Monday 11th January 2021
Posted: Mon 11 Jan, 2021 7:08 am
Morning all.
The US has gone further down the road of polarisation than other places. People increasingly live with in neighbourhoods with likeminded people. The national conversation has been curdling for decades into extreme left and extreme right bubbles, with disastrous effects on politics.
The same technologies are having similar effects here. If we had faced the current pandemic in, say, 1992, how would you have got news about it? Perhaps there would have been a “Covid-92” page on Ceefax.
But if you’d wanted to spread the idea that vaccines are poisons, dreamed up by Bill Gates, you had nowhere to go but Speakers Corner really. So the man I met this summer, who so readily absorbed all this nonsense, would simply have been unlikely to encounter such ideas. These days, someone like Toby Young can set up a website to give people a dose of covid-sceptic propaganda every day. Crank “scientists” can rapidly gain a huge following on twitter.
David Henig
@DavidHenigUK
Today, in "predicted consequences of Brexit turn out to be right", our first entry is some shortages of fresh fruit and veg...
And another, Caroline NokesRogerOThornhill wrote:
An unlikely source maybe but this is welcome from a Tory MP.
Missed that, but some did comment that his heart didn't really seem to be in it.gilsey wrote:Neil O'Brien tweets sensible things but on tv the other day he was just another tory.
Although I very much appreciate others' sentiments about this, personally I find it hard to fault the practicality behind this. Changing our relationship with the EU isn't a unilateral process. The Tories have hugely strained our relationship with the EU. The first step to mending that relationship is to stop dicking them around and acting like the universe revolves around the UK. The other consideration is this. The Tories are quite comfortable with wasting huge amounts of time and resources on marginal arguments over Europe at the expense of things like social care, housing and child poverty but for Labour our position in relation to the EU has to be weighed against a long list of neglected domestic priorities and in terms of greatest positive impacts on the lives of ordinary people there are a lot of issues that come much higher than re-instating freedom of movement. It's a question of the effort (completely revising an international treaty through months and years of renegotiation) versus the potential gain. I don't know whether Labour would focus that effort in exactly the places I would like to see, such as abolishing and replacing universal credit for example, but I'm not unhappy in general about a change of focus. We didn't need to leave the EU to fix our domestic problems and if you believe that then it has to follow that you can also see that we don't need to rejoin the EU to fix them either. It would be nice to rejoin, and I will always support that, but I think it's important not to blow it up into something that is necessary. We can treat EU citizens living and working here well, regardless of freedom of movement, and through good relations with the EU UK citizens in the Europe can hopefully be treated well in kind. If the the last five years have shown us one thing it is that outcomes are more important than processes. The Tories manipulated people into thinking that the means - leaving the EU - was the actually the end, to the point it didn't matter what the outcome for peoples' lives was, just that we did it. I think we have to be careful that we don't do the same in reverse but focus on the outcomes we want, such as wanting EU citizens to be welcome in the UK and vice versa, rather than the specific method we use to achieve that.Starmer told Marr, however, that he was ruling out the sort of extensive renegotiation of the Brexit treaty that would be required to restore free movement.
“I don’t think that there’s scope for major renegotiation. We’ve just had four years of negotiation. We’ve arrived at a treaty and now we’ve got to make that treaty work,” he said.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/parler-dr ... SAMeditionMAGA Hellsite Parler Drops Offline After Amazon Yanks Support
INTO THE VOID (Daily Beast)
No, I really didn't mean it that way. I mean, freedom of movement of people is part of the single market that we've chosen to leave, to get it back means reversing Brexit but what is it that people really want from freedom of movement? If it's about being able to easily work and travel in the EU, there are other ways to achieve that. Third party arrangements can vary , we can have good and close relations that benefit everyone. Or we can exploit EU workers and give them poor pay and conditions and expect the same for UK citizens in EU countries. Part of why the Tories wanted to leave the EU was because they don't want to give EU workers equal pay and rights but that doesn't mean we can't choose to and if we do, we will hopefully be able to live and work in the EU on similar, respectful terms. The Tories want to be a low regulation thorn in the EU's side but we could just as easily be a co-operative and valued neighbour. And if we are for long enough, even though it was the one thing the EU really wanted to avoid, we may eventually be able to evolve a close but bespoke relationship more akkn toPorFavor wrote:@Willow904
I'm sure that you don't mean it that way, but isn't that a very British (English?) way of looking at things? "You'll never be our equals but we'll treat you nicely (as long as you're useful to us), anyway?"
Is there a link with the government that we should know about?PorFavor wrote:Epsom Racecourse is getting an awful lot of free publicity out of the vaccine push . . .
What I meant was that we can unilaterally treat EU citizens working in this country as equals in law even though we don't have to anymore and if we do that there is a higher likelihood that UK citizens will be treated fairly in EU countries in return. I'm talking about building new reciprocal arrangements that achieve similar things to what we lost but in a bespoke manner. For instance, "freedom of movement of people" is one of the four freedoms of the single market. The only way to get it back would be to rejoin the single market which would be politically difficult to gain British public support for and hard to get the EU to immediately re-open negotiations for. It may be better to concentrate on adding to, rather than fundamentally changing our basic agreement. We could try to improve access to the EU for workers in the entertainment industry, or enter new bespoke arrangements that allows more access for financial services and so on. In some ways the slimness of our current deal is an advantage as there is little to object to and huge scope for adding to and evolving it into something far more comprehensive over time.PorFavor wrote:@Willow904
I'm sure that you don't mean it that way, but isn't that a very British (English?) way of looking at things? "You'll never be our equals but we'll treat you nicely (as long as you're useful to us), anyway?"
" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;?Momentum
@PeoplesMomentum
Labour Lord Shami Chakrabarti has introduced an amendment to the Spy Cops bill which would mean that undercover police are not immune from prosecution if they break the law
The leadership are going to whip to abstain on it. This is a huge mistake.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... surrectionTrump impeachment: Democrats formally charge president with inciting insurrection
Trump set to become the first president to be impeached twice
Pelosi: Trump a ‘deranged, unhinged, dangerous president’
(Guardian)
I highly recommend reading it. Forgive me for not quoting from it or giving it a summary. I've had to do necessary errands outside today and I'm exhausted.With a government this bad in charge of the UK during Covid, how do we respond?
Zoe Williams
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... d-planning" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
UHTCEARE written down looks a dismaying acronym no one can remember of whattinyclanger2 wrote:off-topic but handy:
UHTCEARE
“There is a single Old English word meaning ‘lying awake before dawn and worrying."
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/530 ... d-be-using" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
In the 52 weeks to Christmas Day, 604,045 deaths were registered in England and Wales. It's worth saying this almost certainly understates the likely 2020 total, since it includes a few days of late 2019, when deaths were running at far lower levels than they were this winter.
Even so, this number is nonetheless nearly without precedent. If you look at civilian deaths, the only other year in which more than 600,000 people died in England and Wales was 1918, when the final year of World War One coincided with the Spanish Flu.
COVID-19: How mortality rates in 2020 compare with past decades and centuries
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-how ... s-12185275" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
AnatolyKasparov wrote:Currently a "Trump has quit" rumour doing the rounds.
Same goes for the one in No 10...Jay Rosen
@jayrosen_nyu
The editor of Forbes has an idea:
"Let it be known to the business world," he wrote. If you hire any of Trump’s fog machines, fabulists or spokes-critters... "Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie."