clapham_gull
Legacy Fan
- Aug 20, 2003
- 25,877
Got something to say or just want fewer pesky ads? Join us... 😊
[Politics] If there was a general election tomorrow
- Thread starter Ethelwulf
- Start date
I am sorry i don`t off hand , but i will try and find some correspondence we had and let you know . I would have got back earlier , but the wife was next to me . I met Charlotte in Brighton 1 year before i met my wife , but still have a couple of pics and a couple of letter`s , yes the wife knows. She sent me a Christmas card in 82 , and it showed a lovely street and a school/college where she attended as a kid . I`m 59 next wednesday , young 59 of course , i was 19 when i met her she was 18, she has an identical twin , kindest heart i ever met . Always kept my eye on Malmo`s score`s since .
Surrey Phil
Well-known member
- Aug 3, 2010
- 1,531
Sick and tired of elections but thankful we won’t have one until May 2024!
Your punctuation is rather peculiar. It reminds me of someone. Fred Bi....? AlfredMi.....? No, it's gone
If i told you i went to The Knoll school for boys , would that clear thing`s up !
Maybe.
I think that if someone really wants to participate, and they really want to be part of The Albion on NSC, then they are welcome.
I think my problem is that i lurked on NSC for so many years , that when i finally signed up it was like i knew a lot of people on here . Of course truth is , i know nobody and no one knows me , so i hope i havn`t come across too familiar . It wont take you long to realise what a grade A pain in the neck i can be , but i love The Albion as much as any man alive .
And if i earn the welcome , thank you .
clapham_gull
Legacy Fan
- Aug 20, 2003
- 25,877
Everyone gets a bit of grief at the start from people who think they own the place, but it soon passes. The best strategy is to get your post count up by writing bollocks like everyone else on here.
Cheers clapham , in that case i might be over qualified
Wardy's twin
Well-known member
- Oct 21, 2014
- 8,874
I think the fishing issue is really around access to our waters.
Was this a typo
think we went to war with Argentina with seeking permission from the EU and the same, As far as I am aware EU were not involved
dadams2k11
ID10T Error
Thanks.
Slightly off topic, I am watching this part in The Crown on Netflix and it makes sense now.
Every day is a school day.
Billy the Fish
Technocrat
The question has been asked why people would vote conservative.
12 months ago Corbyn was the alternative in a binary choice between Conservative and Labour.
Why can't you comprehend this?
D
Deleted member 2719
Guest
There isn't a general election tomorrow, so wake up everyone and listen to the current government because they have been making some of the most challenging decisions for nearly a year.
They have had the media gunning for them with their over hostile rhetoric almost all the way, in a time when it should be supportive and reactive.
So Boris stumbles over a few words, and it offends a few, he is the most liberal Tory your ever going to get.
So the opposition is as weak as it has ever been, imagine if labour had put a leader in that was likeable.
Most look at what the tories have done so far and will give them an 8/10, so it seems like it will be a whitewash for the Tories if they keep supporting business and the NHS until the next election.
They have had the media gunning for them with their over hostile rhetoric almost all the way, in a time when it should be supportive and reactive.
So Boris stumbles over a few words, and it offends a few, he is the most liberal Tory your ever going to get.
So the opposition is as weak as it has ever been, imagine if labour had put a leader in that was likeable.
Most look at what the tories have done so far and will give them an 8/10, so it seems like it will be a whitewash for the Tories if they keep supporting business and the NHS until the next election.
Deportivo Seagull
I should coco
BadFish
Huge Member
- Oct 19, 2003
- 18,222
A poll would be very interesting here. I took the liberty.
https://nortr3nixy.nimpr.uk/show...core-out-of-10-for-their-handling-of-COVID-19
Hampster Gull
Well-known member
- Dec 22, 2010
- 13,465
As Priti Patel said the government has been “consistently ahead of the curve” in its response to coronavirus. Do you write speeches for her?
You’re a clown Mouldy
Boroseagull
Well-known member
Posting again in this discussion I just have to say to everyone who states that the UK response has been poor in respect of the virus, just read the report in today's Telegraph. If you still think the UK were slow to act spare a thought for those of us who, by choice, reside in Europe! As it's a premium article I'll c&p it;
The EU’s politicisation of Covid vaccines is turning into an economic and political black swan event. There will be a price to pay as the consequences of this profound failure unfold in 2021, and an even higher price as people start to understand why it happened.
Europe’s double-dip recession will be stretched out for another quarter. Recovery will be delayed until the second half of the year.
Thousands more companies will be pushed over the brink, threatening a cascade of defaults and raising the risk of systemic solvency across the banking nexus. Labour scarring will run deeper. Public debt ratios across the Club Med bloc will move closer to the point of no return.
It is by now widely known that the European Medicines Agency wasted two critical weeks after the UK, Canada and even America’s notoriously cautious FDA had approved the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine. The agency would have wasted another week had there not been furious complaints from Berlin.
The Commission’s insistence that all EU states should then launch the vaccine at the same time after Christmas has lost yet more critical days. Germans have been subjected to the surreal spectacle of trial drills by their well-organised vaccination machine when they could have been doing the real thing. They cannot yet receive a jab made by their own start-up group BioNTech.
“Germany has bet on Europe, and lost heavily (krachend verloren),” was the headline across Die Zeit, with a pointed picture of a woman in Cardiff being vaccinated while along with a caption declaring that Germans must wait such deliverance.
The Netherlands has compounded the error by so mishandling its software preparations that it will not start vaccinating until Jan 8. If you think Boris Johnson has had a bad pandemic, take a look at Dutch wunderkind Mark Rutte. Listen to the volcanic exchanges in the Tweede Kamer.
But these delays pale compared to what is coming next year. The European vaccine alliance has failed in its one overriding purpose: it neglected the job of acquiring vaccines. Germany has just 400,000 doses of the BioNTech jab and may not receive more than 3m or 4m by late January, rising to a total of 11m to 13m by the end of March. Berlin has taken matters into its own hands and belatedly ordered more for the future but the damage is done.
A devastating report by investigative journalists at Der Spiegel entitled “The Planning Disaster” pulls away the curtain on the ineptitude of the European Commission, which drifted through the summer with much self-gratulation but little action.
Other countries ordered early, and ordered wide. Brussels picked a mix of vaccines that mostly will not be ready until the second half of 2021 at the earliest. It failed to lock in a firm order for the BioNTech jab until mid-November, long after it was already clear that this messenger RNA vaccine was a front-runner.
Even then it declined the full offer of 500m doses for the EU27. The Commission ordered just 200m, with an option for 100m more. It also turned down most of the offer from Moderna, the other mRNA front-runner.
According to Der Spiegel there had to be parity with Sanofi’s "French vaccine", which has since gone badly awry and is unlikely to come on stream before the end of 2021. "Buying more from a German company wasn't in the cards,” said one source.
You can interpret this as a case of European ideology and political correctness running amok, but there is an even worse construction: the Commission seems to have intervened in the interests of one commercial company, spending public funds corruptly in violation of its own competition law.
“Dramatic consequences are brewing for the German government,” said Der Spiegel. “Without being able to vaccinate on a broad scale, the country won’t be able to stop the virus. Which means that the fall and winter of 2021 could be similar to this year, with high infection rates, contact restrictions and lockdowns.”
Analysts at Eurointelligence go even further: “The combination of a delay of vaccine approval and a procurement policy under suspicion of prioritising producer interest would be a shock from which the EU would struggle to recover. From now onwards, Covid deaths may be EU deaths.”
In my view we are heading into a year where German popular support for the European Project will be stress-tested like never before. Two grave matters will intersect. It will become clear to all that the fundamental health security of the country has been endangered by EU politics. At the same time, monetary union will go through another spasm of tension.
Europe’s leaders have oversold the €750bn recovery fund as a springboard for Keynesian reflation. It is spread too thinly over five years to move the macroeconomic needle. Almost half of the money is in the form of loans that may never be used - except in extremis - because of the Troika-like conditions attached.
Budget plans in southern Europe suggest that much of the grant component displaces money that would have been spent anyway and therefore adds no net fiscal stimulus. Yet a third wave of Covid and further rolling lockdowns, now unavoidable, means that the overall fiscal package will have to be greater.
There is already talk sotto voce that the recovery fund will need to be much larger to avert lasting economic damage. If so, it means telling German and northern European taxpayers that they will have to dig deeper into their pockets to fund even greater transfers to the South.
The European Central Bank can shut down the price signals in the sovereign debt markets for a while longer by soaking up the bond issuance of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and indeed France, but the longer it does so, the clearer it is that the ECB is conducting fiscal policy and propping up insolvent sovereign states in breach of EU treaty law.
While the latest programme of pandemic QE lasts in principle until March 2022, the problems will surface before then. German public opinion and part of the economics professoriate will react once there are first flickers of inflation, which will occur around Easter for mechanical "base-effect" reasons and because of commodity supply constraints. You can dress up QE as an emergency tool for fighting deflation. How do you explain it if prices are rising briskly?
For now attention is on Britain’s particular travails but this is unlikely to last. Scientists working in the UK discovered and tracked the B.1.1.7 mutation because this country has done almost as much genome sequencing of Covid-19 as the rest of the world combined. As Nervtag said in its report, this mutation was particularly hard to sequence.
Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK) makes these sequences available to international science, a big contribution to the global fight against the pandemic that is little appreciated in lay circles. You certainly would not know this from some of the abuse being hurled at Britain.
Italy’s health adviser Walter Ricciardi descended to inexcusable depths in suggesting that the UK knew about the virus in September (it did not not: the sample was collected in September, one of thousands of mutations) and has since engaged in a Wuhanesque cover-up.
It is possible that the mutation came from Italy in the first place for all we know. It might have come from the treatment of an immuno-compromised patient in the UK treated with neutralising antibodies, but we can’t be sure. It is too early to reach any conclusion.
The larger point is that the UK acts as Europe’s viral antennae. There has been more Covid sequencing from Wales than from the whole of France. Once EU states carry out full surveillance of the mutant strain they may discover that it has long been circulating on the Continent, explaining the parabolic surges that have caught so many governments off guard over recent weeks.
The great irony is that only the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will be available soon enough and at a larger enough scale to prevent a disaster for Europe over the next six months. The mutation makes it even more urgent. “Right now, whether Germany fares well or not hinges on the AstraZeneca vaccine,” says Karl Lauterbach, health chief for the German Social Democrats.
The vaccine will almost certainly be approved in the UK the week after Christmas. The European Medicines Agency will have to decide whether to swallow its pride and accept an accursed product of this apostate island. My guess is that it will drag feet for faux procedural reasons until public opinion and the German Chancellor force the issue.
Whatever happens, it is going to be a very difficult time for Europe. People will notice as the UK conducts several million vaccinations a week all through January in a massive operation that draws on the best of the NHS and the British armed forces. There will be the same images in America, Canada, and elsewhere.
They will ask why the doses are being dribbled out so desperately slowly across the Continent, and when that happens Brussels will struggle to offer a credible answer. If EU elites don’t yet realise that this is going to mushroom into one of the biggest failures in the history of the European Project, they will find out soon enough.
The EU’s politicisation of Covid vaccines is turning into an economic and political black swan event. There will be a price to pay as the consequences of this profound failure unfold in 2021, and an even higher price as people start to understand why it happened.
Europe’s double-dip recession will be stretched out for another quarter. Recovery will be delayed until the second half of the year.
Thousands more companies will be pushed over the brink, threatening a cascade of defaults and raising the risk of systemic solvency across the banking nexus. Labour scarring will run deeper. Public debt ratios across the Club Med bloc will move closer to the point of no return.
It is by now widely known that the European Medicines Agency wasted two critical weeks after the UK, Canada and even America’s notoriously cautious FDA had approved the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine. The agency would have wasted another week had there not been furious complaints from Berlin.
The Commission’s insistence that all EU states should then launch the vaccine at the same time after Christmas has lost yet more critical days. Germans have been subjected to the surreal spectacle of trial drills by their well-organised vaccination machine when they could have been doing the real thing. They cannot yet receive a jab made by their own start-up group BioNTech.
“Germany has bet on Europe, and lost heavily (krachend verloren),” was the headline across Die Zeit, with a pointed picture of a woman in Cardiff being vaccinated while along with a caption declaring that Germans must wait such deliverance.
The Netherlands has compounded the error by so mishandling its software preparations that it will not start vaccinating until Jan 8. If you think Boris Johnson has had a bad pandemic, take a look at Dutch wunderkind Mark Rutte. Listen to the volcanic exchanges in the Tweede Kamer.
But these delays pale compared to what is coming next year. The European vaccine alliance has failed in its one overriding purpose: it neglected the job of acquiring vaccines. Germany has just 400,000 doses of the BioNTech jab and may not receive more than 3m or 4m by late January, rising to a total of 11m to 13m by the end of March. Berlin has taken matters into its own hands and belatedly ordered more for the future but the damage is done.
A devastating report by investigative journalists at Der Spiegel entitled “The Planning Disaster” pulls away the curtain on the ineptitude of the European Commission, which drifted through the summer with much self-gratulation but little action.
Other countries ordered early, and ordered wide. Brussels picked a mix of vaccines that mostly will not be ready until the second half of 2021 at the earliest. It failed to lock in a firm order for the BioNTech jab until mid-November, long after it was already clear that this messenger RNA vaccine was a front-runner.
Even then it declined the full offer of 500m doses for the EU27. The Commission ordered just 200m, with an option for 100m more. It also turned down most of the offer from Moderna, the other mRNA front-runner.
According to Der Spiegel there had to be parity with Sanofi’s "French vaccine", which has since gone badly awry and is unlikely to come on stream before the end of 2021. "Buying more from a German company wasn't in the cards,” said one source.
You can interpret this as a case of European ideology and political correctness running amok, but there is an even worse construction: the Commission seems to have intervened in the interests of one commercial company, spending public funds corruptly in violation of its own competition law.
“Dramatic consequences are brewing for the German government,” said Der Spiegel. “Without being able to vaccinate on a broad scale, the country won’t be able to stop the virus. Which means that the fall and winter of 2021 could be similar to this year, with high infection rates, contact restrictions and lockdowns.”
Analysts at Eurointelligence go even further: “The combination of a delay of vaccine approval and a procurement policy under suspicion of prioritising producer interest would be a shock from which the EU would struggle to recover. From now onwards, Covid deaths may be EU deaths.”
In my view we are heading into a year where German popular support for the European Project will be stress-tested like never before. Two grave matters will intersect. It will become clear to all that the fundamental health security of the country has been endangered by EU politics. At the same time, monetary union will go through another spasm of tension.
Europe’s leaders have oversold the €750bn recovery fund as a springboard for Keynesian reflation. It is spread too thinly over five years to move the macroeconomic needle. Almost half of the money is in the form of loans that may never be used - except in extremis - because of the Troika-like conditions attached.
Budget plans in southern Europe suggest that much of the grant component displaces money that would have been spent anyway and therefore adds no net fiscal stimulus. Yet a third wave of Covid and further rolling lockdowns, now unavoidable, means that the overall fiscal package will have to be greater.
There is already talk sotto voce that the recovery fund will need to be much larger to avert lasting economic damage. If so, it means telling German and northern European taxpayers that they will have to dig deeper into their pockets to fund even greater transfers to the South.
The European Central Bank can shut down the price signals in the sovereign debt markets for a while longer by soaking up the bond issuance of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and indeed France, but the longer it does so, the clearer it is that the ECB is conducting fiscal policy and propping up insolvent sovereign states in breach of EU treaty law.
While the latest programme of pandemic QE lasts in principle until March 2022, the problems will surface before then. German public opinion and part of the economics professoriate will react once there are first flickers of inflation, which will occur around Easter for mechanical "base-effect" reasons and because of commodity supply constraints. You can dress up QE as an emergency tool for fighting deflation. How do you explain it if prices are rising briskly?
For now attention is on Britain’s particular travails but this is unlikely to last. Scientists working in the UK discovered and tracked the B.1.1.7 mutation because this country has done almost as much genome sequencing of Covid-19 as the rest of the world combined. As Nervtag said in its report, this mutation was particularly hard to sequence.
Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK) makes these sequences available to international science, a big contribution to the global fight against the pandemic that is little appreciated in lay circles. You certainly would not know this from some of the abuse being hurled at Britain.
Italy’s health adviser Walter Ricciardi descended to inexcusable depths in suggesting that the UK knew about the virus in September (it did not not: the sample was collected in September, one of thousands of mutations) and has since engaged in a Wuhanesque cover-up.
It is possible that the mutation came from Italy in the first place for all we know. It might have come from the treatment of an immuno-compromised patient in the UK treated with neutralising antibodies, but we can’t be sure. It is too early to reach any conclusion.
The larger point is that the UK acts as Europe’s viral antennae. There has been more Covid sequencing from Wales than from the whole of France. Once EU states carry out full surveillance of the mutant strain they may discover that it has long been circulating on the Continent, explaining the parabolic surges that have caught so many governments off guard over recent weeks.
The great irony is that only the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will be available soon enough and at a larger enough scale to prevent a disaster for Europe over the next six months. The mutation makes it even more urgent. “Right now, whether Germany fares well or not hinges on the AstraZeneca vaccine,” says Karl Lauterbach, health chief for the German Social Democrats.
The vaccine will almost certainly be approved in the UK the week after Christmas. The European Medicines Agency will have to decide whether to swallow its pride and accept an accursed product of this apostate island. My guess is that it will drag feet for faux procedural reasons until public opinion and the German Chancellor force the issue.
Whatever happens, it is going to be a very difficult time for Europe. People will notice as the UK conducts several million vaccinations a week all through January in a massive operation that draws on the best of the NHS and the British armed forces. There will be the same images in America, Canada, and elsewhere.
They will ask why the doses are being dribbled out so desperately slowly across the Continent, and when that happens Brussels will struggle to offer a credible answer. If EU elites don’t yet realise that this is going to mushroom into one of the biggest failures in the history of the European Project, they will find out soon enough.
CaptainDaveUK
Well-known member
- Oct 18, 2010
- 1,537
Corbyn and Abbot, to be precise. These two combined are reason enough but traditional Labour voters who supported Brexit made it a landslide.