want extra travel perk on top of call for four-day week"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/07/london-tube-strikes-tfl-drivers-demand-75c-discount-trains
I think that some people having an adverse reaction to a new but necessary treatment is a sad but inevitable fact. However, I also think that if true, that's a very low level of effectiveness for what is a tested but still untried medicine. If true, it indicates that a more nuanced approach might have been desirable - though obviously this could not have been known at the time.
Anyway, the topic doesn't particularly interest me - it's certainly not a hill I'm interested in defending.
What are you? Six years old?
Tories absolutely must come second if their vote is recovering at all and at 25% plus and be as close to Ref as possible
I’ve never thought to ask where I was conceived. Now it’s too late (Dad dead, mum gaga)
Probably quite boring TBH. “Upstairs at home”
What is worse than foolish is your attitude, which is that one's belief or non-belief in completely different scenarios can be a facet of one's identity. Sometimes things are not conspiracies, sometimes they are. Sometimes vaccine programmes are essential, efficacious and effective, and sometimes they are not. You use judgement and intelligence and rigour to know which are which - you don't switch your brain off and decide 'I am not a conspiracy theorist; therefore I will not use my brain in this instance'.
Also a brilliant Italian restaurant in “Kettlebridge”, which has won awards and everything yet did us a cracking lunch for 3 (plus some wine) for £80!
It made me happy you voted No, so this is still part of OUR beautiful shared country. You may feel differently
This centrist dad bed-wetting about Reform is as tedious as it is embarrassing
It's potentially disastrous and needs to be challenged at every opportunity. At least, then, we can't say we weren't warned.
He's still peddling his anti-vax lies in the states years after being totally discredited and struck-off.
I kinda support your point, but don't pretend there aren't significant costs to going in this direction. I'm an off-the-shelf kind of guy - have a look at those countries doing better at stuff than the UK and copy that; recognise what we are doing well and keep going.
Suggesting that the COVID-19 vaccine gave the Queen cancer is not one of the most brilliant ideas of all time, imo, and one likely to kill people.
And with the railways being nationalised again I can see why they are trying to get the old perk back because it's been slowly given to rail workers over the past 5 years...
Actually as I write that last bit, it does seem a bit odd!
Its past the lagershed so to be blunt, if people want to be utter morons, and die as a result, then that's their choice - and once they don't get to vote anymore.
It's actually more bonkers than Liz "I'll tell the bond market how much debt interest we'll pay them" Truss.
You do not legitimise those views by giving them a platform on the main stage at your conference. Not unless you're a shameless grifter who doesn't give a shit about the ordinary Britons whose lives you will blight along the way.
It's interesting how you're desperate to explain this away, when you would be all over a flat earth nutter (or similar) speaking at a fringe event at Labour conference. It's clear that you've already decided to vote Reform, and therefore you have to reject any scintilla of doubt as to whether you're going to do something monumentally damaging. There are a couple of ways this goes. Either you will rationalise this by starting to spout the anti-vax nonsense yourself, or you will contort yourself to deny that Farage and Reform are pushing anti-vax nonsense as part of a general anti-establishment crusade.
The poor kid can't help it if their parents are anti-vaxxers, and the gradual loss of herd immunity for stuff like measles is killing vaccinated kids too.
St Andrews itself is bloody weird. As it is SO tiny and so dominated by a large university (much more than Oxford or Cambridge, which have actual towns beyond the gown) it is - by my reckoning - the youngest town in the UK? By median age?
Also the most beautiful. As in: human beauty. Every ten yards there’s another stunning 19 year old girl
At times today I thought I was back in Bishkek
He was also paid more than 400k from lawyers in lawsuits against the manufactures of the MMR vaccine for his "expert" testimony.
Here's the thing, though. I'm sure he was utterly sincere. It's just that -like all humans- he will have unconsciously sought out things that were convenient to him.
Who was the conspiracy theorist there, you moron?
But people will always seek out things that are convenient to them. If you own an oil field, you will be naturally predisposed to think oil doesn't cause global warming. That's just regular cognitive dissonance.
Sounds like a good trade. No one's right all the time.
Amazing to think that, unlike this centrist dad, he actually voted Starmer a mere year ago.
Plato’s fate beckons.
The difference is that you don't seem to realise it.
It’s not quite as fun as writing for the Spectator, I’m sure.
MARKETING
*stifles derisive laughter*
*lamentably fails*
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/07/angela-rayner-keir-starmer-labour-reform-nigel-farage
"I'm so Ronery
So ronery
So ronery and sadry arone
There's no one
Just me onry
Sitting on my rittle throne
I work rearry hard and make up get prans
but, nobody listens, no one understands
Seems rike no one takes me serirousry
And so, I'm ronery
A rittle ronery
Poor rittle me
There's no one I can rerate to
Feewr rike a biwd in a cage
It's kinda siwry
but, not reawry
because, it's fiwring my body with rage
I'm the smartest, most crever, most physicawry fit
but, nobody erse seems to rearrize it
When I can the worrd maybe they'rr notice me
And untiwr then, I'wr be ronery
Yeaaaaah, a rittle ronery
Poor rittle me..."
Aren’t there other forums where your intellect is matched ? Or are you trying to show us the way to the light of true understanding?
Stop whining about the so called stupidity of others , you obviously love this forum !
That niche seems taken.
You shouldn’t take me TOO seriously
I’ve been busy all weekend doing family stuff and I’ve only had a chance to catch up with threads tonight (in a weird little hotel on the A1 in Northumberland)
The threads struck me as monumentally boring - lots of centrist dorks agreeing about the awfulness of Reform, and other stuff even less imaginative - so I thought I’d wade in and start a fight with everyone, to liven things up
Is all! I still love everyone, really x