[Politics] If there was a general election tomorrow

[Deleted member 2719]

Who said comedy was dead.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

To quote James O’Brien “you can guess how he spelt you’re”

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

All predictable.



Well done on your consistently negative slants on what actually is happening within the UK.

And all because your party of choice was not put in government.

Who is to blame for that..................Potter


Tip for a New Years resolution:

Don't believe In any political polls on NSC

Have nice Christmas guys.

 

[Wardy's twin]

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.

Glad to be of some help. The Crown is brilliant isn't it, one of my favourite TV productions.

 

[dadams2k11]

Glad to be of some help. The Crown is brilliant isn't it, one of my favourite TV productions.

To be honest I didn't watch it when the Mrs had it on but I watch one episode with her on her request and I bloody love it. Can't get enough...

 

[Wardy's twin]

To be honest I didn't watch it when the Mrs had it on but I watch one episode with her on her request and I bloody love it. Can't get enough...

The casting is brilliant. It's been accused of 'trolling' the Royal family and making things up. Personally think the excesses are under done rather over done. People talk about historical fact , but history as has been written is always the through the perspective of the writer..... keep watching. Have as good Christmas as you can.

 

[BadFish]

All predictable.



Well done on your consistently negative slants on what actually is happening within the UK.

And all because your party of choice was not put in government.

Who is to blame for that..................Potter


Tip for a New Years resolution:

Don't believe In any political polls on NSC

Have nice Christmas guys.

Out of interest Mouldy, has anyone ever suggested that polls on NSC represent anything other than the views of people on NSC?

 

[Deportivo Seagull]

All predictable.



Well done on your consistently negative slants on what actually is happening within the UK.

And all because your party of choice was not put in government.

Who is to blame for that..................Potter


Tip for a New Years resolution:

Don't believe In any political polls on NSC

Have nice Christmas guys.

All very predictable Mouldy.

Firstly I have never voted labour and certainly wouldn’t have voted for the cluster**** that was Corbyn. So stop believing that everyone that disagrees with you is a rabid, commie, pinko, subversive.
This government has been a basket case from start to finish. When the 1922 committee start having a go then you just know you are shit.

enjoy your Christmas.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[sparkie]

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.

Mostly right I think.... but labour was way weaker under Corbyn.

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

Well done on your consistently negative slants on what actually is happening within the UK:

It all seems to be going so well on Plague Island!

I hear you have now have yet another Corona virus, this time from SA. So much for protecting your borders! Then you get annoyed when the French say they don’t want any dirty, diseased Brits coming onto our land.

 

[Neville's Breakfast]

It all seems to be going so well on Plague Island!

I hear you have now have yet another Corona virus, this time from SA. So much for protecting your borders! Then you get annoyed when the French say they don’t want any dirty, diseased Brits coming onto our land.

You have quite enough issues at the moment in the Fatherland, HT. I will leave it at that.

 

[GT49er]

I think we should have this poll again tomorrow after the imminent Brexit deal is known

Would the result be any different?

I'll give you three guesses!

 

[GT49er]

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.

Oh dear - that won't go down well with some!

 

[Wardy's twin]

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.

just read the report in today's Telegraph ... its not going to be impartial is it.

 

[portslade seagull]

Were out hurrah !!!!

 

[Pogue Mahone]

Were out hurrah !!!!

Dear God...

A three word post that is littered with grammatical errors, celebrating something that happened at the end of January.

 

[Wardy's twin]

Oh dear - that won't go down well with some!

As you might recall I was and am remainer. If the facts are true then its a disgrace , i have always said that we should remain BUT we need to improve from within. Ordering the vaccines and from diverse sources was one of the better decisions by the government but there have been some appalling ones as well. In the early months Germany and Merkel did handle in much better. Its a shame a) because people will die unnecessarily b) we may end up with a Europe still full of COVID when we might be clearer so that will muck up people wanting to go to Europe for Holidays etc. We also will still be doing huge amounts of trade with them. I wonder if things might of been different if Britain had really grasped the European nettle and tried to make it work rather sit as an uncommitted plastic member.

 

[GT49er]

As you might recall I was and am remainer. If the facts are true then its a disgrace , i have always said that we should remain BUT we need to improve from within. Ordering the vaccines and from diverse sources was one of the better decisions by the government but there have been some appalling ones as well. In the early months Germany and Merkel did handle in much better. Its a shame a) because people will die unnecessarily b) we may end up with a Europe still full of COVID when we might be clearer so that will muck up people wanting to go to Europe for Holidays etc. We also will still be doing huge amounts of trade with them. I wonder if things might of been different if Britain had really grasped the European nettle and tried to make it work rather sit as an uncommitted plastic member.

I've no idea if those facts are true either, but my guess is that there is some truth and some fake news and some total crap on the likes of Twitter on both sides! If those facts are true, though, it negates some of the more extreme views of the 'Boris has done a worse job than anyone else could have' faction. What dealing with Covid shouldn't be seen as is a competition between the two sides (in this case the EU and Britain) - 'Our side's done better than your side - hurrah! - and now more on your side will die'. No thank you, not a good shout.
As for reforming the EU from within, OK, attempts were made, but not very successfully. Trouble is, the route of the EU is the The European Coal and Steel Community, a post-war reconciliation treaty between France and Germany (to sort out coal and steel production and distribution) to which Italy and the Benelux countries tagged along - later forming the EEC - and the trouble with that was - and I believe still is - that Germany and France think it's pretty much their ball, and their party. Anyway, that's my view (and I voted 'No' in 1975 too) and one way or another we'll never really know now that we're leaving.
Well, here's hoping that neither side is petty enough to withhold Covid information and resources from the other.

 

[Wardy's twin]

I've no idea if those facts are true either, but my guess is that there is some truth and some fake news and some total crap on the likes of Twitter on both sides! If those facts are true, though, it negates some of the more extreme views of the 'Boris has done a worse job than anyone else could have' faction. What dealing with Covid shouldn't be seen as is a competition between the two sides (in this case the EU and Britain) - 'Our side's done better than your side - hurrah! - and now more on your side will die'. No thank you, not a good shout.
As for reforming the EU from within, OK, attempts were made, but not very successfully. Trouble is, the route of the EU is the The European Coal and Steel Community, a post-war reconciliation treaty between France and Germany (to sort out coal and steel production and distribution) to which Italy and the Benelux countries tagged along - later forming the EEC - and the trouble with that was - and I believe still is - that Germany and France think it's pretty much their ball, and their party. Anyway, that's my view (and I voted 'No' in 1975 too) and one way or another we'll never really know now that we're leaving.
Well, here's hoping that neither side is petty enough to withhold Covid information and resources from the other.

Maybe you are correct that it could never work properly . We agree one one thing that COVID is not a competition and people need to focus on how we (the world) get out of this. My biggest concern about leaving the EU is the finance industry as that is so key to our GDP, let's hope the 'deal' means that the impact is reduced. My view is and always has been is i would be happy with any decision as long as everyone is tangibly better off at the end of it.

Have as good a Christmas as you can...

 

[GT49er]

Maybe you are correct that it could never work properly . We agree one one thing that COVID is not a competition and people need to focus on how we (the world) get out of this. My biggest concern about leaving the EU is the finance industry as that is so key to our GDP, let's hope the 'deal' means that the impact is reduced. My view is and always has been is i would be happy with any decision as long as everyone is tangibly better off at the end of it.

Have as good a Christmas as you can...

And a non-confrontational Happy Christmas to you too!

 

[This is me]

Sir Boris Johnson - naturally.

 

[Bombadier Botty]

Sir Boris Johnson - naturally.

I’m not sure that Blow Job gives too much of a toss about the SE or CR postcode areas so I wouldn’t waste your vote. Were you living in SW1 or W11 on the other hand...