UK Politics: Statues of Limitations

[A Horse Named Stranger]

The quarantine itself is probably not what I'd get upset about. But the way it was handled again.

I mean announcing: Anybody who returns after midnight tonight, will be put into a 14 days quarantine, is not a particularly great way of doing it. Of course, the images of the jackasses of Magaluf probably forced the issue. But imagine, you were on a vacation now, and suppose you are on holiday, you are supposed to return work on monday, and your flight is scheduled for sunday, and suddenly the goverment says: nope, you are to quarantine for two weeks now.

And if you had holiday scheduled for next week, you'd also try to cancel it now last minute.

[Werthead]

5 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

The quarantine itself is probably not what I'd get upset about. But the way it was handled again.

I mean announcing: Anybody who returns after midnight tonight, will be put into a 14 days quarantine, is not a particularly great way of doing it. Of course, the images of the jackasses of Magaluf probably forced the issue. But imagine, you were on a vacation now, and suppose you are on holiday, you are supposed to return work on monday, and your flight is scheduled for sunday, and suddenly the goverment says: nope, you are to quarantine for two weeks now.

And if you had holiday scheduled for next week, you'd also try to cancel it now last minute.

Yup. And the rules now on statutory sick pay seem to have reverted to normal, so don't cover quarantining and employers, many of whom are struggling, are saying that they can't afford to pay people who are doing that. Total clusterfuck.

The criticism that we shouldn't have reopened in the first place and allowed overseas flights is a lot more valid at this point. 

[williamjm]

11 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

I mean announcing: Anybody who returns after midnight tonight, will be put into a 14 days quarantine, is not a particularly great way of doing it. Of course, the images of the jackasses of Magaluf probably forced the issue. But imagine, you were on a vacation now, and suppose you are on holiday, you are supposed to return work on monday, and your flight is scheduled for sunday, and suddenly the goverment says: nope, you are to quarantine for two weeks now.

While I'm definitely sympathetic towards the people caught out by this, particularly given the short notice, I think anyone going on holiday right now without a backup plan about what to do if quarantine was re-imposed would have been taking a big risk. They have been unlucky but at the same time it's not exactly a huge surprise that something like this would happen in some holiday destination or other.

[Spockydog]

1 hour ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

But imagine, you were on a vacation now, and suppose you are on holiday, you are supposed to return work on monday, and your flight is scheduled for sunday, and suddenly the goverment says: nope, you are to quarantine for two weeks now.

 

Frankly, anyone currently on holiday in Spain, or anywhere else overseas for that matter, wants their fucking head looking at.

 

[Alarich II]

If you go on holidays to Spain or Italy (maybe even France or Austria), don't be surprised when the situation takes a sudden turn to the worse and you'll be quarantined. That something like this would happen as soon as traveling increases again, should come as no surprise to anyone.

[Heartofice]

Yeah anyone travelling abroad these days is taking the risk that something might change and change rapidly. They have zero cause for complaint if they get caught out like this.  It should just be assumed it might happen.

But also I think there is the assumption that this is all just going to go away after the world locked down for a few months, but once everyone starts opening up there are always going to be surges in cases and the point is to try and react to them. We are going to live with the virus probably forever in some form. 

[BigFatCoward]

I have some small sympathy for people who booked a break last year and decided to risk it, anyone who booked since lockdown was lifted was asking for trouble.  I have no issues with their companies not paying them for quarantine if they can't do their role from home.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

13 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Frankly, anyone currently on holiday in Spain, or anywhere else overseas for that matter, wants their fucking head looking at.

Would I have gone abroad for a holiday? Nope. As in, I don't think it's a particularly great idea.

Do I understand people wanting to get back to some sorta normal? Yes. That's not to say, that those drunk Magaluf tourists aren't fucking idiots, but I look down on those drinking tourists with some degree of contempt anyway. Yes, I am dull and boring.

14 hours ago, williamjm said:

While I'm definitely sympathetic towards the people caught out by this, particularly given the short notice, I think anyone going on holiday right now without a backup plan about what to do if quarantine was re-imposed would have been taking a big risk. They have been unlucky but at the same time it's not exactly a huge surprise that something like this would happen in some holiday destination or other.

 

3 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

I have some small sympathy for people who booked a break last year and decided to risk it, anyone who booked since lockdown was lifted was asking for trouble.  I have no issues with their companies not paying them for quarantine if they can't do their role from home.

Basically same response as above. However, that's not to say, that it's fundamentally fucked up on some level. I mean, when the Goverment says, it's perfectly fine to travel abroad for a vacation, don't worry. And then basically on a whim and short notice turns around and say: Kidding! You are getting screwed over now with a quaranting measure.

That goes towards reliability, predictability and very much credibility and trust in a goverment and its actions.

But on that note, this is also the same goverment, that argues driving a car is a sound way to test your vision. So it's not like they had very much of those three things to begin with.

As Werthead said, if it was as predictable as we all think it was, then they shouldn't have opened up for tourist travel in the first place.

[A wilding]

Also there is the further problem that quarantine is not being enforced in any meaningful way.

As I understand it, you fill in a form when you return, agreeing you will quarantine. About 20% of the people who fill these forms in will be sent a text message later asking them to confirm they are quarantining (assuming that company this is outsourced to gets their act together). And that is it. If somehow you do get caught breaking quarantine you might get fined say £1000 (though unlikely, and everyone will know that Farage blatantly broke quarantine and got no fine).

What is the betting that the sort of person who decided to take a holiday in Spain will actually bother the follow the rules? Especially when the potential loss of income, or even of their job, is factored in to their decision.

 

[Werthead]

Sunak's idea of imposing 2% sales tax on online goods to try to encourage more people to shop on the High Street is bizarre. If you need to by a £25 item on Amazon, it now costing £25.50 is not going to slow you down, especially because that same item is likely still £5-£10 more expensive in the shops anyway.

Far more impactful would be reducing crippling business rates and reforming the ownership of business premises, but I fear this is putting a sticking plaster over the hull of the Titanic. The High Street as we once knew it is likely unsalvageable, and coronavirus just made what was coming inevitably happen a few years earlier.

[Spockydog]

3 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

As Werthead said, if it was as predictable as we all think it was, then they shouldn't have opened up for tourist travel in the first place.

I think anyone with a modicum of common sense knows it is beyond stupid to be on holiday in Spain right now. Safe travel corridors my arse. Nowhere is fucking safe. 

Also, anyone who is not a gullible moron knows the Government's advice has, and continues to be, entirely bogus, based on nothing more than their desire to get the capitalist machine grinding again. Yet the pattern everywhere has been the same. Opening up  = increased risk of death. 

The Tories are not much better than the Republicans. They don't care how many plebs die, as long as their backers start making money again. 

 

[Heartofice]

NVM

[A Horse Named Stranger]

12 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

I think anyone with a modicum of common sense knows it is beyond stupid to be on holiday in Spain right now. Safe travel corridors my arse. Nowhere is fucking safe. 

Also, anyone who is not a gullible moron knows the Government's advice has, and continues to be, entirely bogus, based on nothing more than their desire to get the capitalist machine grinding again. Yet the pattern everywhere has been the same. Opening up  = increased risk of death. 

The Tories are not much better than the Republicans. They don't care how many plebs die, as long as their backers start making money again. 

 

Yes, but you are putting the blame on the victims of the scam, and not the conmen. Like I said, trust and credibility are quite precious commodities for goverments, and that was another case of HMG throwing away whatever precious little it had left.

[Spockydog]

Tommy Robinson flees abroad claiming his family are 'no longer safe in the UK' following arson

Lemme get this straight. Yaxley-Lennon is now an actual refugee? The irony is delicious.

[ants]

FT, limited clicks:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/the-eu-is-slowly-herding-britain-to-satellite-status-jj67ljf7q

So, from my reading of this, Britain are effectively going to have spent 4 years to have taken themselves out of the decision making, while taking decisions, all for the benefit of being able to stop EU freedom of movement.  But it wasn't about immigration, right?  On the upside, this will minimise the financial impact as its near the current status quo but with less sovereignty.  

Quote

 

Some four years ago on this page I wrote that Brexit would have only two possible outcomes: a clean and total break with the European Union and all its rules as we launched ourselves into a world of bilateral trade deals around the planet, or a new status as an economic satellite to the EU but excluded from its decision-making. I said that if you believed there was any point at all in Brexit, you must favour the clean break option. Satellite status was only a damage-limitation exercise.

We are now heading for damage-limitation. Do read yesterday’s Times Brexit Briefing, and the report from our Europe correspondent, Bruno Waterfield. The latest analysis suggests that a free trade agreement (FTA) with Europe is likely by the end of the year. I myself think it may be delayed a little longer, but at least there’s progress.

Such an FTA would leave us still able to enjoy relatively frictionless trade with our former EU partners, so long as we essentially copy the EU’s “level playing field” rules; but doing so “voluntarily” as a “sovereign” nation. Boris Johnson could burble more or less truthfully that we are no longer “bound” by Brussels’s rules because we could always walk away (or “diverge” or “regress”) and take the consequences. Destiny, that sheepdog of our doings, knows already that since we realise which side our bread is buttered on, we shall not in fact diverge. But, hey, we could.

Our chief negotiator, David Frost, has not been wholly unsuccessful. Brussels, in the form of Michel Barnier, has backed down on the continued jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ): something Britain won’t accept. So where disagreements arise, other mechanisms will be devised to arbitrate, though of course the ECJ will be there in the background, essentially defining the EU’s own position and red lines. This victory for Britain may have more theoretical than practical value.

The UK has undoubtedly succeeded in gaining the power to keep European immigrants out. 

 

Quote

The fading of these hopes means this: we stick for the foreseeable future with our level-playing-field-based FTA with Europe. We may manage a few deals that don’t undermine the European standards we’ll undertake to stick to but the last thing we’ll want is big new rows that threaten the trade deal with Brussels. Thus, slowly but with a horrible inevitability, and after four years of bleating and barking and running hither and thither, are the Brexit sheep herded through the only gate left: economic satellite status to the EU. It won’t be a disaster and we’ll remain free (as Mr Johnson will trumpet) to depart the playing field whenever we choose. And we won’t.

 

[Werthead]

 

5 hours ago, ants said:

FT, limited clicks:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/the-eu-is-slowly-herding-britain-to-satellite-status-jj67ljf7q

So, from my reading of this, Britain are effectively going to have spent 4 years to have taken themselves out of the decision making, while taking decisions, all for the benefit of being able to stop EU freedom of movement.  But it wasn't about immigration, right?  On the upside, this will minimise the financial impact as its near the current status quo but with less sovereignty.  

 

Interesting. My suspicion was that the government would take advantage of the COVID epidemic to blame it for any economic downturn after a no-deal Brexit, effectively hiding the consequences of that by saying, "well, the entire planet was in a bad economic state after the coronavirus, it was absolutely nothing to do with Brexit, or us fucking up the economy for ten years straight beforehand guv'nor." And they may well have convinced a lot of people of that.

This suggests that maybe they had had economic modelling suggesting that the combination of No Deal + the coronacession was going to be so devastating as to make No Deal no longer remotely viable.

The problem here is that it does open the door to Farage to make comeback 3.0 with the New Brexit Party and start arguing against the deal, whilst the Tories will be mostly happy to have a BINO as long as they can look their voters in the eye and say we're out, it's all good, now let's get back to dismantling the NHS other stuff.

[BigFatCoward]

I have no idea why Owen Jones has apologised for someone else's fuck up. It's ok to say 'that's got fuck all to do with me mate'. 

[Heartofice]

12 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

I have no idea why Owen Jones has apologised for someone else's fuck up. It's ok to say 'that's got fuck all to do with me mate'. 

It is highly amusing that Jones, who has said that Cancel Culture doesn’t exist feels the need to prostrate himself in front of the masses to ask for forgiveness, in case some sort of unforgiving twitter mob come for him.. for something he didn’t do.
 

 

[Spockydog]

4 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

I have no idea why Owen Jones has apologised for someone else's fuck up. It's ok to say 'that's got fuck all to do with me mate'. 

What's he done now? I mean, according to google news, it could be anything.

[Denvek]

7 hours ago, Spockydog said:

What's he done now? I mean, according to google news, it could be anything.

His article about Wiley was published with a picture of Kano, so he's spent the day explaining that he doesn't get to choose the pictures that go with his articles.