England may/may not enter Tier 4+/lockdown/circuit breaker/twilight zone
October 31, 2020 3:26 AM Subscribe
Meanwhile, on a small European island, as stormy weather, Halloween and a blue moon all coincide, different nations are under different systems/tier structures, while different regions of England are under different tiers of lockdown, with some local variations within tiers, and schools and universities open (though with some students quarantined). Cases of Covid19 are generally rising, and hospitals filling or full, possibly due to taxpayer-subsidised restaurant schemes last summer. (Speaking of food, subsidised meals for MPs but not for children). Leaks and speculation point to a possible England lockdown (minus schools), or perhaps Tier 4, next week.
This is a space for UK politics and UK covid/pandemic information and comment.
This is a space for UK politics and UK covid/pandemic information and comment.
Don’t have much to add but it constantly infuriates me the a group of islands, can’t get a pandemic under control. It doesn’t seem that hard (if you have the money HMG does). Just do what Taiwan, South Korea or New Zealand does.
I feel like there is too much faith that a vaccine will save us. It might not work or might not confer long term immunity. The state’s ability to control disease feels like the sort of capability you would always want to have.
posted by DoveBrown at 3:44 AM on October 31, 2020 [11 favorites]
I feel like there is too much faith that a vaccine will save us. It might not work or might not confer long term immunity. The state’s ability to control disease feels like the sort of capability you would always want to have.
posted by DoveBrown at 3:44 AM on October 31, 2020 [11 favorites]
Scottish secondary students are finally gonna have to wear masks in school. I am so relieved, although it doesn't solve the crappy ventilation issues at the school my husband teaches at, but it's a step in the right direction. I am also still so angry at the total lack of forethought and preparation by the school over the summer, which basically amounted to "here are a couple extra sanitising stations and one disposable mask and pair of gloves for emergencies." They had months to plan and did nothing
And of course, there are parents kicking off about the mask thing and I find it hard to be rational and not just FURIOUS that they have no interest in any safeguards for my partner.
There's talk of another "national lockdown" but no indication of whether that's going to include Scotland.
Also, it's way too late for us to get it under control, there's extensive community spread. We needed to be New Zealand from the very beginning, but god forbid people give up their holidays, so we did basically nothing early on and now we can never be New Zealand.
posted by stillnocturnal at 3:57 AM on October 31, 2020 [20 favorites]
And of course, there are parents kicking off about the mask thing and I find it hard to be rational and not just FURIOUS that they have no interest in any safeguards for my partner.
There's talk of another "national lockdown" but no indication of whether that's going to include Scotland.
Also, it's way too late for us to get it under control, there's extensive community spread. We needed to be New Zealand from the very beginning, but god forbid people give up their holidays, so we did basically nothing early on and now we can never be New Zealand.
posted by stillnocturnal at 3:57 AM on October 31, 2020 [20 favorites]
I’m just so damn angry about this. Incompetence and malevolence all the way down.
posted by skybluepink at 4:09 AM on October 31, 2020 [18 favorites]
posted by skybluepink at 4:09 AM on October 31, 2020 [18 favorites]
Short version
There is a pandemic. There is Brexit.
Many people haven't got a fucking clue what is going on except some now realize that there will be death and there will be hunger.
The ruling politicians are fine with that.
posted by adamvasco at 4:49 AM on October 31, 2020 [15 favorites]
There is a pandemic. There is Brexit.
Many people haven't got a fucking clue what is going on except some now realize that there will be death and there will be hunger.
The ruling politicians are fine with that.
posted by adamvasco at 4:49 AM on October 31, 2020 [15 favorites]
Our garden plays host to birds who we like to feed as well as to our cats who like to feed on birds. When the cats are first spotted the birds send up all manner of alarms, and they stay away. But sometimes there is a situation where they keep blithely gathering on the feeder even as one of their number is getting messily crunched up below it.
That seems to be where we are now. People know the dangers but we are sufficiently scunnered (Scots: combination of bored and disgusted) with life under lockdown as to become inured to the dangers and the suffering: in the end we have a life to live and there is a time limit beyond which we are willing to be constrained. It is a frustrating and illogical seeming state - but also a natural one.
Future pandemic strategists may consider this problem: with the best work and luck it takes 18 months to devise, test and distribute a vaccine. But you can only really expect to lock the world down for about 4 months.
posted by rongorongo at 4:50 AM on October 31, 2020 [12 favorites]
That seems to be where we are now. People know the dangers but we are sufficiently scunnered (Scots: combination of bored and disgusted) with life under lockdown as to become inured to the dangers and the suffering: in the end we have a life to live and there is a time limit beyond which we are willing to be constrained. It is a frustrating and illogical seeming state - but also a natural one.
Future pandemic strategists may consider this problem: with the best work and luck it takes 18 months to devise, test and distribute a vaccine. But you can only really expect to lock the world down for about 4 months.
posted by rongorongo at 4:50 AM on October 31, 2020 [12 favorites]
A lockdown with an exemption for schools seems like it has most of the disadvantages without most of the advantage.
posted by Foosnark at 4:55 AM on October 31, 2020 [24 favorites]
posted by Foosnark at 4:55 AM on October 31, 2020 [24 favorites]
Don’t have much to add but it constantly infuriates me the a group of islands, can’t get a pandemic under control. It doesn’t seem that hard (if you have the money HMG does). Just do what Taiwan, South Korea or New Zealand does.
I'm not sure that "islands" thing is that convincing. The UK is a group of islands with an incredibly busy rail link and massive volume of flights between it and the mainland. Many countries in Asia and Africa which are not islands have managed to control it and other countries that are islands or otherwise do not share land borders with highly infected neighbours have also failed to control the infection.
Also, it's way too late for us to get it under control, there's extensive community spread. We needed to be New Zealand from the very beginning, but god forbid people give up their holidays, so we did basically nothing early on and now we can never be New Zealand.
Agreed. There are two places that have managed to completely control an infection once it spread substantially: South Korea and China. There are many other countries which have managed to keep the virus out and contain it through early and aggressive action (including NZ). All European countries, including the UK, have lost their change to be the latter so can now at best aspire to be the former.
This has been a profoundly dispiriting and humiliating experience for all of Europe (and for the US, but most Americans never had much faith in the capability of their government). Again and again, we have collectively failed to act when we needed to and every European country is now again on the same trajectory. Exactly the one that we were told we would be on if controls were relaxed as much as they were. The UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany which had "best of the worst" status in the first wave, every single one of our governments has followed basically the same trajectory and had the same results.
This is one reason I'm not super-interested in micro-comparison between what, say, Scotland, England, and France have done. We're all fuck ups, none of deserve emulation, and at best individual leaders can split hairs and engage in profoundly unedifying micro-comparisons claiming that in some particular they were superior to a near neighbour that occupies a great deal of mental head-space.
During the first wave, it was pointed out that valorising the German performance (even then only better than the rest of a bad lot) had an uncomfortable racial element and was counter-productive from the point of view of real learning compared to looking at countries like Vietnam and South Korea.
This outstanding article linked in the non-US covid thread says it perfectly. I will restrain myself from quoting the whole thing.
Rather than learning from what already worked, we chose Hail Mary technological fixes that didn’t exist yet, like contact-tracing apps and vaccines, to justify business as usual.
Endless debates about what exact kind of bluetooth based contact tracing apps were the right trade-off between controlling the pandemic and privacy. Endless horse-race politics bullshit about whether the German app came out before the UK app, whether NHSX had switched from this to that protocol, why the French were going it alone. Guess what? None of them had any impact.
Testing. Wonderful thing, testing. The UK now has what is probably the most impressive testing capability in Western Europe, maybe even the world. But the interesting work of getting up to however many hundred thousand tests a day was given more priority than standing-up contact tracing on a local, boring, public health level and as a result we are spending a fortune on tests that have at best a moderate impact on transmission. I'm not even sure you can build a real public health infrastructure from scratch so fast. Even Germany has now started focusing their contact tracing on only the highest risk cases because despite their local contact tracing capability, you only get so far before rising transmission overwhelms you.
Again. South Korea and China, to some extent HK and Taiwan, are the only places that went from a serious outbreak to complete containment. One could throw Victoria in Aus in there as well. What did they do? First, a rapid and aggressive lockdown. Second, they had a lot of testing capacity... early. Being able to saturate an area of mostly uninfected people with tests before it spreads is helpful. Testing people who you know have it once its already spread is pointless, what is that meant to do? They had a panopticon style, everything on the table approach to contact tracing, they did not fuck around with using legal powers and incentives to confine contacts. The carrot and the stick, they made it both easy to stay at home, difficult to not comply without detection, and bad news to get caught doing it. Staying home as a contact in the UK (and other european countries) was never made financially nor otherwise easy, enforcement was basically non-existent. Nor was there any opportunity for infected people in households to stay in quarantine hotels away from uninfected people.
A lockdown with an exemption for schools seems like it has most of the disadvantages without most of the advantage.
Depends on whether you can get Rt below 1 without closing them. If you can't then they will have to. It looks like *some* of the tier 3 LAs *may* have cases gently decreasing. I think they will wait to see what data comes in before Monday to see if tier 3 is "enough" before bringing in an additional tier or national lockdown.
If we had committed to another six weeks of full lockdown in the early summer, we might have gotten it low enough to fully eliminate. I think the government (and other Euro governments) gambled that a vaccine would be widely available much earlier than it actually will be. If we were starting to vaccinate now and had most of the really vulnerable done by Christmas, then the approach they took would have paid off. That hasn't happened and they've all screwed us. If we are lucky, there will be vaccines that sort of work going into mass-use in January - if we're really lucky.
posted by atrazine at 5:15 AM on October 31, 2020 [26 favorites]
I'm not sure that "islands" thing is that convincing. The UK is a group of islands with an incredibly busy rail link and massive volume of flights between it and the mainland. Many countries in Asia and Africa which are not islands have managed to control it and other countries that are islands or otherwise do not share land borders with highly infected neighbours have also failed to control the infection.
Also, it's way too late for us to get it under control, there's extensive community spread. We needed to be New Zealand from the very beginning, but god forbid people give up their holidays, so we did basically nothing early on and now we can never be New Zealand.
Agreed. There are two places that have managed to completely control an infection once it spread substantially: South Korea and China. There are many other countries which have managed to keep the virus out and contain it through early and aggressive action (including NZ). All European countries, including the UK, have lost their change to be the latter so can now at best aspire to be the former.
This has been a profoundly dispiriting and humiliating experience for all of Europe (and for the US, but most Americans never had much faith in the capability of their government). Again and again, we have collectively failed to act when we needed to and every European country is now again on the same trajectory. Exactly the one that we were told we would be on if controls were relaxed as much as they were. The UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany which had "best of the worst" status in the first wave, every single one of our governments has followed basically the same trajectory and had the same results.
This is one reason I'm not super-interested in micro-comparison between what, say, Scotland, England, and France have done. We're all fuck ups, none of deserve emulation, and at best individual leaders can split hairs and engage in profoundly unedifying micro-comparisons claiming that in some particular they were superior to a near neighbour that occupies a great deal of mental head-space.
During the first wave, it was pointed out that valorising the German performance (even then only better than the rest of a bad lot) had an uncomfortable racial element and was counter-productive from the point of view of real learning compared to looking at countries like Vietnam and South Korea.
This outstanding article linked in the non-US covid thread says it perfectly. I will restrain myself from quoting the whole thing.
Rather than learning from what already worked, we chose Hail Mary technological fixes that didn’t exist yet, like contact-tracing apps and vaccines, to justify business as usual.
Endless debates about what exact kind of bluetooth based contact tracing apps were the right trade-off between controlling the pandemic and privacy. Endless horse-race politics bullshit about whether the German app came out before the UK app, whether NHSX had switched from this to that protocol, why the French were going it alone. Guess what? None of them had any impact.
Testing. Wonderful thing, testing. The UK now has what is probably the most impressive testing capability in Western Europe, maybe even the world. But the interesting work of getting up to however many hundred thousand tests a day was given more priority than standing-up contact tracing on a local, boring, public health level and as a result we are spending a fortune on tests that have at best a moderate impact on transmission. I'm not even sure you can build a real public health infrastructure from scratch so fast. Even Germany has now started focusing their contact tracing on only the highest risk cases because despite their local contact tracing capability, you only get so far before rising transmission overwhelms you.
Again. South Korea and China, to some extent HK and Taiwan, are the only places that went from a serious outbreak to complete containment. One could throw Victoria in Aus in there as well. What did they do? First, a rapid and aggressive lockdown. Second, they had a lot of testing capacity... early. Being able to saturate an area of mostly uninfected people with tests before it spreads is helpful. Testing people who you know have it once its already spread is pointless, what is that meant to do? They had a panopticon style, everything on the table approach to contact tracing, they did not fuck around with using legal powers and incentives to confine contacts. The carrot and the stick, they made it both easy to stay at home, difficult to not comply without detection, and bad news to get caught doing it. Staying home as a contact in the UK (and other european countries) was never made financially nor otherwise easy, enforcement was basically non-existent. Nor was there any opportunity for infected people in households to stay in quarantine hotels away from uninfected people.
A lockdown with an exemption for schools seems like it has most of the disadvantages without most of the advantage.
Depends on whether you can get Rt below 1 without closing them. If you can't then they will have to. It looks like *some* of the tier 3 LAs *may* have cases gently decreasing. I think they will wait to see what data comes in before Monday to see if tier 3 is "enough" before bringing in an additional tier or national lockdown.
If we had committed to another six weeks of full lockdown in the early summer, we might have gotten it low enough to fully eliminate. I think the government (and other Euro governments) gambled that a vaccine would be widely available much earlier than it actually will be. If we were starting to vaccinate now and had most of the really vulnerable done by Christmas, then the approach they took would have paid off. That hasn't happened and they've all screwed us. If we are lucky, there will be vaccines that sort of work going into mass-use in January - if we're really lucky.
posted by atrazine at 5:15 AM on October 31, 2020 [26 favorites]
I think the government (and other Euro governments) gambled that a vaccine would be widely available much earlier than it actually will be
That and the ridiculous infection theater of allowing travel in "corridors" with "temperature testing", and GO ON summer holidays a few months ago!, as well as pubs & houseparties being completely free-range.
I repeat the comment I made months ago; the reason why contact tracing wasn't pursued aggressively in the UK was they did trials, and too many brits were having either untaxed cash or sex on the side or other illicit activities and didn't want to tell the govt. about "who they were seeing". The failure rate in contact tracing was HIGH and they gave up. (this from someone, a close friend of mine, who is close to the top of the testing effort)
What I want to know, mid-term timescale is when the dust settles, what will the "bubbled" countries do about the fucked up ones and vice-versa - before vaccine use is widespread enough not to care (surely a few years!), and what will that do to international relations and inter-and-intra state stress?
posted by lalochezia at 5:42 AM on October 31, 2020 [8 favorites]
That and the ridiculous infection theater of allowing travel in "corridors" with "temperature testing", and GO ON summer holidays a few months ago!, as well as pubs & houseparties being completely free-range.
I repeat the comment I made months ago; the reason why contact tracing wasn't pursued aggressively in the UK was they did trials, and too many brits were having either untaxed cash or sex on the side or other illicit activities and didn't want to tell the govt. about "who they were seeing". The failure rate in contact tracing was HIGH and they gave up. (this from someone, a close friend of mine, who is close to the top of the testing effort)
What I want to know, mid-term timescale is when the dust settles, what will the "bubbled" countries do about the fucked up ones and vice-versa - before vaccine use is widespread enough not to care (surely a few years!), and what will that do to international relations and inter-and-intra state stress?
posted by lalochezia at 5:42 AM on October 31, 2020 [8 favorites]
To cover everything, in nuance and detail, that's going on in wider UK politics would make
me cry like a lost child for the state we're in.
With great irony (or duplicitiousness, take your pick), the government which has spent months announcing national policy by leaking it to pet newspapers or onto Twitter is now 'furious' that someone in their ranks has...leaked this news to pet newspapers.
posted by reynir at 5:52 AM on October 31, 2020 [9 favorites]
me cry like a lost child for the state we're in.
With great irony (or duplicitiousness, take your pick), the government which has spent months announcing national policy by leaking it to pet newspapers or onto Twitter is now 'furious' that someone in their ranks has...leaked this news to pet newspapers.
posted by reynir at 5:52 AM on October 31, 2020 [9 favorites]
There is always some sunshine around for some.
Documents leaked to the Good Law Project appear to show special pathways through which “VIPs” and Cabinet Office contacts were able to win contracts bypassing the NHS and handing crucial services to corporate executives. The Financial Times has counted £10bn worth of Covid contracts made without competitive tender.
In an additional dose of irony, the Government’s Anti-Corruption Champion, responsible for implementing the anti-corruption strategy, is John Penrose MP. He is the husband of Baroness Dido Harding – head of the Test and Trace programme and acting Chair of the National Institute for Health Protection (NIHP). Harding’s recent appointments have themselves been marked by controversy, with many questioning why a former retail boss has been appointed to several major health roles in the midst of a pandemic.
posted by adamvasco at 6:11 AM on October 31, 2020 [16 favorites]
Documents leaked to the Good Law Project appear to show special pathways through which “VIPs” and Cabinet Office contacts were able to win contracts bypassing the NHS and handing crucial services to corporate executives. The Financial Times has counted £10bn worth of Covid contracts made without competitive tender.
In an additional dose of irony, the Government’s Anti-Corruption Champion, responsible for implementing the anti-corruption strategy, is John Penrose MP. He is the husband of Baroness Dido Harding – head of the Test and Trace programme and acting Chair of the National Institute for Health Protection (NIHP). Harding’s recent appointments have themselves been marked by controversy, with many questioning why a former retail boss has been appointed to several major health roles in the midst of a pandemic.
posted by adamvasco at 6:11 AM on October 31, 2020 [16 favorites]
I went for my flu jab the other week and the administering nurse was confident we would have a vaccine by March. He is at the sharp end, so I choose to believe he knows what he's talking about.
The government doesn't have a clue what they're doing. I could be scrupulously fair and say well, unprecedented times and no-one knows what's going on, etc. But right at the start of this, the scientists and researchers were saying this is going to be a series of waves, peaks and troughs, and decisive actions need to be taken to avoid unnecessary deaths. So, we were late to the first lockdown - we spent all that time pointing to the rates of deaths and infections in Italy and Spain and France saying we're not that bad, we're all fine and then whoosh, off we went up the charts.
We could have reasoned that we're a little island with some incredibly densely - packed urban areas, with lots of poverty and deprivation, that anyone with half a brain and an ounce of compassionate common sense could have identified early doors as a disaster waiting to happen. But we lost that opportunity and people died unnecessarily.
So, now we've messed around with lifting and renewing restrictions for long enough for the virus to take a firm grip again. Everyone I've heard talk about it, in real life and on the local news (apart from a few people - anyone watching BBC News at 10 last night would have seen a good example in the man in Nottingham with the somewhat askew mask) just wants to be told either we're back in lockdown or here are some very clear, countrywide instructions that everyone can follow. We could be halfway through a lockdown by now, with unnecessary deaths starting to fall off.
Times like this are when you need decisive and robust national leadership and that is something we simply don't have. There is no excuse for the confusion, fear and unnecessary deaths we are seeing and suffering now in this second wave, as we have been through it before and we know what the solution is.
The PM will be giving us the benefit of his immense experience later today but it's too late for the thousands of people who have already fallen ill and died in the last few weeks. Unnecessary deaths.
posted by Martha My Dear Prudence at 6:25 AM on October 31, 2020 [13 favorites]
The government doesn't have a clue what they're doing. I could be scrupulously fair and say well, unprecedented times and no-one knows what's going on, etc. But right at the start of this, the scientists and researchers were saying this is going to be a series of waves, peaks and troughs, and decisive actions need to be taken to avoid unnecessary deaths. So, we were late to the first lockdown - we spent all that time pointing to the rates of deaths and infections in Italy and Spain and France saying we're not that bad, we're all fine and then whoosh, off we went up the charts.
We could have reasoned that we're a little island with some incredibly densely - packed urban areas, with lots of poverty and deprivation, that anyone with half a brain and an ounce of compassionate common sense could have identified early doors as a disaster waiting to happen. But we lost that opportunity and people died unnecessarily.
So, now we've messed around with lifting and renewing restrictions for long enough for the virus to take a firm grip again. Everyone I've heard talk about it, in real life and on the local news (apart from a few people - anyone watching BBC News at 10 last night would have seen a good example in the man in Nottingham with the somewhat askew mask) just wants to be told either we're back in lockdown or here are some very clear, countrywide instructions that everyone can follow. We could be halfway through a lockdown by now, with unnecessary deaths starting to fall off.
Times like this are when you need decisive and robust national leadership and that is something we simply don't have. There is no excuse for the confusion, fear and unnecessary deaths we are seeing and suffering now in this second wave, as we have been through it before and we know what the solution is.
The PM will be giving us the benefit of his immense experience later today but it's too late for the thousands of people who have already fallen ill and died in the last few weeks. Unnecessary deaths.
posted by Martha My Dear Prudence at 6:25 AM on October 31, 2020 [13 favorites]
Don’t have much to add but it constantly infuriates me the a group of islands, can’t get a pandemic under control. It doesn’t seem that hard (if you have the money HMG does). Just do what Taiwan, South Korea or New Zealand does.
In my ignorance, I had assumed that being an island (or group of islands) was going to be the virus superpower, where you are able to impose strict controls and manage the flow of people into the country. Obviously, that hasn't turned out to be the case, but I do wonder if enough people thought along those lines to create a sense of complacency.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:51 AM on October 31, 2020 [2 favorites]
In my ignorance, I had assumed that being an island (or group of islands) was going to be the virus superpower, where you are able to impose strict controls and manage the flow of people into the country. Obviously, that hasn't turned out to be the case, but I do wonder if enough people thought along those lines to create a sense of complacency.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:51 AM on October 31, 2020 [2 favorites]
The UK screwed up the first wave by introducing measures too late.
But with the second wave it looks about average to me. All the countries that had bad first waves are having bad second waves.
Sometimes the UK is just an average European country with no particular reason to self-congratulate or self-flagellate.
Anti-COVID measures are usually taken on a national basis. I'm a bit skeptical of theories like "all European countries took bad measures but all Asian countries took good measures". Regional climates could be a factor. Antibodies to previous Coronaviruses could be a factor.
I feel we're a bit like the people in the Black Death frantically killing cats or looking for the right flowers to beat the miasmas: desperately looking for some reason to believe that we can be in control.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:06 AM on October 31, 2020 [3 favorites]
But with the second wave it looks about average to me. All the countries that had bad first waves are having bad second waves.
Sometimes the UK is just an average European country with no particular reason to self-congratulate or self-flagellate.
Anti-COVID measures are usually taken on a national basis. I'm a bit skeptical of theories like "all European countries took bad measures but all Asian countries took good measures". Regional climates could be a factor. Antibodies to previous Coronaviruses could be a factor.
I feel we're a bit like the people in the Black Death frantically killing cats or looking for the right flowers to beat the miasmas: desperately looking for some reason to believe that we can be in control.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:06 AM on October 31, 2020 [3 favorites]
Looking forward to Tier Series S and Tier Series X next month.
posted by adrianhon at 7:15 AM on October 31, 2020 [7 favorites]
posted by adrianhon at 7:15 AM on October 31, 2020 [7 favorites]
I haven’t seen any good evidence to suggest that climate or antibodies to previous coronaviruses is significant enough to explain the differences between most European and most Asian countries, although I would welcome being educated on that score. However, I have seen evidence on the better performance of test and trace, along with better mask-wearing and hygiene in Asia.
So maybe it is possible that some Asian countries are just, you know, better than European countries at some stuff, and we don’t have to minimise that achievement?
posted by adrianhon at 7:19 AM on October 31, 2020 [41 favorites]
So maybe it is possible that some Asian countries are just, you know, better than European countries at some stuff, and we don’t have to minimise that achievement?
posted by adrianhon at 7:19 AM on October 31, 2020 [41 favorites]
The UK screwed up the first wave by introducing measures too late.
Herding the most vulnerable people into one place without finding out if any were infected is also a standout. Effectively turning care homes in to death camps.
posted by biffa at 7:23 AM on October 31, 2020 [3 favorites]
Herding the most vulnerable people into one place without finding out if any were infected is also a standout. Effectively turning care homes in to death camps.
posted by biffa at 7:23 AM on October 31, 2020 [3 favorites]
I am so angry.
posted by kyrademon at 7:33 AM on October 31, 2020 [5 favorites]
posted by kyrademon at 7:33 AM on October 31, 2020 [5 favorites]
Herding the most vulnerable people into one place without finding out if any were infected is also a standout. Effectively turning care homes in to death camps.This is looking more and more like it was a deliberate act to reduce pressure on the NHS.
Which a cold-hearted bastard would say was probably the right choice.
The real evil was not supporting the care homes as part of that horrifying decision.
They're going to get away with it too.
posted by fullerine at 7:40 AM on October 31, 2020 [1 favorite]
It so happens that the guy who started all this is not yet off the hook.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 7:43 AM on October 31, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by Cardinal Fang at 7:43 AM on October 31, 2020 [1 favorite]
I’m not really holding my breath for Cummings having to face any consequences, but I would be delighted to see it happen.
posted by skybluepink at 8:00 AM on October 31, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by skybluepink at 8:00 AM on October 31, 2020 [2 favorites]
I think Cummings (and Boris) are there until No Deal Brexit is confirmed.
Lots of money riding on that happening.
I suppose it does mean getting rid of them to get a deal with the EU is basically now or never.
Not sure there's any Tories left who are not on the hell bound handcart though.
posted by fullerine at 8:05 AM on October 31, 2020 [3 favorites]
Lots of money riding on that happening.
I suppose it does mean getting rid of them to get a deal with the EU is basically now or never.
Not sure there's any Tories left who are not on the hell bound handcart though.
posted by fullerine at 8:05 AM on October 31, 2020 [3 favorites]
Metafilter: now we can never be New Zealand
posted by joeyh at 9:23 AM on October 31, 2020 [6 favorites]
posted by joeyh at 9:23 AM on October 31, 2020 [6 favorites]
There is no leadership in this country. It's just a load of self-serving populists who like to cosplay wartime leadership while avoiding making any actual decisions until it's too late and then immediately backing down when those decisions are proven to be both unpopular and unsuccessful.
It says everything about the character of Boris Johnson that the only thing I've ever seen him be firm and unwavering on is that Cummings is beyond reproach and that there is nothing further to the Barnard Castle trip. He will push the entire country under the Brexit bus but anything happening to Dom is a line too far.
Every week when I think I've reached a new low, I find another level of anger and frustration at this government. And, even more, I hate that it's working and English citizens are more likely to blame each other than the government for the increase in infections.
Ultimately Johnson is just playing politics. He will be unaffected by any of this. He didn't learn humility from getting sick either. He and his cronies will ride the no-deal Brexit to its inevitable and financially beneficial end result for them while the country gets ever more fucked.
posted by slimepuppy at 9:59 AM on October 31, 2020 [10 favorites]
It says everything about the character of Boris Johnson that the only thing I've ever seen him be firm and unwavering on is that Cummings is beyond reproach and that there is nothing further to the Barnard Castle trip. He will push the entire country under the Brexit bus but anything happening to Dom is a line too far.
Every week when I think I've reached a new low, I find another level of anger and frustration at this government. And, even more, I hate that it's working and English citizens are more likely to blame each other than the government for the increase in infections.
Ultimately Johnson is just playing politics. He will be unaffected by any of this. He didn't learn humility from getting sick either. He and his cronies will ride the no-deal Brexit to its inevitable and financially beneficial end result for them while the country gets ever more fucked.
posted by slimepuppy at 9:59 AM on October 31, 2020 [10 favorites]
Documents leaked to the Good Law Project appear to show special pathways through which “VIPs” and Cabinet Office contacts were able to win contracts bypassing the NHS and handing crucial services to corporate executives.
Business as usual, then. To a certain group of people *everything* in running the country comes down to contracts, money and making a profit. Get a nice contract, do something (maybe good, maybe not, doesn’t really matter) and make a ton of money. If it doesn’t work very well or you fail to deliver at all, who cares? It’s only the little people who will suffer the fallout. Oh, and get the contract written so that you walk away with a pile of cash even if you get dumped from the project.
What me, cynical?
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 10:00 AM on October 31, 2020 [1 favorite]
Business as usual, then. To a certain group of people *everything* in running the country comes down to contracts, money and making a profit. Get a nice contract, do something (maybe good, maybe not, doesn’t really matter) and make a ton of money. If it doesn’t work very well or you fail to deliver at all, who cares? It’s only the little people who will suffer the fallout. Oh, and get the contract written so that you walk away with a pile of cash even if you get dumped from the project.
What me, cynical?
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 10:00 AM on October 31, 2020 [1 favorite]
Oh joy!
Just been out to get a bottle of whisky. It may not be enough...
posted by Fuchsoid at 10:01 AM on October 31, 2020
Just been out to get a bottle of whisky. It may not be enough...
posted by Fuchsoid at 10:01 AM on October 31, 2020
The recent introduction of “designated care homes” for COVID positive people together with guidance about both how those homes should work, and how no other homes should accept COVID positive people seemed like a really good start and gave me some hope.
And then I spent the last week arguing with some people in the NHS about why non designated care homes couldn’t be forced to accept people without a negative test - regardless of how busy they were.
It’s profoundly depressing seeing us making the same mistakes for the same reasons.
posted by Gilgongo at 10:17 AM on October 31, 2020
And then I spent the last week arguing with some people in the NHS about why non designated care homes couldn’t be forced to accept people without a negative test - regardless of how busy they were.
It’s profoundly depressing seeing us making the same mistakes for the same reasons.
posted by Gilgongo at 10:17 AM on October 31, 2020
Right now (17:25 local time) the press conference to announce this - already put back from 4pm to 5pm - has now been postponed while briefing of other politicians takes place. When you can't even get the press conference right...
In short: we are so, so screwed.
posted by YoungStencil at 10:25 AM on October 31, 2020 [1 favorite]
In short: we are so, so screwed.
posted by YoungStencil at 10:25 AM on October 31, 2020 [1 favorite]
I am also still so angry at the total lack of forethought and preparation by the school over the summer, which basically amounted to "here are a couple extra sanitising stations and one disposable mask and pair of gloves for emergencies." They had months to plan and did nothing.
Some schools did better than others of course, but I know ours spent huge amounts of time on planning, as did all the others I know. The problem was, they had to do 10 times as much planning for all possible scenarios, because the information that the DfE did give to schools was always very late, and constantly subject to change anyway. There was basically no extra money to actually implement anything, PPE and sanitiser were at eye-watering prices if available at all, there was no funding for extra staff to account for sky-high projected cover costs, and let's not forget the vast amount of everyone's time that was wasted in the summer on the whole run up to the exams debacle and subsequent u-turns (as well as the impact on students themselves of course).
The UK government has been piss-poor at this throughout*, every fucking thing happens too late and is rushed out, isn't thought through in the slightest, not explained bar the odd useless campaign-style slogan, barely funded, and everyone affected just has to try and figure it out as we go. "Following the science" my arse.
* That the only tory MPs allowed to stand were ones who'd whole-heartedly embraced a no-deal Brexit meant that any crisis needing the ability to imagine possible consequences and plan for them was always going to be a clusterfuck, but it's just our luck it was Covid. I'm so looking forward to no-deal Brexit and 100 mile lorry queues with these idealogically incompetent muppets in charge.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 10:30 AM on October 31, 2020 [5 favorites]
Some schools did better than others of course, but I know ours spent huge amounts of time on planning, as did all the others I know. The problem was, they had to do 10 times as much planning for all possible scenarios, because the information that the DfE did give to schools was always very late, and constantly subject to change anyway. There was basically no extra money to actually implement anything, PPE and sanitiser were at eye-watering prices if available at all, there was no funding for extra staff to account for sky-high projected cover costs, and let's not forget the vast amount of everyone's time that was wasted in the summer on the whole run up to the exams debacle and subsequent u-turns (as well as the impact on students themselves of course).
The UK government has been piss-poor at this throughout*, every fucking thing happens too late and is rushed out, isn't thought through in the slightest, not explained bar the odd useless campaign-style slogan, barely funded, and everyone affected just has to try and figure it out as we go. "Following the science" my arse.
* That the only tory MPs allowed to stand were ones who'd whole-heartedly embraced a no-deal Brexit meant that any crisis needing the ability to imagine possible consequences and plan for them was always going to be a clusterfuck, but it's just our luck it was Covid. I'm so looking forward to no-deal Brexit and 100 mile lorry queues with these idealogically incompetent muppets in charge.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 10:30 AM on October 31, 2020 [5 favorites]
Heavy sigh.
(Yes, I know that's always my response on these threads, but I don't know what else to say really.)
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 11:01 AM on October 31, 2020 [2 favorites]
(Yes, I know that's always my response on these threads, but I don't know what else to say really.)
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 11:01 AM on October 31, 2020 [2 favorites]
@bbcnickrobinson:
Insiders insist there’s been no trouble. PM had to squeeze three days prep - calls, briefings, writing - for the big announcement into a few hours thanks to last night’s National lockdown leak. No 10 well aware that @bbcstrictly
is on at 7.15 pm.
(Explanation for people who do not live on this batshit crazy open prison. Strictly (Come Dancing) is some kind of TV dance show with viewer voting, and apparently any delay will create "fury". Reasons such as {checks} announcing a lockdown for a pandemic which is felling many of the viewers are irrelevant.)
posted by Wordshore at 11:25 AM on October 31, 2020 [7 favorites]
Insiders insist there’s been no trouble. PM had to squeeze three days prep - calls, briefings, writing - for the big announcement into a few hours thanks to last night’s National lockdown leak. No 10 well aware that @bbcstrictly
is on at 7.15 pm.
(Explanation for people who do not live on this batshit crazy open prison. Strictly (Come Dancing) is some kind of TV dance show with viewer voting, and apparently any delay will create "fury". Reasons such as {checks} announcing a lockdown for a pandemic which is felling many of the viewers are irrelevant.)
posted by Wordshore at 11:25 AM on October 31, 2020 [7 favorites]
That the Tories are self-serving, corrupt, inept charlatans is not a surprise. What is deeply upsetting is that even now, a good 35-40% of the British electorate keep voting for them. No matter the scandal, no matter the incompetence, no matter the deaths, they keep voting.
posted by adrianhon at 11:33 AM on October 31, 2020 [10 favorites]
posted by adrianhon at 11:33 AM on October 31, 2020 [10 favorites]
They got a lot of grief for moving the start of the first episode of Bakeoff, and were duly rewarded by an excellent opening sketch featuring Matt Lucas as the PM. It's not unreasonable that a press briefing timed for 4pm should not interfere with a widely watched tv show at 7.15pm when we're pretty much all stuck at home.
posted by plonkee at 11:34 AM on October 31, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by plonkee at 11:34 AM on October 31, 2020 [2 favorites]
No 10 well aware that @bbcstrictly is on at 7.15 pm.
Well at least we know where the priorities of the country lie.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 11:38 AM on October 31, 2020
Well at least we know where the priorities of the country lie.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 11:38 AM on October 31, 2020
Wordshore - I think James Hunt speaks for many of us in response to that.
posted by YoungStencil at 11:39 AM on October 31, 2020
posted by YoungStencil at 11:39 AM on October 31, 2020
Mod note: Couple comments deleted. This is about the UK, please don't make it be about the USA.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:01 PM on October 31, 2020 [12 favorites]
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:01 PM on October 31, 2020 [12 favorites]
Well at least we know where the priorities of the country lie.
Given you have been able to read the details of the announcement for at least an hour I think you can hardly blame people for wanting to see a TV show. Especially if the people running the announcement can't even be arsed to format a PowerPoint for national telly.
posted by biffa at 12:25 PM on October 31, 2020
Given you have been able to read the details of the announcement for at least an hour I think you can hardly blame people for wanting to see a TV show. Especially if the people running the announcement can't even be arsed to format a PowerPoint for national telly.
posted by biffa at 12:25 PM on October 31, 2020
"Journalists" asking about fucking Christmas celebrations and not furlough details, minimum wage floor, etc. Spot on.
posted by HumuloneRanger at 12:27 PM on October 31, 2020 [4 favorites]
posted by HumuloneRanger at 12:27 PM on October 31, 2020 [4 favorites]
A lockdown with an exemption for schools seems like it has most of the disadvantages without most of the advantage.
I’ve said this a couple times but one should not just assume schools are a core driver of transmission. But also note that “schools” are a heterogeneous issue - primary schools may be low-risk, but high schools may not.
posted by atoxyl at 12:32 PM on October 31, 2020 [7 favorites]
I’ve said this a couple times but one should not just assume schools are a core driver of transmission. But also note that “schools” are a heterogeneous issue - primary schools may be low-risk, but high schools may not.
posted by atoxyl at 12:32 PM on October 31, 2020 [7 favorites]
Anti-COVID measures are usually taken on a national basis. I'm a bit skeptical of theories like "all European countries took bad measures but all Asian countries took good measures". Regional climates could be a factor. Antibodies to previous Coronaviruses could be a factor.
Well, maybe but I think that this is very unlikely.
First, it would be one thing if the "Asian countries" in question were Cambodia and Vietnam - adjacent, similar climate, etc but Vietnam, South Korea, HK, and North China have little in common climatically and wouldn't be expected to share an antibody pool. Testing to date has not found substantially different pools of antibody anywhere in Asia, with the exception of some work done a few years which found antibodies to what looked like novel bat-derived coronavirus among people who live very near caves in China known to contain bats which carry them. Note that Hubei province is nowhere near there and other Chinese outbreak clusters were also in coastal cities which are nowhere near.
In June as well, there were claims that it looked like there was "immunological dark matter" in Germany to explain differences. It may well be that there is some kind of contribution from something like that but there is no evidence at all of that right now.
Also, countries in Africa with good public health infrastructure focused on infectious disease (something which broadly no European country has - ID is a medical specialty for nerds and PH for hippies is the perception) have also had good results so I think it's pretty clear what is going on here.
I agree that we shouldn't overfit and assume that every little difference is due to observable differences either but that isn't what this is.
posted by atrazine at 12:33 PM on October 31, 2020 [6 favorites]
Well, maybe but I think that this is very unlikely.
First, it would be one thing if the "Asian countries" in question were Cambodia and Vietnam - adjacent, similar climate, etc but Vietnam, South Korea, HK, and North China have little in common climatically and wouldn't be expected to share an antibody pool. Testing to date has not found substantially different pools of antibody anywhere in Asia, with the exception of some work done a few years which found antibodies to what looked like novel bat-derived coronavirus among people who live very near caves in China known to contain bats which carry them. Note that Hubei province is nowhere near there and other Chinese outbreak clusters were also in coastal cities which are nowhere near.
In June as well, there were claims that it looked like there was "immunological dark matter" in Germany to explain differences. It may well be that there is some kind of contribution from something like that but there is no evidence at all of that right now.
Also, countries in Africa with good public health infrastructure focused on infectious disease (something which broadly no European country has - ID is a medical specialty for nerds and PH for hippies is the perception) have also had good results so I think it's pretty clear what is going on here.
I agree that we shouldn't overfit and assume that every little difference is due to observable differences either but that isn't what this is.
posted by atrazine at 12:33 PM on October 31, 2020 [6 favorites]
Herding the most vulnerable people into one place without finding out if any were infected is also a standout. Effectively turning care homes in to death camps.
There's apparently not as much evidence of this as we thought. It now looks like the biggest contributor to care home outbreaks was number of residents and whether they used agency staff shared with other homes. Although clearly not a great idea, it may be that we got lucky and not many of the people discharged were infected (note that they didn't test them all - staff did assess whether they had a respiratory illness and didn't discharge if they did).
It so happens that the guy who started all this is not yet off the hook.
I'm pretty sure that he didn't start the coronavirus and that "dossier" is a deranged fantasy. The idea that someone is guilty of perverting the course of justice for making a false public statement of something that may be investigated by the policy is deeply bizarre coming from a former prosecutor.
At least they're extending furlough. That's going to be a big relief for a lot of people but once again I have to ask if Rishi Sunak has some kind of time machine that lets him do the right thing three weeks after he should.
Tory MPs apparently furious. Well lads, this is the guy you hired. Can any of them, in their heart of hearts say that if they'd put Jeremy Hunt or Rory Stewart in charge of the party it would have gone down like this. They can't even contain leaks properly! The reasons this was rushed was it was scheduled for Monday.
posted by atrazine at 12:41 PM on October 31, 2020 [2 favorites]
There's apparently not as much evidence of this as we thought. It now looks like the biggest contributor to care home outbreaks was number of residents and whether they used agency staff shared with other homes. Although clearly not a great idea, it may be that we got lucky and not many of the people discharged were infected (note that they didn't test them all - staff did assess whether they had a respiratory illness and didn't discharge if they did).
It so happens that the guy who started all this is not yet off the hook.
I'm pretty sure that he didn't start the coronavirus and that "dossier" is a deranged fantasy. The idea that someone is guilty of perverting the course of justice for making a false public statement of something that may be investigated by the policy is deeply bizarre coming from a former prosecutor.
At least they're extending furlough. That's going to be a big relief for a lot of people but once again I have to ask if Rishi Sunak has some kind of time machine that lets him do the right thing three weeks after he should.
Tory MPs apparently furious. Well lads, this is the guy you hired. Can any of them, in their heart of hearts say that if they'd put Jeremy Hunt or Rory Stewart in charge of the party it would have gone down like this. They can't even contain leaks properly! The reasons this was rushed was it was scheduled for Monday.
posted by atrazine at 12:41 PM on October 31, 2020 [2 favorites]
I'm pretty sure that he didn't start the coronavirus
Of course he didn't. What he did start was the idea that someone could ignore the rules and do what they liked and get away with it.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 12:57 PM on October 31, 2020 [3 favorites]
Of course he didn't. What he did start was the idea that someone could ignore the rules and do what they liked and get away with it.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 12:57 PM on October 31, 2020 [3 favorites]
That the Tories are self-serving, corrupt, inept charlatans is not a surprise. What is deeply upsetting is that even now, a good 35-40% of the British electorate keep voting for them.
People didn't vote for Boris Johnson. They voted for 'Not Jeremy Corbyn'.
(This thread isn't about the USA, but you may see a parallel.)
posted by Cardinal Fang at 1:02 PM on October 31, 2020 [1 favorite]
People didn't vote for Boris Johnson. They voted for 'Not Jeremy Corbyn'.
(This thread isn't about the USA, but you may see a parallel.)
posted by Cardinal Fang at 1:02 PM on October 31, 2020 [1 favorite]
I think Cummings (and Boris) are there until No Deal Brexit is confirmed.
Boris wavered yet again on his latest 'immovable deadline' for the end of UK-EU talks, which this time was October 15. He is likely waiting for the result of the US election to see exactly what he can get away with (if Trump wins, basically anything; if Biden wins, considerably less).
So, please, American friends - get out and vote. It matters to us over here.
(I'm not going to suggest which way you should vote; as a non-American I have no right to do so. But just bloody vote, ok?)
posted by Cardinal Fang at 1:08 PM on October 31, 2020
Boris wavered yet again on his latest 'immovable deadline' for the end of UK-EU talks, which this time was October 15. He is likely waiting for the result of the US election to see exactly what he can get away with (if Trump wins, basically anything; if Biden wins, considerably less).
So, please, American friends - get out and vote. It matters to us over here.
(I'm not going to suggest which way you should vote; as a non-American I have no right to do so. But just bloody vote, ok?)
posted by Cardinal Fang at 1:08 PM on October 31, 2020
Cardinal Fang: The worst current poll has the Conservatives on 37%, and that’s long after Corbyn left, just after the Free School Meals fiasco, and before Corbyn was suspended by Labour.
posted by adrianhon at 1:43 PM on October 31, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by adrianhon at 1:43 PM on October 31, 2020 [1 favorite]
Mod note: Couple comments deleted. Be aware that reactions to how different places are doing with the virus can easily become a proxy for xenophobic stereotypes and racism. For example, ostentatious skepticism about the success Asian or other non-Anglo/Euro countries have had in controlling the virus by using straightforward well-attested public health measures (in contrast with places like the UK or the US where those well-attested measures haven't been put in place)... on the grounds that there might be some other factor that explains/undercuts that success.... can all-too-easily come across as racist. Please take more care in commenting about this.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:02 PM on October 31, 2020 [28 favorites]
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:02 PM on October 31, 2020 [28 favorites]
adrianhon: Granted. But that's a poll, not a vote. It'd be nice to have another vote sooner than scheduled, but it's unlikely.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 3:09 PM on October 31, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by Cardinal Fang at 3:09 PM on October 31, 2020 [1 favorite]
As a lecturer at a UK-based university, I cannot overstate the impact of universities here re-populating their campus with students, telling them not to socialize/fraternize/party, and insisting on face-to-face teaching. We saw what happened in the US nearly two months ago and here we are.
posted by LMGM at 5:59 PM on October 31, 2020 [11 favorites]
posted by LMGM at 5:59 PM on October 31, 2020 [11 favorites]
I'm in Melbourne, Victoria where we have just emerged from 111 days of lockdown.
The measures that entailed included:
8pm-6am curfew
Only one person to leave the house each day for essential trips - food, healthcare
One hour of exercise per day
Only moving within a 5km radius of your home
Schools closed
Work from home unless you are in an essential industry
It was hard. Very hard, but it worked. But we also had state funding of employed people and we increased the income support for jobless people. Also the majority of the infections were occurring in aged care.
I'm not sure that the UK is in the same place - it's going to be in winter where it's much colder than a Melbourne winter. The virus seems to be more widespread in the population rather than aged care. The income support may not be available.
I don't think a month of lockdown will arrest the virus. It will take a lot longer.
posted by awfurby at 1:13 AM on November 1, 2020 [4 favorites]
The measures that entailed included:
8pm-6am curfew
Only one person to leave the house each day for essential trips - food, healthcare
One hour of exercise per day
Only moving within a 5km radius of your home
Schools closed
Work from home unless you are in an essential industry
It was hard. Very hard, but it worked. But we also had state funding of employed people and we increased the income support for jobless people. Also the majority of the infections were occurring in aged care.
I'm not sure that the UK is in the same place - it's going to be in winter where it's much colder than a Melbourne winter. The virus seems to be more widespread in the population rather than aged care. The income support may not be available.
I don't think a month of lockdown will arrest the virus. It will take a lot longer.
posted by awfurby at 1:13 AM on November 1, 2020 [4 favorites]
On the one hand, I'm very glad that I moved to Scotland before this all came down and therefore have a public health system run by the reasonably competent Nicola Sturgeon et al rather than subject to Tory idiocy and corruption (who the fuck disbands their central public health body during a pandemic and reconstitutes it with an unqualified toady in charge?!?). On the other, a Scottish winter in lockdown is most definitely not going to be fun...
posted by aihal at 2:39 AM on November 1, 2020 [5 favorites]
posted by aihal at 2:39 AM on November 1, 2020 [5 favorites]
(who the fuck disbands their central public health body during a pandemic and reconstitutes it with an unqualified toady in charge?!?)
*jazz hands* The Conservatives!
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 7:33 AM on November 1, 2020 [5 favorites]
*jazz hands* The Conservatives!
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 7:33 AM on November 1, 2020 [5 favorites]
Oooooops
For most of its existence, the contact tracing app for England and Wales has been using the wrong risk threshold.
posted by fullerine at 8:09 AM on November 1, 2020 [2 favorites]
For most of its existence, the contact tracing app for England and Wales has been using the wrong risk threshold.
posted by fullerine at 8:09 AM on November 1, 2020 [2 favorites]
I'm in Melbourne, Victoria where we have just emerged from 111 days of lockdown.
The measures that entailed included:
8pm-6am curfew...
We can basically split distancing rules into two categories:
First, there are the rules, that if followed, reduce contacts.
Second are the rules like curfews, requiring documents to be pre-filled for being outside (France did this during first lockdown) that do not directly reduce contacts and that would have no effect if everyone was following the contact rules. These rules essentially make enforcement easier - if the police see someone out after curfew, right away that person now has an affirmative requirement to justify what they're doing. I wonder if many of these measures will be more required in the second lockdowns now that there is a good deal of fatigue about these measures.
We know that the mix of measures used in Europe during the first lockdown was enough to keep R below 1. We know that the measures taken in Victoria are enough.
They'll be targeting two things: first, it has to be below 1 or there is little point, we'll just have slow motion misery if it's 1.1. Second, you really want it to be substantially below so that outbreak shrinks rapidly. It would be tough to get to the end of another four week of lockdown for cases to be only 10% lower than now.
For most of its existence, the contact tracing app for England and Wales has been using the wrong risk threshold.
My god. Literally no-one in all the time since launch went and double-checked that they're correctly changed the risk threshold? I guess on the plus side, app based tracing hasn't worked anywhere else either so they've been saved by only fucking up something that wouldn't have worked anyway but it's not exactly a brilliant performance by anyone, it it?
posted by atrazine at 1:40 AM on November 2, 2020 [1 favorite]
The measures that entailed included:
8pm-6am curfew...
We can basically split distancing rules into two categories:
First, there are the rules, that if followed, reduce contacts.
Second are the rules like curfews, requiring documents to be pre-filled for being outside (France did this during first lockdown) that do not directly reduce contacts and that would have no effect if everyone was following the contact rules. These rules essentially make enforcement easier - if the police see someone out after curfew, right away that person now has an affirmative requirement to justify what they're doing. I wonder if many of these measures will be more required in the second lockdowns now that there is a good deal of fatigue about these measures.
We know that the mix of measures used in Europe during the first lockdown was enough to keep R below 1. We know that the measures taken in Victoria are enough.
They'll be targeting two things: first, it has to be below 1 or there is little point, we'll just have slow motion misery if it's 1.1. Second, you really want it to be substantially below so that outbreak shrinks rapidly. It would be tough to get to the end of another four week of lockdown for cases to be only 10% lower than now.
For most of its existence, the contact tracing app for England and Wales has been using the wrong risk threshold.
My god. Literally no-one in all the time since launch went and double-checked that they're correctly changed the risk threshold? I guess on the plus side, app based tracing hasn't worked anywhere else either so they've been saved by only fucking up something that wouldn't have worked anyway but it's not exactly a brilliant performance by anyone, it it?
posted by atrazine at 1:40 AM on November 2, 2020 [1 favorite]
Oh and the lateral flow tests they want to use to expand testing aren't approved yet for use by non-healthcare workers and not yet qualified for use on asymptomatic people (which is where you want them).
That is completely typical for so many of their behaviour - good ideas, piss poor execution, awful and dishonest communication.
Tracing app? Good idea, worth trying. Execution: poor.
Lateral flow mass-testing? Good idea. Basically the stuff that Michael Mina has been pushing in the US. Execution: poor. Comms: dishonest and overly optimistic. Why on earth call it "Moonshot" and then leak it to the press? Just get on with testing and qualifying point of care and self administered tests and then launch them with a big event if the pilots show that they work. Excitement after they succeed, please, rather than building up a completely fanciful scenario based on everything going exactly the way you want it to and then acting disappointed when the real world doesn't cooperate. Note that every country is testing lateral flow tests! Of course they are. What on earth is the point of pretending that something that might work is "coming soon"?
National contact tracing service? Sounds good, that's how it works in SK. Execution: not good at all. Comms: "world beating". The ridiculous thing is that the Welsh and Scots contact tracing services are not that much better in performance but they never pretended that they were going to have a world class service and so people naturally accept that standing this up from nothing is hard work and they're doing the best they can. Whereas in England we're lumbered with flim-flammery and boosterism followed
posted by atrazine at 2:28 AM on November 2, 2020 [6 favorites]
That is completely typical for so many of their behaviour - good ideas, piss poor execution, awful and dishonest communication.
Tracing app? Good idea, worth trying. Execution: poor.
Lateral flow mass-testing? Good idea. Basically the stuff that Michael Mina has been pushing in the US. Execution: poor. Comms: dishonest and overly optimistic. Why on earth call it "Moonshot" and then leak it to the press? Just get on with testing and qualifying point of care and self administered tests and then launch them with a big event if the pilots show that they work. Excitement after they succeed, please, rather than building up a completely fanciful scenario based on everything going exactly the way you want it to and then acting disappointed when the real world doesn't cooperate. Note that every country is testing lateral flow tests! Of course they are. What on earth is the point of pretending that something that might work is "coming soon"?
National contact tracing service? Sounds good, that's how it works in SK. Execution: not good at all. Comms: "world beating". The ridiculous thing is that the Welsh and Scots contact tracing services are not that much better in performance but they never pretended that they were going to have a world class service and so people naturally accept that standing this up from nothing is hard work and they're doing the best they can. Whereas in England we're lumbered with flim-flammery and boosterism followed
posted by atrazine at 2:28 AM on November 2, 2020 [6 favorites]
{reads Twitter}
So if you copy/write Article 61 of the Magna Carta into your MetaFilter profile then the mods cannot, by ancient decree, delete any comment you make on MetaFilter nor close your account.
Good/useful to know.
posted by Wordshore at 8:54 AM on November 2, 2020 [6 favorites]
So if you copy/write Article 61 of the Magna Carta into your MetaFilter profile then the mods cannot, by ancient decree, delete any comment you make on MetaFilter nor close your account.
Good/useful to know.
posted by Wordshore at 8:54 AM on November 2, 2020 [6 favorites]
So if you copy/write Article 61 of the Magna Carta into your MetaFilter profile then the mods cannot, by ancient decree, delete any comment you make on MetaFilter nor close your account
Maybe if you classify the balls in the play-pit as mast and your children as hogs you can claim the right of pannage?
posted by atrazine at 9:54 AM on November 2, 2020 [1 favorite]
Maybe if you classify the balls in the play-pit as mast and your children as hogs you can claim the right of pannage?
posted by atrazine at 9:54 AM on November 2, 2020 [1 favorite]
Uh oh. The Magna Carta?
posted by MattWPBS at 1:19 PM on November 2, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by MattWPBS at 1:19 PM on November 2, 2020 [2 favorites]
So they’re rolling out mass testing local to me (Liverpool) and I’d like to be heartened by that, because I think it’s a good idea, but I have absolutely no faith in this crew to do it right. If they stick to letting us handle the contact tracing in the old school way, we might have a chance, but I just don’t trust they’re going to do anything except give a bunch of money to their mates to do a half-arsed job.
posted by skybluepink at 2:20 AM on November 3, 2020
posted by skybluepink at 2:20 AM on November 3, 2020
@AllyFogg: BBC Newsreader just said "Let me just read out a Tweet that Margaret Thatcher has put out" and I shat myself before he corrected it to Theresa May.
posted by Wordshore at 3:07 AM on November 4, 2020 [8 favorites]
posted by Wordshore at 3:07 AM on November 4, 2020 [8 favorites]
The lady’s for returning 😬
posted by adrianhon at 5:51 AM on November 4, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by adrianhon at 5:51 AM on November 4, 2020 [1 favorite]
Rory Stewart seems to have spent lock down thinking about how much he dislikes Johnson (The TLS, officially a review for the Johnson biography).
posted by DoveBrown at 12:46 AM on November 5, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by DoveBrown at 12:46 AM on November 5, 2020 [2 favorites]
tbf, Zombie Margaret Thatcher would be entirely on-brand for 2020.
posted by Pink Frost at 1:49 PM on November 5, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by Pink Frost at 1:49 PM on November 5, 2020 [1 favorite]
It seems that Biden being the next US president is going to be a bit of a challenge to Johnson's stupid "plans".
Not at all to make this about the US, but the sharp wit in there surprised me a bit.
Back to the UK; now that buying cheap chlorinated chickens off of the US is less of an option, does anyone know what Johnson plans to do?
posted by mumimor at 8:23 AM on November 8, 2020
Not at all to make this about the US, but the sharp wit in there surprised me a bit.
Back to the UK; now that buying cheap chlorinated chickens off of the US is less of an option, does anyone know what Johnson plans to do?
posted by mumimor at 8:23 AM on November 8, 2020
In 2018, Joe Biden sat down with Nick Clegg for a podcast.
They talked about a lot of things. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the topic of Brexit came up. Joe Biden didn't mince his words.
On Brexit: “America’s ability to meet our responsibilities around the world rests upon a Europe that is whole, free and at peace. It is the platform that allows us to maintain our security. We badly need Europe whole, free, at peace – and united.”
On the aftermath of Brexit: “I think we‘ve got to have a period of saying ‘OK, you want a bite out of that apple? How‘s it taste? What's going on? How do you feel about that?‘“
On Britain potentially leaving the EU: “I was really disappointed in terms of US interests. If we had any voice in Europe, it was you. I was not surprised, because in times of confusion and great change I think we all become susceptible to demagogues and charlatans who in order to aggrandise their power find a scapegoat.”
Also
‘If you think Joe hates him, you should hear Kamala.’ Johnson reportedly attracted the power-pair’s ire after calling former President Obama’s decision to remove a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office ‘a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire.’
posted by adamvasco at 9:18 AM on November 8, 2020 [2 favorites]
They talked about a lot of things. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the topic of Brexit came up. Joe Biden didn't mince his words.
On Brexit: “America’s ability to meet our responsibilities around the world rests upon a Europe that is whole, free and at peace. It is the platform that allows us to maintain our security. We badly need Europe whole, free, at peace – and united.”
On the aftermath of Brexit: “I think we‘ve got to have a period of saying ‘OK, you want a bite out of that apple? How‘s it taste? What's going on? How do you feel about that?‘“
On Britain potentially leaving the EU: “I was really disappointed in terms of US interests. If we had any voice in Europe, it was you. I was not surprised, because in times of confusion and great change I think we all become susceptible to demagogues and charlatans who in order to aggrandise their power find a scapegoat.”
Also
‘If you think Joe hates him, you should hear Kamala.’ Johnson reportedly attracted the power-pair’s ire after calling former President Obama’s decision to remove a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office ‘a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire.’
posted by adamvasco at 9:18 AM on November 8, 2020 [2 favorites]
Just wanted to point out that there's a bit of good news for a change.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 4:19 AM on November 9, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 4:19 AM on November 9, 2020 [2 favorites]
We need some good news. I went to pick up a prescription this morning, and there were a shockingly high number of people not wearing masks. This was at a chemist attached to our local medical centre. I am not hopeful about this winter.
posted by skybluepink at 4:32 AM on November 9, 2020
posted by skybluepink at 4:32 AM on November 9, 2020
Vox: Pfizer claims its Covid-19 vaccine is 90 percent effective so far. Here’s what we actually know.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:03 AM on November 10, 2020
posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:03 AM on November 10, 2020
Also Deutsche Welle had a thing a little while ago on the difficult trade-offs in the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. Hopefully one of these vaccines will be safe and effective enough.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:06 AM on November 10, 2020
posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:06 AM on November 10, 2020
Trouble at Mill
Dominic Cummings could resign after spin doctor forced out of Downing Street.
posted by adamvasco at 2:48 PM on November 11, 2020 [1 favorite]
Dominic Cummings could resign after spin doctor forced out of Downing Street.
posted by adamvasco at 2:48 PM on November 11, 2020 [1 favorite]
Dominic Cummings could resign after spin doctor forced out of Downing Street.
Worth taking with an enormous heap of salt considering how every side of this will be strategically planted by someone who has an interest in the outcome...
It anyway wouldn't be too surprising to see Cummings go once Brexit is "done" (lol) because he's not really interested in helping run a Conservative government more generally. If he thinks he no longer has the political capital to do the other things he wanted to do, like reform the senior civil service or get the government to increase spending on R&D, I imagine he would go anyway. (and I think he probably does not have the political capital to do much more at this point).
Essentially his job as comms director becomes a bit pointless once most statements come from Stratton who reports directly to the PM. Lee Cain was completely temperamentally unsuited to being a chief of staff and it's bizarre that they even considered it.
posted by atrazine at 8:27 AM on November 12, 2020
Worth taking with an enormous heap of salt considering how every side of this will be strategically planted by someone who has an interest in the outcome...
It anyway wouldn't be too surprising to see Cummings go once Brexit is "done" (lol) because he's not really interested in helping run a Conservative government more generally. If he thinks he no longer has the political capital to do the other things he wanted to do, like reform the senior civil service or get the government to increase spending on R&D, I imagine he would go anyway. (and I think he probably does not have the political capital to do much more at this point).
Essentially his job as comms director becomes a bit pointless once most statements come from Stratton who reports directly to the PM. Lee Cain was completely temperamentally unsuited to being a chief of staff and it's bizarre that they even considered it.
posted by atrazine at 8:27 AM on November 12, 2020
Looks like he is going after all. Good thing that there's a viable vaccine since these two weirdos were the pro-lockdown bulwarks (and Cain is thought by some to have leaked the discussions for this one in order to force it) against a growing anti-lockdown Conservative backbench.
It will be interesting to see the Guardian celebrate this until they realise that the replacements will be people who actually like the Conservative party and Conservative MPs (if you imagine such a ghastly thing).
Can't wait for the scathing blog posts.
posted by atrazine at 1:34 AM on November 13, 2020
It will be interesting to see the Guardian celebrate this until they realise that the replacements will be people who actually like the Conservative party and Conservative MPs (if you imagine such a ghastly thing).
Can't wait for the scathing blog posts.
posted by atrazine at 1:34 AM on November 13, 2020
“Chief of Staff”. For fuck’s sake. How much of Downing Street is West Wing cosplay?
posted by Grangousier at 1:52 AM on November 13, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by Grangousier at 1:52 AM on November 13, 2020 [3 favorites]
It's an important role (call it what you will) that someone should do but a comms guy, even a good comms guy (which... you know...) just isn't a good choice to do it. You really want someone who is focused on developing and maintaining broad relationships and building a management machine. Historically the cabinet secretary has done a lot of this but I'm not sure that a purely apolitical (which they are supposed to be) person in that role really works. Recall that it was New Labour who created the SpAd system as we know it now, precisely because they felt the model of ministers + civil service was not effective in driving change. Not that sure whether the post 1997 system has been *that* much better though.
A lot of historical poor performance of the UK executive has been that there is a very small central operation and therefore it can be really hard to drive any kind of change that is not restricted to a single department since all the executive competence sits within departments. In that sense, re-organising the way that the number 10 / number 11 / cabinet office machinery works is a genuinely good idea and that isn't particularly controversial within the civil service. Especially for a person like Johnson (who is obviously not really suited to actually governing), an organised and disciplined political manager is pretty important.
Lee Cain was a bizarre choice for this kind of role though, he's a comms guy who has lately done some strategy (first refuge of the scoundrel), not really a manager of people. Even Cummings (also ill suited to this role) would be a better choice. It's also a role that involves working with the chief whip to keep the party on side and since Lee Cain (like the rest of that crew) is neither a member of - nor particularly fond of - the party
posted by atrazine at 3:35 AM on November 13, 2020 [1 favorite]
A lot of historical poor performance of the UK executive has been that there is a very small central operation and therefore it can be really hard to drive any kind of change that is not restricted to a single department since all the executive competence sits within departments. In that sense, re-organising the way that the number 10 / number 11 / cabinet office machinery works is a genuinely good idea and that isn't particularly controversial within the civil service. Especially for a person like Johnson (who is obviously not really suited to actually governing), an organised and disciplined political manager is pretty important.
Lee Cain was a bizarre choice for this kind of role though, he's a comms guy who has lately done some strategy (first refuge of the scoundrel), not really a manager of people. Even Cummings (also ill suited to this role) would be a better choice. It's also a role that involves working with the chief whip to keep the party on side and since Lee Cain (like the rest of that crew) is neither a member of - nor particularly fond of - the party
posted by atrazine at 3:35 AM on November 13, 2020 [1 favorite]
According to Sky News, Cummings has already gone. Merry Christmas everyone!
posted by Cardinal Fang at 9:38 AM on November 13, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by Cardinal Fang at 9:38 AM on November 13, 2020 [1 favorite]
The good news: Cummings is gone.
The bad news: This shower of a cabinet, who made it perfectly clear earlier this year that they are completely unable to function without him, are now about to attempt to run the country. In the middle of a pandemic with the end of transition round the corner.
posted by automatronic at 2:24 PM on November 13, 2020
The bad news: This shower of a cabinet, who made it perfectly clear earlier this year that they are completely unable to function without him, are now about to attempt to run the country. In the middle of a pandemic with the end of transition round the corner.
posted by automatronic at 2:24 PM on November 13, 2020
A Guardian article about possible voter suppression in the UK. Which I've given up discussing with UK friends as there's a very common belief that our voting system is completely fair (it's not) and without hurdles, and will therefore somehow always remain that way. "No-one has to queue for hours like they do in the US" seems to be the main denial-refrain in response.
There's probably a long while until the next UK general election, which doesn't need to be held until 2024. And with an 80+ seat majority, plenty of time for the current regime to get through legislation, and introduce further changes and hurdles.
posted by Wordshore at 12:49 AM on November 15, 2020 [1 favorite]
There's probably a long while until the next UK general election, which doesn't need to be held until 2024. And with an 80+ seat majority, plenty of time for the current regime to get through legislation, and introduce further changes and hurdles.
posted by Wordshore at 12:49 AM on November 15, 2020 [1 favorite]
'Chumocracy': how Covid revealed the new shape of the Tory establishment.
What I Learnt About the Great Procurement Scandal: Building ‘My Little Crony’.
Reading all the stories about Government contracts awarded during the Coronavirus pandemic is a bit like starting one of those big Russian novels: all the names sound vaguely familiar, but you struggle to keep track of who’s who.
posted by adamvasco at 5:27 AM on November 15, 2020 [2 favorites]
What I Learnt About the Great Procurement Scandal: Building ‘My Little Crony’.
Reading all the stories about Government contracts awarded during the Coronavirus pandemic is a bit like starting one of those big Russian novels: all the names sound vaguely familiar, but you struggle to keep track of who’s who.
posted by adamvasco at 5:27 AM on November 15, 2020 [2 favorites]
The good news: Cummings is gone.
The bad news: This shower of a cabinet, who made it perfectly clear earlier this year that they are completely unable to function without him, are now about to attempt to run the country. In the middle of a pandemic with the end of transition round the corner.
A lot of people who are thrilled with his and Cain's departure this week seem to think that now they're gone, some cross of Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn will be in Downing Street to advise the PM instead. This is still a Conservative government with a large majority, led (-ish) by a man complete unsuited to serious work and with no internal compass or principles of his own.
The Tory MPs who are happiest about this are precisely the worst kind of shire Tory imbecile, they're happy because they've gotten rid of the two most pro-lockdown aides to the PM and now hope to influence him more effectively.
posted by atrazine at 2:41 PM on November 15, 2020 [1 favorite]
The bad news: This shower of a cabinet, who made it perfectly clear earlier this year that they are completely unable to function without him, are now about to attempt to run the country. In the middle of a pandemic with the end of transition round the corner.
A lot of people who are thrilled with his and Cain's departure this week seem to think that now they're gone, some cross of Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn will be in Downing Street to advise the PM instead. This is still a Conservative government with a large majority, led (-ish) by a man complete unsuited to serious work and with no internal compass or principles of his own.
The Tory MPs who are happiest about this are precisely the worst kind of shire Tory imbecile, they're happy because they've gotten rid of the two most pro-lockdown aides to the PM and now hope to influence him more effectively.
posted by atrazine at 2:41 PM on November 15, 2020 [1 favorite]
While Johnson is in isolation again: Major breakthrough needed to avert no-deal Brexit, says Irish minister
Translation: the fishing issue is just rubbish, invented to sell Brexit to naive idiots with a romantic image of "fishing", which does not in any way match the reality.
But maintaining similar baseline environmental, labour and social standards means that the UK wants to go below the EU standards at a time where the EU wants to raise them, for the benefit of the environment, for workers' rights and for consumers' safety.
After reading adamvasco's links and good comment, I'm thinking that they are trying to force a hard Brexit before normality returns to the international community. If there is a deal, the UK will slowly and gently be pushed back in line over the next four years. If there is a hard Brexit, it will be harder to mend the bits.
posted by mumimor at 7:07 AM on November 16, 2020
The outstanding issues remain the level of access to UK waters provided to EU fishing fleets, fair competition rules for business – including rules on domestic subsidies – and the mechanism in the final treaty for resolving future disputes.
The UK’s chief negotiator, David Frost, tweeted on Sunday that there had been “some progress in a positive direction in recent days”. But he insisted that his negotiating position on the most contentious issues would not soften in light of the departure of Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, the former campaign director for Vote Leave.
It is understood that common ground is being found on the shape of a deal for how both sides will regulate domestic subsidies. But there is no agreement on a mechanism on maintaining similar baseline environmental, labour and social standards in the years to come. The UK insists it will not tie itself to the Brussels rulebook.
Translation: the fishing issue is just rubbish, invented to sell Brexit to naive idiots with a romantic image of "fishing", which does not in any way match the reality.
But maintaining similar baseline environmental, labour and social standards means that the UK wants to go below the EU standards at a time where the EU wants to raise them, for the benefit of the environment, for workers' rights and for consumers' safety.
After reading adamvasco's links and good comment, I'm thinking that they are trying to force a hard Brexit before normality returns to the international community. If there is a deal, the UK will slowly and gently be pushed back in line over the next four years. If there is a hard Brexit, it will be harder to mend the bits.
posted by mumimor at 7:07 AM on November 16, 2020
The fishing issue while irrelevant economically is a genuinely emotive one both to a small number of people in the UK and in France (nobody else cares) because of how intensively it affects the people it does affect in both countries. On regulation of domestic standards, there is no point to leaving the EU without at least being able to have different regulations. Otherwise you're just an associate member who has to follow rules that you have no control over. Of course, some of us knew all along that the EU was not really setup to have a close trading relationship with a country not actually in it.
Of course, some of us don't have any particular desire to deviate from the current or future EU standards on these things which are usually good sensible standards but I do understand the Brexiter point that if you're not going to have a role in writing them you shouldn't have to comply with them. That being said, one might wonder quite why some of the well funded backers of Brexit are so keen on being allowed to diverge - probably not because they want to make the rules more labour friendly...
Fundamentally this was always the hardest issue because the UK is not interested in being required to adopt EU standards without input and the EU obviously will not accept third country veto on its standards nor will it will allow unfettered trade access from a country that diverges substantially from them. It's a circle that cannot really be squared - either someone needs to decide the standards for the whole bloc as one or there cannot be a single trade bloc. Dynamic alignment is basically a license for future one-sided re-writing of the rules but what is the alternative? Without some mechanism for maintaining alignment you eventually end up with distortionary divergence in some key rules and if you allow that then why bother writing rules at all?
Not just that, but ultimately you need a mechanism to determine if a party is breaking the agreement and to impose corrective requirements. That can either be a mediator determined in the treaty, a WTO body, or something else. The EU uses the CJEU internally to resolve disputes but for obvious reasons the UK does not want to be subject to a court to which it cannot appoint judges. This once again runs into the structural problem - the whole interlinked machinery that makes up the EU "expects" to see a CJEU shaped body to resolve disputes so what they are trying to do is to rig up a system for a closer-than-anyone-else trade relationship without actually staying in the EU.
Personally my view is that the EU as currently constituted is unstable and needs to either be less powerful and purely a co-ordinating body connecting almost entirely sovereign states or more powerful and federalist. I would have preferred Brexit to lead to the latter but unfortunately I don't see it happening. The UK is leaving a massive rules-based trading bloc just in time to see the international rules based system dissolve. The timing is extremely stupid and over the next few years people will learn the hard difference between de jure sovereignty and de facto sovereignty - the UK will gain the former at the expense of the latter and learn that smaller countries just get told what to do by larger countries.
posted by atrazine at 8:28 AM on November 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
Of course, some of us don't have any particular desire to deviate from the current or future EU standards on these things which are usually good sensible standards but I do understand the Brexiter point that if you're not going to have a role in writing them you shouldn't have to comply with them. That being said, one might wonder quite why some of the well funded backers of Brexit are so keen on being allowed to diverge - probably not because they want to make the rules more labour friendly...
Fundamentally this was always the hardest issue because the UK is not interested in being required to adopt EU standards without input and the EU obviously will not accept third country veto on its standards nor will it will allow unfettered trade access from a country that diverges substantially from them. It's a circle that cannot really be squared - either someone needs to decide the standards for the whole bloc as one or there cannot be a single trade bloc. Dynamic alignment is basically a license for future one-sided re-writing of the rules but what is the alternative? Without some mechanism for maintaining alignment you eventually end up with distortionary divergence in some key rules and if you allow that then why bother writing rules at all?
Not just that, but ultimately you need a mechanism to determine if a party is breaking the agreement and to impose corrective requirements. That can either be a mediator determined in the treaty, a WTO body, or something else. The EU uses the CJEU internally to resolve disputes but for obvious reasons the UK does not want to be subject to a court to which it cannot appoint judges. This once again runs into the structural problem - the whole interlinked machinery that makes up the EU "expects" to see a CJEU shaped body to resolve disputes so what they are trying to do is to rig up a system for a closer-than-anyone-else trade relationship without actually staying in the EU.
Personally my view is that the EU as currently constituted is unstable and needs to either be less powerful and purely a co-ordinating body connecting almost entirely sovereign states or more powerful and federalist. I would have preferred Brexit to lead to the latter but unfortunately I don't see it happening. The UK is leaving a massive rules-based trading bloc just in time to see the international rules based system dissolve. The timing is extremely stupid and over the next few years people will learn the hard difference between de jure sovereignty and de facto sovereignty - the UK will gain the former at the expense of the latter and learn that smaller countries just get told what to do by larger countries.
posted by atrazine at 8:28 AM on November 16, 2020 [2 favorites]
I can absolutely see the logic from a brexiteer pov, the thing is, that is not how the world works anymore. But you know and write that. I think the next being task for world leaders is to get China to adhere to a baseline of standards, a task that was probably delayed both by Brexit and the Trump presidency. China is getting stronger by the hour and the nations who want to stop global warming and improve the rights of workers and consumers need to work together to make a change.
It has been said thousands of times here and everywhere, the really sad thing about Brexit is how many people have voted against their own interests. Again.
What I don't get is why you think EU is unstable? The response to Brexit has been solid, and even those countries that are possibly facing penalties from the EU for democracy and human rights issues do not show the faintest sign of leaving. Greece isn't leaving. The last EU election gave a strong turn for the environment, which was strengthened when Farage's idiots left.
The new budget is a historic deal for solidarity, climate and cooperation across borders on COVID-19. It's not as radical as I would like it, but nothing is that. With the UK out, the countries who want a stronger EU have gained power and they are moving on, slowly but with purpose.
Obviously, there are arguments in the EU, among the different countries and within the parliament. That's how democracy works.
posted by mumimor at 10:01 AM on November 16, 2020
It has been said thousands of times here and everywhere, the really sad thing about Brexit is how many people have voted against their own interests. Again.
What I don't get is why you think EU is unstable? The response to Brexit has been solid, and even those countries that are possibly facing penalties from the EU for democracy and human rights issues do not show the faintest sign of leaving. Greece isn't leaving. The last EU election gave a strong turn for the environment, which was strengthened when Farage's idiots left.
The new budget is a historic deal for solidarity, climate and cooperation across borders on COVID-19. It's not as radical as I would like it, but nothing is that. With the UK out, the countries who want a stronger EU have gained power and they are moving on, slowly but with purpose.
Obviously, there are arguments in the EU, among the different countries and within the parliament. That's how democracy works.
posted by mumimor at 10:01 AM on November 16, 2020
The new budget is a historic deal
I thought it was vetoed?
posted by aramaic at 11:19 AM on November 16, 2020
I thought it was vetoed?
posted by aramaic at 11:19 AM on November 16, 2020
EU budget: European Commission welcomes agreement on €1.8 trillion package to help build greener, more digital and more resilient Europe
It probably got lost in the US election. As I wrote above, not to my far-left standards, but beyond anything one could have imagined five years ago.
posted by mumimor at 11:37 AM on November 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
It probably got lost in the US election. As I wrote above, not to my far-left standards, but beyond anything one could have imagined five years ago.
posted by mumimor at 11:37 AM on November 16, 2020 [1 favorite]
But Hungary and Poland have both announced a veto; is there a mechanism to pass the budget regardless of their objection?
posted by aramaic at 11:46 AM on November 16, 2020
posted by aramaic at 11:46 AM on November 16, 2020
I'm not sure. Because of corona, the press coverage here is a bit weak (to say the least). But what I have heard is that the other countries are saying take it or leave it, and Poland and Hungary can't afford to leave. The UK can't either, but Poland and Hungary can't even less.
posted by mumimor at 12:02 PM on November 16, 2020
posted by mumimor at 12:02 PM on November 16, 2020
Now I found an obscure blog that says yes, they have vetoed. But I still think the other 24 countries will stick to their principles.
posted by mumimor at 12:07 PM on November 16, 2020
posted by mumimor at 12:07 PM on November 16, 2020
What I don't get is why you think EU is unstable? The response to Brexit has been solid, and even those countries that are possibly facing penalties from the EU for democracy and human rights issues do not show the faintest sign of leaving. Greece isn't leaving.
I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction to Brexit (and to Russian aggression) and that gave me hope that the project would hold together.
I thought it was extremely worrying the way that the debates over the coronavirus relief funding worked. The Dutch government managed to hold this up for quite some time. Compare that to how quickly individual EU states managed to take internal decisions and even how the US managed to get at lease one round of relief funding passed.
What might have happened if Germany had not had a leader of such high moral and technical capability as Merkel at a time like this? I think the result was good but I also think it could have gone the other way. Italians are still extremely angry about it. During the month or so of real panic, EU countries were using their intelligence agencies to intercept each other's PPE shipments! Yeah they've stopped doing it now that they're no longer panicked but I don't doubt that a crisis will come again. If it comes with a euro-sceptic German chancellor or one that relies on a coalition that won't send money to the South of Europe... that could be the end of the whole project.
My real worries are two-fold:
First is that the EU lacks what Ibn Khaldun called "ʿAsabiyya", a sense of one-ness that motivates collective sacrifice in the name of a cohesive whole. (To be fair some EU countries like Spain have that problem internally). Any attempt to create it can go down either a high-road which is focused on shared elite culture - this works for people like me, French civil servants from the ENA, and the people who work in Brussels - logically our education was multi-lingual and focused on a pretty broad shared heritage. It can also go down a low-road which is a potentially very nasty race based one - we are fortress Europe - defined by who we are not. That would be very, very ugly.
Second I continue to think that the long term stability of a monetary union with not fiscal union is precarious. It can be argued that on a macro-level there is a once-a-year fiscal transfer in the form of richer North Europeans who spend a few weeks and an appreciable fraction of their annual income in Southern Europe but more seriously, the current way of doing things systematically impoverishes Southern Europe to keep the Euro low enough so that Germany can export competitively. Countries adjacent to Germany also benefit from this manufacturing export system either as transit countries, financial services providers, or manufacturing centres themselves. There was an article posted on MeFi a few months ago about the Czech government being overly accommodating to German carmakers and one of my Czech friend's comments was "Yeah, this is good economics and good politics. No Czech voter is going to be turned off by a politician who does what is needed to keep the VW factory open".
Take the current budget. Filled with stuff I like but going to be vetoed by what are essentially far right wing governments (much, much more rightwing than MeFi Bête noire Donald Trump, let alone a flim flam artist like Johnson). Now you know and I know that you can't just look at fiscal transfers - wealthy EU countries benefit from keeping their currencies low, from easy access to raw materials, supply chains, markets in Eastern and Southern Europe and from a security situation that has the borders at natural geographic boundaries except on the Polish-Ukrainian border where there isn't one. If you want to know how important that last one is - just read Polish or Ukrainian history. That's hard to explain though and the much easier story is "these shiftless so-and-sos are lying in the sun having a siesta on us!" and that is a dangerously easy sell during a crisis.
posted by atrazine at 12:52 PM on November 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction to Brexit (and to Russian aggression) and that gave me hope that the project would hold together.
I thought it was extremely worrying the way that the debates over the coronavirus relief funding worked. The Dutch government managed to hold this up for quite some time. Compare that to how quickly individual EU states managed to take internal decisions and even how the US managed to get at lease one round of relief funding passed.
What might have happened if Germany had not had a leader of such high moral and technical capability as Merkel at a time like this? I think the result was good but I also think it could have gone the other way. Italians are still extremely angry about it. During the month or so of real panic, EU countries were using their intelligence agencies to intercept each other's PPE shipments! Yeah they've stopped doing it now that they're no longer panicked but I don't doubt that a crisis will come again. If it comes with a euro-sceptic German chancellor or one that relies on a coalition that won't send money to the South of Europe... that could be the end of the whole project.
My real worries are two-fold:
First is that the EU lacks what Ibn Khaldun called "ʿAsabiyya", a sense of one-ness that motivates collective sacrifice in the name of a cohesive whole. (To be fair some EU countries like Spain have that problem internally). Any attempt to create it can go down either a high-road which is focused on shared elite culture - this works for people like me, French civil servants from the ENA, and the people who work in Brussels - logically our education was multi-lingual and focused on a pretty broad shared heritage. It can also go down a low-road which is a potentially very nasty race based one - we are fortress Europe - defined by who we are not. That would be very, very ugly.
Second I continue to think that the long term stability of a monetary union with not fiscal union is precarious. It can be argued that on a macro-level there is a once-a-year fiscal transfer in the form of richer North Europeans who spend a few weeks and an appreciable fraction of their annual income in Southern Europe but more seriously, the current way of doing things systematically impoverishes Southern Europe to keep the Euro low enough so that Germany can export competitively. Countries adjacent to Germany also benefit from this manufacturing export system either as transit countries, financial services providers, or manufacturing centres themselves. There was an article posted on MeFi a few months ago about the Czech government being overly accommodating to German carmakers and one of my Czech friend's comments was "Yeah, this is good economics and good politics. No Czech voter is going to be turned off by a politician who does what is needed to keep the VW factory open".
Take the current budget. Filled with stuff I like but going to be vetoed by what are essentially far right wing governments (much, much more rightwing than MeFi Bête noire Donald Trump, let alone a flim flam artist like Johnson). Now you know and I know that you can't just look at fiscal transfers - wealthy EU countries benefit from keeping their currencies low, from easy access to raw materials, supply chains, markets in Eastern and Southern Europe and from a security situation that has the borders at natural geographic boundaries except on the Polish-Ukrainian border where there isn't one. If you want to know how important that last one is - just read Polish or Ukrainian history. That's hard to explain though and the much easier story is "these shiftless so-and-sos are lying in the sun having a siesta on us!" and that is a dangerously easy sell during a crisis.
posted by atrazine at 12:52 PM on November 16, 2020 [4 favorites]
The hard truth is that there are 3 major regulatory setups in the world. The US, the EU, and China. For almost everyone, it's pick one you're going to focus on for doing trade with, because it will limit your trade with the other 2.
The UK, of course, is aligned with the EU, but the brexit ultras want to change that to the US. If we stay aligned to EU standards, that leaves the door ajar to re-joining at a (much) later date, assuming demographic change and shocks make it feasible - such as Scotland leaving to join the EU, Irish reunification etc.
If we can be changed to the laissez-faire US approach to food, medicine, labour rights, environmental protections etc etc, it erects a high barrier between us and the EU that will sever people's connections to europe over time, and make it much harder to re-align later. Plus make a bunch of spivs and chancers much richer of course, as ever. They were rather betting on Trump to help make that happen, while Biden's desire to maintain peace in Ireland makes it much harder - by its very nature, diverging from the EU substantively will mean that either NI is cut off from the mainland, or a hard border needs to be reinstated between the UK and the EU, and that border runs right through the island of Ireland.
So either Johnson will have to give up his* dreams of a UK 'set free' from the EU in the next 10 days or so, or accept an absolutely momentous economic crisis that might bring him down personally - if he can't successfully divert all the blame onto covid and/or the EU - and hope for Trump 2.0 in 4 years.
* Johnson doesn't have his own dreams, he just uses the ones of whoever was last in the room with him, which of course has been Cummings et al mostly.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 12:33 AM on November 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
The UK, of course, is aligned with the EU, but the brexit ultras want to change that to the US. If we stay aligned to EU standards, that leaves the door ajar to re-joining at a (much) later date, assuming demographic change and shocks make it feasible - such as Scotland leaving to join the EU, Irish reunification etc.
If we can be changed to the laissez-faire US approach to food, medicine, labour rights, environmental protections etc etc, it erects a high barrier between us and the EU that will sever people's connections to europe over time, and make it much harder to re-align later. Plus make a bunch of spivs and chancers much richer of course, as ever. They were rather betting on Trump to help make that happen, while Biden's desire to maintain peace in Ireland makes it much harder - by its very nature, diverging from the EU substantively will mean that either NI is cut off from the mainland, or a hard border needs to be reinstated between the UK and the EU, and that border runs right through the island of Ireland.
So either Johnson will have to give up his* dreams of a UK 'set free' from the EU in the next 10 days or so, or accept an absolutely momentous economic crisis that might bring him down personally - if he can't successfully divert all the blame onto covid and/or the EU - and hope for Trump 2.0 in 4 years.
* Johnson doesn't have his own dreams, he just uses the ones of whoever was last in the room with him, which of course has been Cummings et al mostly.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 12:33 AM on November 17, 2020 [2 favorites]
I'm an optimist, mostly.
I was against the speed of the Eastern Enlargement, because it seemed fairly easy to predict the outcome: what we have now. And I suspect that the people who pushed for it were well aware of that and imagined that outcome would benefit them, as it did for a while. For some reason the right always thinks it can control the fascists, they never learn, and at the time Europe was dominated by Neo-liberal parties. Before the Eastern Enlargement happened, I felt there was a developing "Europeanness", both among the elder people who remembered the purpose of EU, and among the inter-rail generation who had made friends all over Europe and were less skeptical of people from other countries than their parents. I agree this development has been set back at least a generation, but I still believe it will happen gradually.
With the departure of UK from the EU, the fiscal union will get a lot closer. One thing is that the UK were strongly against it, but another was that before all the banking and tax-scandals, many other countries were, too. Even some countries that could benefit. Now, most governments are aware that there needs to be some EU-level regulation and control if we are to stop the crooks. This I see as the first important step towards a more direct redistribution of ressources and some union-level control organizations.
On the other hand, the left is far too slowly realising that if we want to stop wage-dumping by migrants inside the EU*, we need to have common social standards, like a minimum wage and a right to have a home and to eat. The German Christian Democrats have always had this social dimension for their own reasons, so now it can begin to happen, and it is beginning with the minimum wage.
Nothing is going to happen rapidly, but it will happen, slowly.
I believe that the main reason (parts of) the British elite wanted to get out of the EU is exactly this: there will be a common EU regulatory system that will hit down hard on tax evasion and controversial banking practices.
And there will be a minimum wage and other improved workers' rights.
To be fair, the Brexiteers' movement from "Norway" to hard Brexit mirrors the movement in the EU since 2016, and specially after the EU elections.
*Migration from outside the EU is another question, and a far harder one to answer. The demographic reality and the economy says that it is something we need to handle, and again, it is not something that can be dealt with by the countries individually. I think that should be a separate post, though I know that it is very relevant when discussing both Brexit and Corona. Because I work at a technical university, where about half or more of our students are either second-generation Danes or international students, I often roll my eyes at the people who are scared of migration. But the EU is not a technical university.
posted by mumimor at 6:46 AM on November 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
I was against the speed of the Eastern Enlargement, because it seemed fairly easy to predict the outcome: what we have now. And I suspect that the people who pushed for it were well aware of that and imagined that outcome would benefit them, as it did for a while. For some reason the right always thinks it can control the fascists, they never learn, and at the time Europe was dominated by Neo-liberal parties. Before the Eastern Enlargement happened, I felt there was a developing "Europeanness", both among the elder people who remembered the purpose of EU, and among the inter-rail generation who had made friends all over Europe and were less skeptical of people from other countries than their parents. I agree this development has been set back at least a generation, but I still believe it will happen gradually.
With the departure of UK from the EU, the fiscal union will get a lot closer. One thing is that the UK were strongly against it, but another was that before all the banking and tax-scandals, many other countries were, too. Even some countries that could benefit. Now, most governments are aware that there needs to be some EU-level regulation and control if we are to stop the crooks. This I see as the first important step towards a more direct redistribution of ressources and some union-level control organizations.
On the other hand, the left is far too slowly realising that if we want to stop wage-dumping by migrants inside the EU*, we need to have common social standards, like a minimum wage and a right to have a home and to eat. The German Christian Democrats have always had this social dimension for their own reasons, so now it can begin to happen, and it is beginning with the minimum wage.
Nothing is going to happen rapidly, but it will happen, slowly.
I believe that the main reason (parts of) the British elite wanted to get out of the EU is exactly this: there will be a common EU regulatory system that will hit down hard on tax evasion and controversial banking practices.
And there will be a minimum wage and other improved workers' rights.
To be fair, the Brexiteers' movement from "Norway" to hard Brexit mirrors the movement in the EU since 2016, and specially after the EU elections.
*Migration from outside the EU is another question, and a far harder one to answer. The demographic reality and the economy says that it is something we need to handle, and again, it is not something that can be dealt with by the countries individually. I think that should be a separate post, though I know that it is very relevant when discussing both Brexit and Corona. Because I work at a technical university, where about half or more of our students are either second-generation Danes or international students, I often roll my eyes at the people who are scared of migration. But the EU is not a technical university.
posted by mumimor at 6:46 AM on November 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
I believe that the main reason (parts of) the British elite wanted to get out of the EU is exactly this: there will be a common EU regulatory system that will hit down hard on tax evasion and controversial banking practices.
Ironically the biggest concession David Cameron secured in his negotiation preceding the referendum was a legally binding permanent UK opt-out of that kind of regulation! Getting into binding documents what up to then had been essentially discretionary and periodically renewed exceptions. It was way too obscure and technocratic to satisfy many voters who did not understand it.
posted by atrazine at 7:32 AM on November 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
Ironically the biggest concession David Cameron secured in his negotiation preceding the referendum was a legally binding permanent UK opt-out of that kind of regulation! Getting into binding documents what up to then had been essentially discretionary and periodically renewed exceptions. It was way too obscure and technocratic to satisfy many voters who did not understand it.
posted by atrazine at 7:32 AM on November 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
Ironically the biggest concession David Cameron secured in his negotiation preceding the referendum was a legally binding permanent UK opt-out of that kind of regulation!
Exactly, that's the point, isn't it?
Now the EU can decide whatever they want, and force the UK to comply if they want to trade. Delicious.
posted by mumimor at 7:47 AM on November 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
Exactly, that's the point, isn't it?
Now the EU can decide whatever they want, and force the UK to comply if they want to trade. Delicious.
posted by mumimor at 7:47 AM on November 17, 2020 [1 favorite]
Majority of EU population feel good about bloc, study finds
In the UK, 60% of respondents have a favourable view, the highest on record
posted by mumimor at 7:58 AM on November 17, 2020
In the UK, 60% of respondents have a favourable view, the highest on record
posted by mumimor at 7:58 AM on November 17, 2020
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posted by Wordshore at 3:31 AM on October 31, 2020 [3 favorites]