No deal Brexit impact

[daiking]

16 minutes ago, LA3222 said:

But then here you are, holding up the UK as a country which has done badly - when as @daiking points out, we've all done badly.

 

The only areas I have read about which have done well are countries under a dictatorship, pre-prepared countries as @joe90 said, and Africa.

 

I will say though, with the countries that have experienced SARs etc and the fact they did ok now - let's not forget, when they went though SARs etc, they did just as bad as we are now with COVID!

 

Africa is an area which seems vastly under reported. Why have they done well where Western countries with all their medical facilitates etc havent?

 

I would suggest the issue lies more with western Liberal attitudes. The minute the government tries to prohibit/restrict they are all up in arms about oppression, government heavy handedness etc. That makes government action very difficult. Christmas is a prime example, they made no allowance for Eid, yet we are for Christmas, why? Because your average westerner will just chin off any restrictions and do what the hell they like. Who then polices that? Look at what happened when pubs were told to shut at 10, everyone hit the local off licence and got pissed in the streets.

 

The government is not the primary issue, people and their willingness to disregard the issue and danger presented is. 

 

Equally the Government can't be 'strong' when EVERY decision taken is constantly sniped at/undermined by the press, the opposition party, the SNP etc. This sniping just validates the belief in citizens that the government don't know what they're doing so let's do what we like?‍♂️ 

 

One of the problems with Brexit is we are the first to do it. That we are led by the institutionally incompetent* is compounded by the fact there is no one to crib off. C’est la vie. Hopefully someone vaguely competent will come along in the next 20 years.

 

*Is this the fault of our EU membership? (not the EU per se). It looks awfully like our political class have been abrogating any responsibility they can to the EU for decades and suddenly they’re ill prepared to take it back.

[Galileo]

10 hours ago, daiking said:

...It looks awfully like our political class have been abrogating any responsibility they can to the EU for decades and suddenly they’re ill prepared to take it back.

 

Politicians of all persuasions have laid the blame for all manner of ills at the feet of the EU and its predecessors, as handy scapegoats to cover up for their own incompetence. If you spend 40 years painting an institution as the bogey man publicly while all along quietly at the front of that organisation pushing it in certain directions, then leave, your chickens are going to start to come home to roost.

No good will come from Brexit, or it's discussion for it is a faith driven cause not seated in logic and so though I have tried endlessly to provide facts, figures, counter every argument with sourced well researched answers and asked for just one tangible benefit, no conversation has ever ended well. Give or take a few percent, one half of the UK will now have to live with what the other half wanted, I only hope that the Brexiters were right all along and confound the logic, I really do, for my own, family and friends sake.

[daiking]

Just gonna leave this here ?

[Crofter]

13 hours ago, LA3222 said:

The only areas I have read about which have done well are countries under a dictatorship, pre-prepared countries as @joe90 said, and Africa.

 

I didn't know Jacinda Ardern was a dictator?

 

It's not true to say that the UK has done just as badly as other Western countries. I've not kept abreast of the figures as much in recent months but certainly at the start we were doing appalling badly, despite being late to the party and having the benefit of watching what the Italians were going through.

 

We are in that select group of nations whose leader has contracted the virus. You might put it down to bad luck, but I think there's also an element of truth in saying that if someone can't even keep themself safe, what chance is there of them keeping their country safe?

[Temp]

4 minutes ago, daiking said:

Just gonna leave this here ?

 

 

Last I heard Moderna one of the other vaccine makers had applied to US and EU regulators for approval but NOT the UK.

Edited December 1, 2020 by Temp

[daiking]

4 minutes ago, Temp said:

 

Last I heard Moderna had applied to US and EU regulators for approval but NOT the UK.

I’m trying to find a chart I saw yesterday but I don’t think we’ve ordered any/much Moderna. We’ve got a bit of Pfizer and sh*tloads of AstraZeneca of the front runners.

[PeterW]

This is the full list of what is ordered

 

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-government-secures-additional-2-million-doses-of-moderna-covid-19-vaccine

[Temp]

1 hour ago, Temp said:

 

Last I heard Moderna one of the other vaccine makers had applied to US and EU regulators for approval but NOT the UK.

 

Seems that's because the mhra are doing a rolling review. 

[LA3222]

7 hours ago, Crofter said:

I didn't know Jacinda Ardern was a dictator?

I don't believe I did say she was a dictator? I made a broad brush statement as the issue is too vast to go into specific detail in a short response. Yet another example of selective stat comparisons - comparing New Zealand to the UK is a joke. 

 

A quick look:

 

New Zealand 103,000 square miles for a a population of less than 5 million.

UK  94,000 square miles for a population of around 70 million.

 

London has more people than New Zealand.

 

Lets just think about that for a minute, yes I know New Zealand will have population clusters as opposed to even distribution throughout , much like the UK. Seriously though, anyone with a bit of sense should realise that New Zealand will have a much easier time trying to contain COVID when compared to the UK.

 

New Zealand closed its borders, a relatively simple exercise compared to the UK attempting the same thing. Heathrow is the busiest airport in Europe. I haven't the energy to follow this rabbit any further!

 

I wish people would cease using ridiculous comparisons. 

 

7 hours ago, Crofter said:

It's not true to say that the UK has done just as badly as other Western countries. I've not kept abreast of the figures as much in recent months but certainly at the start we were doing appalling badly, despite being late to the party and having the benefit of watching what the Italians were going through.

 

And yet, Spain, France, Germany etc etc had to go into a lockdown for a second wave well before the UK. I would say that the 'overall' performances are very similar.

 

Belgium, Spain, and Italy all have higher death rates per 100,000.

 

And then we come to recorded death rates.

 

Is every country using the same metric to records COVID/suspected COVID related deaths. No. So again how can we compare how countries are 'truely' performing if we aren't recording deaths the same way?

 

7 hours ago, Crofter said:

I think there's also an element of truth in saying that if someone can't even keep themself safe, what chance is there of them keeping their country safe?

 

I would suggest that as the Prime Minister it is not feasible to minimise outside contact in the same way that joe public can and still run the country correctly. I suspect the press would have a field day about how he is hiding or some such if he did so. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn't.

[SteamyTea]

@LA3222

What you are doing is just spouting opinion.

You even say 

19 minutes ago, LA3222 said:

I haven't the energy to follow this rabbit any further!

If you want to be taken seriously, get the data.

 

[joe90]

3 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

If you want to be taken seriously, get the data.

reminds me of my old Dad, he used to say “you can prove black is white with figures”. Data is fine but opinion is also fine. ?‍♂️

[SteamyTea]

4 minutes ago, joe90 said:

opinion is also fine

Opinion is the starting point, then it gets backed up with testing and data to see how it matches reality.

Trouble is with this whole BREXIT debate is that opinion became the endpoint, with all the detailed hard work skipped.

Would be like asking one of my old, first year, forensic science students to do a third year project in contemporary art, without any books, visits to galleries and not being allowed to speak to experts in the field.  It would be a fail.

[LA3222]

On 01/12/2020 at 08:08, SteamyTea said:

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/11/year-uk-has-paid-appalling-price-boris-johnson-s-election-victory

 

30 NOVEMBER 2020
A year on, the UK has paid an appalling price for Boris Johnson’s election victory
Through his shameful conduct, the Prime Minister has debased his office and trashed Britain’s global reputation. 

BY
MARTIN FLETCHER
Through his shameful conduct, the Prime Minister has debased his office and trashed Britain’s global reputation.
 

The 12 December anniversary of Boris Johnson’s “stonking” election victory over the weakest opposition in memory looms, and what a year it has been. Not so much an annus horribilis as what our classically-trained Prime Minister might, in another context, call the “annus horribilissimus”. 

Deep within me I can summon a modicum of sympathy for our Great Dear Leader. To be hit by the Covid-19 pandemic so early in his term was cruel. Even Johnson’s hero, Winston Churchill, would have struggled. But the pandemic has exposed him for the weak, vacillating and incompetent leader that he is, and the country is paying an appalling price.

He failed to prepare for the first wave in the spring, or the second wave in the autumn. He failed to stockpile PPE, protect care homes, provide testing or impose swift lockdowns. Lacking a coherent strategy, he has “veered like a shopping trolley” between authoritarianism and libertarianism, between science and political expediency, between saving lives and saving the economy. Now we’ve been granted a brief respite from our terrible tiers so we can go out and spread the virus for five days over Christmas.

The result is the worst of all possible worlds. Despite spending more money fighting Covid-19 (£280bn and rising) than any other G7 country save Canada, we have also suffered the second highest death rate after Italy. 

[See also: The biggest mistakes made by Boris Johnson’s government during the Covid-19 crisis]

The pandemic was unavoidable. Brexit was a choice. Last summer the European Union (having mysteriously survived all those Brexiteer predictions of its imminent collapse) offered to extend the transition period beyond 31 December, but Johnson in his wisdom said no. Thus chaos will be piled on chaos a month from now. 

A post-Christmas surge in Covid will almost certainly coincide with bedlam at our ports, disrupted supply lines, higher prices, and shortages of food, fuel and medicines. An economy forecast to contract by 11.3 per cent in 2020 (its worst performance since 1709) will suffer several more percentage points of lost growth over the next few years with or without the “oven ready” deal Johnson repeatedly promised us 12 months ago.

All those trade agreements he promised have failed to materialise – not even one with Trump’s America. His “global Britain” is cutting foreign aid, disbanding the Department for International Development, cracking down on immigration and consumed by a narrow, mean-spirited nationalism. The pandemic has destroyed the myth that our small island can raise the drawbridge and “take back control” in this age of globalisation. 

Far from strengthening the United Kingdom, Brexit is hastening its disintegration as support for Scottish independence surges and Northern Ireland’s fragile peace comes under threat. Far from becoming a low-tax, low-regulation Singapore-on-Thames, we face a mountain of new red tape and higher taxes to fill the black hole in the public finances. 

As the costs of Brexit have become ever more apparent, and the benefits ever more illusory, who but a handful of crazed zealots will be celebrating our “liberation” on New Year’s Eve? And how extraordinary that in last week’s spending review statement, Rishi Sunak failed to mention Brexit once, its enormous economic consequences notwithstanding? Even among its advocates Brexit has become a taboo subject, a dirty word.

Covid and Brexit apart, Johnson faces a third grave charge, namely that his shameful conduct has debased his office, weakened the institutions of government with all their checks and balances, and tarnished Britain’s reputation in the world.

He has explicitly condoned the breaking of international law. He has undermined cabinet government by stuffing his own with pliant mediocrities (remember them all dutifully tweeting their support for Dominic Cummings after he blatantly breached the lockdown rules?). He has sought to bypass parliament and politicise the civil service. He has attempted to cow the judiciary and independent media.

[See also: How Priti Patel became unsackable]

The list goes on. He has ousted honest and capable public servants, often through smears and anonymous briefings, while rewarding cronies with jobs, peerages and lucrative contracts. No other prime minister has been reprimanded by the Commissioner for Public Appointments, as Johnson was last month, for “packing the composition of interview panels with allies” and “the growth of unregulated appointments”.

He has brazenly and shamelessly refused to dismiss ministers and top aides no matter how egregious their transgressions. He stood by Priti Patel despite a report concluding that she bullied civil servants, prompting his adviser on ministerial standards to resign in protest. He stood by Gavin Williamson despite the A-level results fiasco. He kept Cummings despite his Barnard Castle escapade. He ignored Robert Jenrick’s malodorous approval of Richard Desmond’s £1bn housing development. He refused to suspend a Tory MP accused of rape, but removed the whip from another Conservative, Julian Lewis, who won election as chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee and published the report into Russian interference in British politics. 

Instead of seeking to unite our fractured country, Johnson has frequently taunted the half of the country that voted Remain. He governs through infantile three-word slogans. He prefers fantastical visions – UK space commands and wind farms powering every British home within nine years – to policies rooted in reality. If he really wants Britain to be the “world leader” in green energy, why not end the ten-year freeze on fuel duty? 

Johnson is so profligate with public money that senior civil servants have sought an unprecedented 17 “ministerial directions” to signal disagreement with spending decisions they consider risky or wasteful. He has obfuscated, dissembled and played fast and loose with facts, earning at least two rebukes from the UK Statistics Authority. 

He has made so many vacuous promises – of “world-beating” apps, of putting a “tiger in the tank” of the Brexit talks, of sending the virus packing within 12 weeks, by the summer, by Christmas, by next Easter – that he has lost all credibility. As John Major observed in a brilliant speech on 9 November, “false optimism is deceit by another name”.

A year on from Johnson’s election victory, I struggle to think of a single way in which the country has benefited from his premiership, and I’m evidently not alone. His approval rating has plunged to -24. Labour has overtaken the Tories in the polls. Despite an 80-seat majority he struggles to win key parliamentary votes. He has squandered the support even of the slavishly sycophantic Tory press, and the process of “levelling up” seems to be going into reverse.

The good news is that our floundering featherweight of a prime minister has finally been forced to jettison Cummings and his Vote Leave henchmen in favour of apparent grown-ups such as Simon Case and Dan Rosenfield – and that there are now only four years left until the next election.

Is not an example of someone spouting opinion and not data - and yet you felt the need to post this?

 

Good for the goose, good for the gander?

 

As for data, I check 'the data' before I post. I just don't have the time to write a thesis when I post.

 

As Joe says, data is just another tool which can be manipulated to suit the authors narrative. Im sure you have seen PP demos which demonstrate this by using the same data, presented in opposite ways to show how supporting opposing arguments can be done. 

[dpmiller]

I'd have to say, NZ is probably pretty similar to the rest of the UK if you take greater london out of it.

[SteamyTea]

6 minutes ago, LA3222 said:

Im sure you have seen PP demos which demonstrate this by using the same data, presented in opposite ways to show how supporting opposing arguments can be done. 

Yes, and it was my job to highlight it and put a stop to it.

If you do not understand how data should be collected, cleaned up, tested and presented, I am willing to give lessons, they do not come cheap.

8 minutes ago, LA3222 said:

Is not an example of someone spouting opinion and not data - and yet you felt the need to post this?

That was about Boris, not BREXIT.

[LA3222]

39 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

If you do not understand how data should be collected, cleaned up, tested and presented, I am willing to give lessons, they do not come cheap.

You are interpreting my words now to sort your narrative. I did not say I do not understand etc, I was making a point about how data can be presented to suit.

 

41 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

That was about Boris, not BREXIT.

 

Again you are selectively interpreting what I'm saying. At no point have I questioned talk of Boris vs talk of Brexit. Again I was making a point, about how you posted an 'opinion' piece yet felt the need to call me out for posting 'opinion and not fact'.

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

 

What you are doing is just spouting opinion.

 ?

[Temp]

Those with holiday home only allowed to use them for 90 days at a time..

 

Daily Mail: Half a million Brits can only stay in their holiday homes for three months at a time from 2021.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9019917/Half-million-Brits-stay-holiday-homes-three-months-time-2021.html

 

 

[Onoff]

3 hours ago, Temp said:

Those with holiday home only allowed to use them for 90 days at a time..

 

Daily Mail: Half a million Brits can only stay in their holiday homes for three months at a time from 2021.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9019917/Half-million-Brits-stay-holiday-homes-three-months-time-2021.html

 

 

 

Does that mean SWMBO could go for 3 months then I could go after? That'd work...

 

Thinking further if she did Jul/Aug/Sep then I went Oct/Nov/Dec it'd take us into the next year and start all over again......

Edited December 5, 2020 by Onoff

[Ferdinand]

4 hours ago, Temp said:

Those with holiday home only allowed to use them for 90 days at a time..

 

Daily Mail: Half a million Brits can only stay in their holiday homes for three months at a time from 2021.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9019917/Half-million-Brits-stay-holiday-homes-three-months-time-2021.html

 

 

 

Bit naughty of the mail only to mention the short term 3 month visas and full residence visas, and not to mention that visas allowing longer term stays are available as an annual thing costing approximately £70 or 20p per day.

 

I don't think that people who can afford to travel to France or wherever several times a year will really notice that.

 

The lady in the article who says she wants to spend part of winter in the UK, then the rest of the year in her family's properties in France and Spain is getting slightly short shrift in the comments.

 

They are correct to highlight the "180 Day Visa Free" campaign though - what it needs is for Brussels to get its Rs in gear and follow the UK's example of 180 days visit without (or with a very minimal click'n'print) visa. I'd say the same for the French Govt in Paris, but I am not aware whether the collective has delegated the authority to the French Govt to let them do that.

 

Perhaps they will change depending on what happens to the tourist trade from third countries - there will be a market for all visas together with 3 months in EU and then some time i nthe UK.

 

?.

 

Ferdinand

[SteamyTea]

9 minutes ago, Ferdinand said:

approximately £70 or 20p per day

Wasn't BREXIT going to make us all better off.  How can charging, for what is currently free, making individuals better off?

[Ferdinand]

Just now, SteamyTea said:

Wasn't BREXIT going to make us all better off.  How can charging, for what is currently free, making individuals better off?

 

Charged by the French Govt...

[SteamyTea]

1 minute ago, Ferdinand said:

Charged by the French Govt...

Yes, and I bet they are perfectly happy that we now have sovereignty again, masters of our own destiny.

And we can all eat our own chicken, apart from the stuff that comes in from Vietnam.

[Ferdinand]

17 hours ago, SteamyTea said:

Yes, and I bet they are perfectly happy that we now have sovereignty again, masters of our own destiny.

And we can all eat our own chicken, apart from the stuff that comes in from Vietnam.

 

Not sure on that. Monseiur Macron seems to be jumping up and down like a Jack-in-the-Box.

 

I'm not totally convinced by his strategy - "If you don't give me all the fishing rights I want, I'll exercise a veto and protect my fishermen by making sure they don't get anything at all."

 

Hmmm.

[joe90]

14 minutes ago, Ferdinand said:

I'm not totally convinced by his strategy - "If you don't give me all the fishing rights I want, I'll exercise a veto and protect my fishermen by making sure they don't get anything at all."

ha ha ha, yes, also if they don’t get “their“ fishing rights (in our waters!), they will blockade the ports, so the queues of lorries will be nothing compared to the queues of ships ?

[Temp]

On Radio4 they were talking about Macron and Merkel and the fishing rights and accidentally called him President Mackerel.