UK Politics - We Don’t Want to See Your Papers, Please

[Which Tyler]

5 hours ago, polishgenius said:

This is a terrifying read when my uncle is right now undergoing chemo to treat a cancer that an operation to remove half his femur failed to properly excise. 

Similar here, my MiL in France was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer 4 weeks ago. They still haven't been able to start chemo yet.

[The Anti-Targ]

9 hours ago, Raja said:

Not involved in cancer care, but man, this stuff is a tough read and obviously so much worse for clinicians & patients - Written by an Oncologist in Nottingham, full link here

 

This, some people will say, is the reason healthcare in the UK needs to be privatised. As the free market gods like to say, when there is blood on the floor it is time to invest. Though I wonder if they hold to the same mantra when they have blood on their hands?

[Derfel Cadarn]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58673567
 

Government tell people not to panic buy petrol due to shortages, so naturally people have started panic buying petrol. Queues at my local Morrisons.

[Derfel Cadarn]

11 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

This, some people will say, is the reason healthcare in the UK needs to be privatised. As the free market gods like to say, when there is blood on the floor it is time to invest. Though I wonder if they hold to the same mantra when they have blood on their hands?

The £350,000,000 a week extra money Johnson promised the NHS should be a big help!

[A Horse Named Stranger]

On 9/22/2021 at 12:41 AM, maarsen said:

It was always a no go as the new NAFTA  agreement gives Mexico and Canada a veto. Trump wanted this and if bites Boris in the ass. 

Going back to this NAFTA pipe dream or pipe nightmare (is this a word?), depending on how you feel about it.

I know this is tedious and kills all of the fun in those big trade dreams. But you always have to take into account what it means to Northern Ireland (or rather NI protocol).

NAFTA has follows different standards and regulations from the EU. NI is set to be alligned to the Republic of Ireland (or the EU if you prefer that). That means the UK would have to do checks on goods going into Ireland in earnest - unless they want to set up a hard border in Ireland (have fun with that). They are failing to do that on a dry run right now. Bigger regulatory divergence, means bigger strains on the protocol, plain and simple. I'll leave it to everyone's imagination how big a clusterfuck the UK goverment would make out of it, if they'd have to deal with massive goods being imported from the US. Realistically it's again, either cutting NI loose or breaking the treaty with the EU. Oh, and we are not even talking about joining NAFTA being pretty much the killing blow to UK farming (cheap food imports from the US).

[Filippa Eilhart]

3 hours ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58673567
 

Government tell people not to panic buy petrol due to shortages, so naturally people have started panic buying petrol. Queues at my local Morrisons.

it’s not a shortage, there’s plenty of fuel, you just can’t get it 

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

joining NAFTA being pretty much the killing blow to UK farming (cheap food imports from the US).

I'm not so sure about the cheap part, because so much of our agricultural regions are being destroyed by floods and wildfires and drought.  That is certainly so right now.  One sees it everywhere in the restaurants, food markets and food pantries for the poor.  The quantity and quality are definitely strained.  Additionally, you know, labor shortages for getting that lettuce out of the fields, packed and then driven to market!  So the UK's own cheap food supply ought to be safe, because still very much needed?

[A Horse Named Stranger]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

I'm not so sure about the cheap part, because so much of our agricultural regions are being destroyed by floods and wildfires and drought.  That is certainly so right now.  One sees it everywhere in the restaurants, food markets and food pantries for the poor.  The quantity and quality are definitely strained.  Additionally, you know, labor shortages for getting that lettuce out of the fields, packed and then driven to market!  So the UK's own cheap food supply ought to be safe, because still very much needed?

I think you might be underestimating the sheer size of the Agricultural sector in the US.

Last year, was the second highest in terms of exports. Your farms are set up for mass production and exports. UK farmers can't compete with that. UK farm size vs. US alone tells you why. Only way to compete for them is with subsidies, and guess what the US will insist on getting cut.

 

[Zorral]

10 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Only way to compete for them is with subsidies, and guess what the US will insist on getting cut.

Could be.  Big Ag is subsidized here too with vast amounts of federal and state aid, assistance, perks, and so on.

[Heartofice]

Queues for petrol today even more insane than yesterday. Proof of how prone people are to herd mentality and mass panic. 
 

Boris hasn’t helped this by his own words, of course if he says that there is no petrol shortage everyone is going to think there is a petrol shortage!

Plus BBC has been running it as front page news, helping to terrify everyone.

Depressing.

[Fragile Bird]

I just looked up some of the stories about the petrol shortage issue in the UK, and I gather the story is “we have lots of petrol, we just don’t have the truck drivers to deliver it to gas stations”.

If there’s no petrol at gas stations, isn’t that a petrol shortage? If you can’t access petrol supplies, if there are no deliveries to the stations, isn’t that a shortage, because there isn’t any there? Or is it only a shortage if all the petrol was located in France and delivered from there, with ‘no petrol in the UK’?

If a drug maker had all their insulin, for example, locked up in a warehouse so that people who need insulin couldn’t find any at the pharmacy, aren’t they facing an insulin shortage?

[The Anti-Targ]

It's a simple thing to determine the truth. Are petrol stations having to shut off pumps because there is no more fuel in the tank(s) at the station? If no, then no fuel shortage. If yes hows many stations and how wide spread? If not many and only in a few locations then no fuel shortage, really. If many and wide spread then there is a fuel shortage.

[DaveSumm]

I can’t get quite as angry about panic buyers as some, to be honest we’ve proven we’re a country of panic buyers so now we’re trapped in a prisoners dilemma.  If someone had a long trip this weekend so they fuelled up Thursday instead of this morning, have they really made the wrong call? They judged the country they were in and planned accordingly.

[Heartofice]

1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

I just looked up some of the stories about the petrol shortage issue in the UK, and I gather the story is “we have lots of petrol, we just don’t have the truck drivers to deliver it to gas stations”.

If there’s no petrol at gas stations, isn’t that a petrol shortage? If you can’t access petrol supplies, if there are no deliveries to the stations, isn’t that a shortage, because there isn’t any there? Or is it only a shortage if all the petrol was located in France and delivered from there, with ‘no petrol in the UK’?

If a drug maker had all their insulin, for example, locked up in a warehouse so that people who need insulin couldn’t find any at the pharmacy, aren’t they facing an insulin shortage?

Huh? There was no petrol shortage. There was a very small localised problem with lack of drivers, that has predictably turned into a national panic about shortages. 
 

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/25/panic-buying-rather-than-shortages-causing-queues-at-uk-petrol-stations-aa-head-says

There might be a fuel shortage now everyone has lost their minds.

 

[Denvek]

1 hour ago, The Anti-Targ said:

It's a simple thing to determine the truth. Are petrol stations having to shut off pumps because there is no more fuel in the tank(s) at the station? If no, then no fuel shortage. If yes hows many stations and how wide spread? If not many and only in a few locations then no fuel shortage, really. If many and wide spread then there is a fuel shortage.

2 out of the 4 petrol stations I drove past today were closed due to no fuel, so I'd count that as a shortage.

 

1 minute ago, Heartofice said:

Huh? There was no petrol shortage. There was a very small localised problem with lack of drivers, that has predictably turned into a national panic about shortages. 
 

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/25/panic-buying-rather-than-shortages-causing-queues-at-uk-petrol-stations-aa-head-says

There might be a fuel shortage now everyone has lost their minds.

 

Just because there is sufficient petrol in the country doesn't mean it isn't a shortage - if the petrol isn't where it needs to be meaning people can't buy it, it's a shortage, no matter whether the cause is lack of drivers, panic buying, or the government saying exactly the right words that make people panic-buy petrol ("Don't panic-buy petrol").

[Heartofice]

1 minute ago, Denvek said:

2 out of the 4 petrol stations I drove past today were closed due to no fuel, so I'd count that as a shortage.

 

Just because there is sufficient petrol in the country doesn't mean it isn't a shortage - if the petrol isn't where it needs to be meaning people can't buy it, it's a shortage, no matter whether the cause is lack of drivers, panic buying, or the government saying exactly the right words that make people panic-buy petrol ("Don't panic-buy petrol").

Again, there was a small localised problem with supply with one supplier, which has been blown up out of all proportion. Im not sure what is so hard to understand about that.

The reason there is a shortage now is because every moron in the country has got up early to get fuel. Hardly surprising petrol stations can’t keep up.  
 

Again I’m not sure what is hard to understand 

[Which Tyler]

7 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

There might be a fuel shortage now everyone has lost their minds.

Yes, but there is now. Though if it is purely down to the panic buying, it will have eased again within 48 hours (probably way less) as all the panic buyers have full tanks, whilst deliveries continue as per usual.

 

 

Personally, I've never felt more smug about my decision not to replace my car 14 years ago.

 

Incidentally, I massively approve of EG Group's decision to limit sales (to non HGV / emergency services) - wish the supermarkets would do that whenever a water pipe springs a leak!

[Derfel Cadarn]

So, it appears the government have officially renamed Brexit to Covid-19.

Meanwhile the EU is suffering from shortages of popcorn, as they enjoy the shit-show across the channel.

[mormont]

5,000 three-month temporary visas to deal with a shortage of at least ten and possibly twenty times that number of drivers looks exactly like what a government would do if it wanted to say it had done something, without really doing anything.

[Denvek]

2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Again, there was a small localised problem with supply with one supplier, which has been blown up out of all proportion. Im not sure what is so hard to understand about that.

The reason there is a shortage now is because every moron in the country has got up early to get fuel. Hardly surprising petrol stations can’t keep up.  
 

Again I’m not sure what is hard to understand 

You appear to be defining "shortage" strictly as a shortage of fuel, which there technically isn't, it's just that the fuel isn't in the place it needs to be for the public to be able to buy it. The definition the rest of the thread, and my offline conversations, are using is that a shortage is where people want to buy fuel but can't. It doesn't matter if the refineries are at full capacity - if the fuel doesn't exist at the filling stations then there's a shortage.

But this kind of semantic quibbling is a pointless argument that nobody wins, so let's just leave it at that and wait for the government to pretend to do something about it while the opposition fights among themselves.