UK Politics - Wanted: 50,000 Lorry Drivers. Long hours, Crap Conditions, All The Schadenfreude You Can Eat

[Raja]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

At the moment it looks like reinstating the basic measures

I mean, there's a reason some form of measures, termed light touch measures, were recommend by SPI-MO last month, but the government gives no fucks until their hands are forced by the numbers.

It's certainly not good public health, but zero people should expect that from this government.

[Raja]

Lmao. Javid is trolling with this press conference. What a moron.

[The Anti-Targ]

NZ-UK FTA signed. The process (I've not been personally involved, but colleagues have been) seems to be a bit of a laugh. The UK FTA negotiators have been "no no no" all the way along. But whenever our PM or a minister visits the UK and talks with counterparts it's all "yes yes yes" from Boris and co. And of course it's what Boris and co say that is the final word.

I think this is the quickest FTA we've ever negotiated. The trade benefits seem to mostly accrue to us, so I would like to give my appreciation to your kind generosity, albeit it may not be voluntary. Though we are only looking at a $900M+ (NZD) benefit over time, which considering the overall size of the UK market across all of the relevant sectors is not all that much really. And much of that will not be increased trade, but rather reduced cost of trade, so NZ butter, wine and lamb to become cheaper.

But one thing I have always wanted to see (and your previous membership of the EU had hamstrung) is greater freedom of movement between NZ and the UK. It seems like in parallel to the FTA the way will be much more open to people movement for work / working holidays. So I guess +1 Brexit benefit, for us at least.

[Which Tyler]

6 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

But one thing I have always wanted to see (and your previous membership of the EU had hamstrung) is greater freedom of movement between NZ and the UK. It seems like in parallel to the FTA the way will be much more open to people movement for work / working holidays. So I guess +1 Brexit benefit, for us at least.

If it means that I can move to NZ, I'm all for it!

I must admit, I never noticed much difficulty for Kiwis being able to move to the UK - though I guess the "ancestry within 3 generations" free pass, was starting bite.
Equally, I can make no comment on how much hoop-jumping there was to get in.

 

UK farmers won't be happy, but then, I've little sympathy for them as they (including my cousin!) voted strongly in favour of telling their own staff to fuck off, hoping that it was going to mean new trade deals with Aus, NZ and USA that would bring cheaper food into the country.

[Spockydog]

So with ministers this morning furiously scrambling to deny that there is a Plan C, which will see everyone except Boris Johnson and his cabinet banned from seeing friends and family at Christmas, are we to assume that there is most definitely a Plan C, which will see everyone except Boris Johnson and his cabinet banned from seeing friends and family at Christmas?

 

 

[Werthead]

Yeah, the government moving from "there is no need for further measures" to "there may be a need for further measures" in a couple of days shows the direction of travel there. The thing is that a very moderate response now will avoid the need for a full-scale lockdown later on (yup, deja vu, for the second time), but the government won't do that and will wait until the figures are disastrous and will have to respond with a much more draconian response which will be much more controversial and unpopular later on. Again. What was the definition of insanity again?

I was surprised to see our full vaccination rate has only reached 67.6% (after reaching 64% on 1 September, so in two months that needle has barely moved 4%) and even first dosers are only at 74%, which is not where we need to be to have a reasonable chance of achieving combined herd immunity (via infection and immunisation). Although I've seen some ideas that the government has theorised that the recalcitrant vaccine takers may only be reachable by infection versus immunisation, and since the majority are under 20 the number who die in the process would be extremely small.

Probably the next thing to do is roll out a third booster for everyone, not just the at-risk. Israel has made a third jab available to everyone and there is promising evidence that being triple-jabbed has a sizeable impact on reducing the spread of COVID, which is the weakness of the single and even double-jabbed (which reduces the risk of spreading the virus but not by a huge amount). How effective that can be without children being vaccinated and with a hardcore holdout of morons (who yesterday thought it would be a great idea to burst into my local hospital and threaten staff with fake legal threats, intriguingly, from the Pope) remains a question.

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Well again the issue is really not about cases any more. If cases are mostly amongst the young and deaths and hospitalisations are steady and at a reasonable level then there isn’t really much more to do. This is really it now I think. It’s not really clear at what point we would expect to stop measures. Hate to quote Boris but if not now, when? 

I'd say, at a minimum, before we get to a thousand deaths a week, which is not far off where we are now.

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Then there is more data coming out that suggests natural immunity from previous infection has basically the same protection against infection as AZ and Pfizer vaccines. So it’s becoming a little unclear what more can be done or if the measures to reduce the numbers of cases have too many negative consequences in comparison to any imagined benefits.

Or we could look at our peer countries like France, Germany and Italy, who are handling the situation much better than we are (at the moment, anyway). Germany, with 15 million more people, had 101 less deaths than us yesterday because they are not fucking idiots.

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Encouraging people to work from home is a fine idea, but don’t pretend it has no down sides, with city hospitality and lunch outlets going out of business, office space going empty and turning the cities in ghost towns. 

We also should not pretend there are not additional benefits to working from home, such as cutting pollution and removing travel stress in the morning, and transferring power back to workers who have splendidly been using that to their benefit over the last year and a half.

Also, if you really want to pay £3 for a disturbingly moist egg-and-cress sandwich, there are various apps available which allow you to continue giving them your patronage.

Still, there are other moderate measures that can be taken before getting to the point of making people work from home again.

[The Anti-Targ]

3 hours ago, Which Tyler said:

If it means that I can move to NZ, I'm all for it!

I must admit, I never noticed much difficulty for Kiwis being able to move to the UK - though I guess the "ancestry within 3 generations" free pass, was starting bite.
Equally, I can make no comment on how much hoop-jumping there was to get in.

 

UK farmers won't be happy, but then, I've little sympathy for them as they (including my cousin!) voted strongly in favour of telling their own staff to fuck off, hoping that it was going to mean new trade deals with Aus, NZ and USA that would bring cheaper food into the country.

I certainly remember a little while back the UK govt made some rule changes that made it a lot harder for NZers to go to the UK and work. I think it might have been under the Blair govt. The ancestral thing hasn't changed but as you say not a lot of the current young generation qualify on ancestry because we're getting into the 4th generation. I'm pretty sure I'm 4 generations removed from the old country on both my parents' sides and I'm almost old enough to be a grandparent. Though I think there would have been a fair amount of post WWII immigration from the UK and Europe. So some people from my generation will have parents who are UK natives. One of my friends when I was growing up had a father from Scotland

[Which Tyler]

6 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

 One of my friends when I was growing up had a father from Scotland

Does he have kids? Have they told the Scottish Rugby Union?

 

Oh, and as for Wert's hospital - I'm guessing it's this one:

 

[The Anti-Targ]

1 minute ago, Which Tyler said:

Does he have kids? Have they told the Scottish Rugby Union?

He has a daughter, so could be good for the women's team, but I get the feeling that's not the team you had in mind as needing a bit of help.

[Which Tyler]

1 minute ago, The Anti-Targ said:

He has a daughter, so could be good for the women's team, but I get the feeling that's not the team you had in mind as needing a bit of help.

I deliberately didn't specify gender; I think their women's team is even more desperate for players - even if they haven't actively started scouting the antipodes yet

[The Anti-Targ]

We probably have some spare rugby players of any gender that might like to spend some time in the UK. I have to say, I very much enjoyed watching the women's 7s at the Olympics, it might be a total bias with no truth to it at all, but I feel like the women's game has less brute and more finesse to it, so it is a pleasure to watch.

[Spockydog]

LOL at those morons in the hospital.

 

[Which Tyler]

14 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

LOL at those morons in the hospital.

I'm sure that none of the staff there had anything better to do than massage the egos of attention seeking morons

 

  

18 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

We probably have some spare rugby players of any gender that might like to spend some time in the UK. I have to say, I very much enjoyed watching the women's 7s at the Olympics, it might be a total bias with no truth to it at all, but I feel like the women's game has less brute and more finesse to it, so it is a pleasure to watch.

I love women;s rugby - it's great. In XVs, any reduction in brutality is more related to its amateur status than anything else - watch some clips of Maggie Alphonsi and see that there's no lack in application of brute force, or Portia Woodman to see people getting Lomu.d

[Spockydog]

GPs are planning a ballot on industrial action over Javid's boneheaded plans to force them, in the middle of a pandemic, to offer face-to-face appointments to anyone who demands them. 

Personally, I much prefer not having to wait for half-an-hour in a crowded waiting room because my doctor is so overworked that ten minutes is nowhere near long enough for her to see to the needs of every patient so she inevitably falls behind with her appointments. 

 

[The Anti-Targ]

UK trade deals criticised for having no identifiable trade benefit for the UK. UK Govt ministers: Stop being a downer, you just need to have faith that eventually something great will come along.

If the govt has a plan to make the UK progressively less a producer of goods and seek greater prosperity through services, arts and the like, then trade deals which have a substantial imbalance in goods trade are a good thing in service to that plan. And if that's the plan then it means trading partners will benefit. They (we) won't benefit much if it just means the UK becomes poorer, because the theoretical increase in trade won't materialise since the UK will be buying less. The NZ trade deal by itself is too small to have a material effect on the UK economy. But whatever you call the trade situation with the EU is big enough to have a material effect on the UK economy, and a US trade deal would too if the trade benefits are skewed towards the US to the extent the NZ and Aus deals are. Even the Aus deal is not big enough by itself to have a major impact on the UK economy.

[mormont]

21 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

If the govt has a plan

Not for one second do I believe that this government, led by an arch opportunist and bluffer, has a plan for anything other than 'get through the next week somehow, figure the rest out later'.

[The Anti-Targ]

I felt I needed to at least acknowledge the possibility of a plan. I would never want to become an absolute pessimist that govts never have the interests of the country as a whole at heart, just a relative pessimist.

[Heartofice]

Its notable these trade deals are in the pacific region, and its pretty clear that there is a plan to pivot towards asia and high growth economies and away from over reliance on very low growth economies like the EU.

[Soylent Brown]

That's right, why deliver something to your neighbours when you can instead travel to the other side of the world to deliver something! Very brainly!

[Week]

2 hours ago, Soylent Brown said:

That's right, why deliver something to your neighbours when you can instead travel to the other side of the world to deliver something! Very brainly!

We're also at a time that supply chains are extremely resilient -- particularly long distance shipping -- it's a no brainer.