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UK Politics - You can't correct a mistake, if you don't admit it was a mistake


Which Tyler

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Indeed. We have a shit show of epic proportions brewing. 

Once again, Johnson is defying the science. He's clearly terrified of the Capitalism At All Costs wing of his party so it will be interesting to see how long it takes for him to lock it all down again, once his decision not to suspend flights from India bites him on his blubbery arse. 

Make no mistake, we are heading for a third wave. Thankfully, a high proportion of the people currently hospitalized with Covid had the opportunity to be vaccinated but refused to get it done. If enough of these morons die, it can only be a good thing for the human gene pool, right? 

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1 minute ago, Spockydog said:

Indeed. We have a shit show of epic proportions brewing. 

Once again, Johnson is defying the science. He's clearly terrified of the Capitalism At All Costs wing of his party so it will be interesting to see how long it takes for him to lock it all down again, once his decision to allow dozens of flights from India to land in Britain over the past month or so. 

Make no mistake, we are heading for a second wave. Thankfully, a high proportion of the people currently hospitalized with Covid had the opportunity to be vaccinated but refused to get it done. If enough of these morons die, it can only be a good thing for the human gene pool, right? 

Third wave surely? 

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I can't see us getting a third wave, even Neil Ferguson has come out and said that the curve is flattening and hes a bit more optimistic about it. We don't know how much more infectious the variant is and how much is down to the specifics of where that varient is located, especially when a large percentage of people in hospital with it have been previously offered the vaccine but didn't take it.

We'll have to see where we are in a couple of weeks, but cases, hospitalisations and deaths are all flat, and incredibly low right now and have been for a while. If there is a disruption to our opening up then there would need to be a huge upswing in hospitalisations to justify it and given the success of our vaccine programme that seems pretty unlikely. 

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Not sure what’s funny about that, if a third wave was a sure thing we wouldn’t be opening up June 21st, simple as that. A lot of sites are trying to squeeze a headline out of this and we simply don’t know yet. Press conference at 5 today might shed some light.

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1 hour ago, Spockydog said:

If enough of these morons die, it can only be a good thing for the human gene pool, right? 

No.

Even foolish people have family and friends who love them and would miss them. Even ignorant people are a loss that diminishes us. And besides, some of these people will have infected others who are innocent but maybe can't get a vaccination, for whatever reason.

As for a third wave, depends how we define a wave. But there have been cases and will be more cases that were avoidable if the government weren't so politically committed to the current road map.

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3 minutes ago, mormont said:

 

As for a third wave, depends how we define a wave. But there have been cases and will be more cases that were avoidable if the government weren't so politically committed to the current road map.

What if those cases don’t lead to any increase in hospitalisations and deaths?

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For once, I have to agree with HoI. Once a society reaches a point where everyone who wants a vaccine can easily get it, I see no reason why the entire society should suffer to protect a small group of anti-vax morons from the consequences of their own idiocy.

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Just now, Gorn said:

For once, I have to agree with HoI. Once a society reaches a point where everyone who wants a vaccine can easily get it, I see no reason why the entire society should suffer to protect a small group of anti-vax morons from the consequences of their own idiocy.

What about the disabled, immunocompromised, and others who cannot get the vaccine?

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14 minutes ago, Maltaran said:

You seem to be implying that the only people who won’t get vaccines are the anti-vaccine morons

No I’m trying to work out what the sort of numbers we are talking about here and how that relates to the trade off to keeping locked down

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I don't know enough about UK politics to know if this would work or not, but I thought this was an interesting (and long) article about how Labour could potentially fix itself. What it boils down to is: Go all on defending meritocracy as a populist campaign, push an expansion of technical colleges and grammar schools, cast the Tories as plutocrats, and jettison anyone on the left upset about all this in a bid to recapture the center:

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/05/reclaiming-meritocracy
 

Quote

 

Keir Starmer faces three big challenges if he is to regain momentum as the Labour leader rather than spending the coming years fighting to survive. He needs to create a political narrative rooted in his own biography. He needs to capture the centre ground of politics from the Tories. And he needs to mobilise the rage that all sorts of Britons feel about the rise of a self-indulgent and irresponsible plutocratic elite. Meritocracy provides an answer to all three.

Starmer visibly belongs to Labour’s great meritocratic tradition. Indeed, his very name takes us back to the great age of working-class autodidacts – Keir Hardie said that the great turning point of his life was when he discovered Thomas Carlyle at the age of 16. Starmer’s father was a factory worker who came home every evening to look after his mother, who suffered from a terrible degenerative disease. He went to Reigate Grammar School, where his contemporaries included the effervescent Andrew Sullivan, a journalist based in the United States. He proceeded from a first in law at Leeds University to a postgraduate degree at Oxford and then to a stellar career at the bar, culminating in five years as director of public prosecutions and a knighthood. It’s easy to imagine him shooting the breeze with Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison.

The Conservative Party has done a deft job of occupying the middle ground both in terms of its voter base (the northern working class) and in the issues it has chosen – the commitment to expanding the state and focusing on education and the NHS. Simply trying to outbid the Tories is likely to create worries among voters about overspending.

A better way for Labour would be to focus on reinventing the meritocratic tradition: celebrate schools such as Brampton Manor Academy; call for a new generation of technical schools and colleges, like the ones that are so successful in Germany, that will provide a ladder of opportunity to people who don’t want to go to university; and point out that, for all their waffle about the north, the Tories are still the party of unmerited wealth.

Look at the shiny new tower blocks in London (and indeed other cities) that are full of empty flats owned by foreign investors – Swiss bank accounts in the sky. Look at the streams of money flowing into Conservative coffers from wealthy Russian and other suspicious donors. Look at the fact that around a third of Britain is still owned by the landed aristocracy. Look at the way that the products of public schools continue to dominate British institutions (including the Conservative Party).

Criticising the concentration of wealth can backfire badly if it is done in the name of equality of outcome, as Jeremy Corbyn discovered: nobody wants to live in Venezuela. But it can succeed brilliantly if it is presented in terms of opportunity.

What about criticising the public schools by suggesting that they make half of their places available to scholarship winners? Or forcing foreigners who buy flats in Britain as investments to guarantee that they are increasing the stock available rather than just nabbing what is already there (as is done in New Zealand)? Or imposing a tax on big landowners, such as the ones who own so much of the north of England, who have done nothing to deserve their position other than being born?

The Labour Party has a winning ideology left deep in its muscle memory. Starmer’s best chance of giving some life to his currently inert leadership lies in reclaiming that ideology, egalitarian critics to his left be damned, and refashioning it for our current age of plutocratic elites, growing inequality and frustrated popular ambition. Politicians are doomed to flounder if they can’t find a single word or phrase to sum up what they are about. Keir Starmer’s last, and best, chance lies in the word “meritocracy”.

 

 

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4 hours ago, Spockydog said:

Thankfully, a high proportion of the people currently hospitalized with Covid had the opportunity to be vaccinated but refused to get it done.

Is this based on actual data? I’m hoping the system is set up so that if there are any refusals, they move on to someone else and the overall vaccination rates aren’t affected. I’m not sure that anti-vaxxers are really dragging us down yet, maybe when we start reaching all adults and then see what that does to overall Covid levels in the population. 

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Just now, DaveSumm said:

Is this based on actual data? I’m hoping the system is set up so that if there are any refusals, they move on to someone else and the overall vaccination rates aren’t affected. I’m not sure that anti-vaxxers are really dragging us down yet, maybe when we start reaching all adults and then see what that does to overall Covid levels in the population. 

No actual data, but I did read somewhere that of those hospitalized with Covid, the vaccinated patients got infected just before or just after their vaccine was administered. 

Virtually nobody who is fully-vaccinated is being hospitalized. 

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4 minutes ago, Fez said:

I don't know enough about UK politics to know if this would work or not, but I thought this was an interesting (and long) article about how Labour could potentially fix itself. What it boils down to is: Go all on defending meritocracy as a populist campaign, push an expansion of technical colleges and grammar schools, cast the Tories as plutocrats, and jettison anyone on the left upset about all this in a bid to recapture the center:

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/05/reclaiming-meritocracy
 

 

If I remember correctly, this is what the postwar Labour government did do and set the groundwork for an arts and culture explosion in the 60s. Think of all the innovators and movers and shakers such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and many more in theatre, movies and literature.  I don't think a single one came from the public school environment.

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I don’t see Labour going all in on Meritocracy as an ideal, because that suggests that there are winners and losers and that winning and losing is a personal responsibility and not due to systemic barriers or assistance. I don’t think that chimes in very well with the general ethos of their more left wing members. It might lead to some confused messaging.

The article mentions the middle ground like it’s a thing, when Labours issue is that the Tories have found it easy to move left economically while maintaining a conservative stance on values. Labour will struggle to move right on values and culture without losing part of its core. 
 

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3 hours ago, Heartofice said:

I can't see us getting a third wave, even Neil Ferguson has come out and said that the curve is flattening and hes a bit more optimistic about it. We don't know how much more infectious the variant is and how much is down to the specifics of where that varient is located, especially when a large percentage of people in hospital with it have been previously offered the vaccine but didn't take it.

We'll have to see where we are in a couple of weeks, but cases, hospitalisations and deaths are all flat, and incredibly low right now and have been for a while. If there is a disruption to our opening up then there would need to be a huge upswing in hospitalisations to justify it and given the success of our vaccine programme that seems pretty unlikely. 

And yet, cases of B1.617 have increased by 30% since Monday.

That's rapid!

ETA: make that 28%

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/19/uk-cases-of-covid-indian-variant-up-28-in-two-days-says-hancock

Of course, it still remains to be seen how hospitalisations and deaths go, but I hope BJ is ready to pull the trigger when he has to - but I'm not holding out any hope for action less than 2 weeks too late (if required)

 

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