buctootim

....and the majority of those 256 will have been immuno compromised patients whose bodies weren't able to trigger a response to the vaccine

I reckon in reality he quit at the time. The rest was just flannel to give them time to find a replacement.

Your own link proves you wrong. This stuff really isn't hard, its just counting. The polls in months in the run up to the referendum were evenly split

Sigh. You do know what random sampling is, that it is done by professional statisticians and that the Times don't just choose people from their readership? Please tell me you know that.

If you strip out the 'don't knows' it gives a 55% to 45% split. imo thats clear evidence of majority regret but its still not so decisive that you'd think it was a settled view. You'd need something north of 60:40 for that. There has to be a element of 'sticking with my view because I don't want to be proved wrong' about it surely? Of course. There is always the possibility of one poll being an outlier. However it is part of a trend. Polls are designed for a known variance -normally + or - 1% with a confidence interval of 95%. Meaning one result in 20 would have a error giving a variance of greater of + or - 1%. So the chances of one poll being out by more than 1% are 1 in 20. The chances of two successive polls being out by more than 1% is 20 x 20 (1 in 400) three 20 x 20 x 20 (1 in 8,000) 4..... you get the idea.

https://whatukthinks.org/eu/questions/in-highsight-do-you-think-britain-was-right-or-wrong-to-vote-to-leave-the-eu/

There are some billionaires who believe passing your wealth down through generations kills social mobility. Arguably 'real' Tories would be opposed to inherited wealth because it rewards being lucky and impedes (by driving up asset prices) those who are hard working and entrepreneurial. The current Government seem to believe more in a self perpetuating oligarchy than anything else

Doh. If that is true why do you think they all had roaming charges before the EU mandated their abolition? Where was the super smart market grabber like O2 then? I also had a contract with EE. Didnt stop them supposedly keeping my roaming but down grading it to super patchy 3G on a recent trip to France. In terms of contract I still had in plan data but to all practical intents and purposes it has gone.

Ah okay fair enough. But it is a good example of importing people because we aren’t managing our training and labour market well enough. For lots of industries we have routinely imported people for jobs we can’t fill rather than proving training for Brits. That’s what drove brexit, the feeling that too many foreigners were taking jobs Brits could do and were driving down wages

Climb the Glydwrs instead. Nearby, more beautiful and much much less visited

That’s obviously a political cop out. There will always be headline hitting crime in London and mistakes regardless of who is in charge. Patel has spent years playing the blame game shifting responsibility on to Dick and Sadiq as mayor of London. There are literally of dozens of chief constables of other forces and senior officers in the met who could take over. She has chosen to keep Dick . Next time Patel blames her it will sound ever more hollow.

Vet shortage is definitely Brexit related. For decades Britain has trained fewer vets than it needs and imported the rest m, primarily from the EU because of mutu recognition of qualifications. The salaries are good here, UK vets can earn double what they do in Sweden for example. It’s the opportunity to move whic has disappeared

Poor people never really drove their cars in central London anyway. It was too slow and the parking cost too much when you got there. Central London parking meters typically cost more per hour than the minimum wage. Afaik the congestion charge income subsidises public transport in London. Re regressive national insurance use this calculator https://listentotaxman.com

No banana. Most commuters into London, who are probably majority Tory voters welcome the congestion charge because it makes their commute by bus quicker and walking from tube stations easier and more pleasant. The tax is regressive. How is it fair that somebody on national average wage of c£33,000pa pays 8.6% of their income in NI whilst somebody on £100,000pa pays 5.9% and on £250k pays 3.6%?

I voted remain but accepted that free movement of labour depressed wages in some sectors. This period of upward adjustment is a good thing and was easily predictable. Action to train up Brits could and should have been taken years ago. Why do we have fewer medical school places than we need and instead steal doctors from developing countries? Why do we think enough people will be prepared to fund their own year long HGV training and tuition for near minimum wage at the end of it? The problem with Brexit is not that there could never be any benefits - but that it was obvious that those benefits would never materialise. Why? because the people who peddled the 'EU bad' 'Brexit good' mantra are not only dishonest incompetents who prioritise their own careers over the good of the nation. It's also that Johnson, Davis, Raab, Mogg, Cummings etc are ideologically opposed to exactly the kinds of things they needed to do to manage the transition properly. They were never going to spend more on things like skills training and subsidies for farming whilst telling the Tory grey vote they are going to have pay more for their minimum wage carers , Amazon deliveries, latte servers and window cleaners.

In the past month my son has had it, along with several of his friends. Now my daughter has it - again one of a group of friends - so its a pretty virulent strain. Unfortunately Ive been double jabbed by the fake news so called 'vaccine' and haven't got it. I want to assert my right to take horse de-wormer tho.

Posting at 3am again. Hope all is good in the alcohol and mental health front. Financial services exports to the EU increased by 1.4% over a two year period when inflation was 2.9%. Which means they fell by 1.5%, not rose. If you add that reduction to the reversal of the growth trend before Brexit, you have a very very different picture. "Brexit shrank UK services exports by more than £110bn over a four-year period, new research shows, highlighting the far-reaching trade implications of Britain’s decision to break away from the EU. Experts at Aston University in Birmingham found that UK services exports from 2016 to 2019 were cumulatively £113bn lower than they would have been had the UK not voted to quit the EU in June 2016." https://www.ft.com/content/20a626ab-d221-43e6-9990-bfd1e1ff132d

Ha! I had once of those because at the time I needed a newish reliable car that could carry two young kids and their stuff but had just got divorced and was skint. It was cheap and had a Mercedes 2.2 diesel so I bought it. A few months later I was driving with my boss in his car in the US and he pointed out a cruiser on the road, laughed loudly and mocked the people driving it. His embarrassment when I owned up was worse than mine.

Agree, it just looks a bit dated. tbh what i find ridiculous are those Blade Runner wannabe styled SUVs for the urban jungle (arf) - all pretend muscle and flashing lights. Maybe thats just a creeping thing tho

Ha very nearly true! It was super tinny. I left it parked near the pier one weekend when I went to see my mum on IOW by Red Funnel. Somebody must have climbed on the roof and jumped around because it was so bent in I could only just get in the drivers seat. I forced my head up against the roof and the whole thing just pinged out again like a spring. Not even a crack in the paint! Edit - actually think it was a Mk1 - W reg.

I had the 950cc version when I was a student. Wouldnt even do 70mph flat out in third going up hills.

Exactly so. Britain's relatively good performance over the past 30 years has more to do with offshoring most manufacturing, Thatcher's closing of mines and the exhaustion of North Sea oil. If we had to make all the stuff we use emissions would be far far higher. Considering how much stuff China make for the rest of the world their emissions are surprisingly low.

No, but you cant expect China to respond well to pressure to curb emissions when most of Europe, North America, Oceania and the Middle East are emitting more. Whether we like it or not the future is probably going to involve some kind of emissions trading based on every person having a carbon allowance.

China is always singled out as the bad guy - despite being only 43rd in the ranking table of emissions per capita. Why not Canada at 7, Australia at 11 or the US 16? Why not the Falkland Islands or Gibraltar at 13 and 14 respectively - all of which have more than double China's emissions per person? Or is it simply a case of blaming those countries with big populations and giving ourselves a pass?

You missed some commas