Tory Leadership contest 2022
- Thread starter brogdale
- Start date
not sure why tweeter was pointing me at the torygraph, but apparently there's a chunk of party members wanting to be able to vote for johnson
not quite sure if that's aor a
The other 198,000 are undecided on the matter.
Artaxerxes
Look out, he's got a gnu!
They've not been able to get in the day room
Zapp Brannigan
Built like a steakhouse, handles like a bistro
not sure why tweeter was pointing me at the torygraph, but apparently there's a chunk of party members wanting to be able to vote for johnson
not quite sure if that's a
If there's a petition to give the job to Larry the cat I'd bet it would get more than 2k signatures. A bunch of wailing gammon cranks shouldn't be news, even in the fucking Torygraph.
Lord Camomile
Yipchaa!
Presumably going for "hit the ground running", but maybe an accidental moment of insight suggested that might be setting the bar too high.
"Let's start with just hitting the ground, and maybe we'll introduce movement a few months in, depending on how step one goes..."
"... NO! No stepping! We've just covered this...!"
elbows
Well-Known Member
Secrecy is certainly part of the scene, and has implications both for accountability but also other stuff such as revealing how power is spread or concentrated, what calculations are part of the mix, whether those calculations are unpalatable if revealed to the public, etc.
As Pickman's model has already pointed out, there are actually a large number of SAGE documents available online, including ones that are labelled as minutes. I wouldnt really call them full minutes, but then I would say the same about Irelands NPHAT documents too. They are both more like meeting summaries than actual formal minutes, eg often avoided revealing what specific individuals said.
Other relevant factors are that in most countries including the UK these bodies were involved with making recommendations rather than final decisions. Countries certainly varied in terms of how likely their elected government regimes were likely to turn those recommendations into policies without exception or delay, and the exact extent to which the bodies had formal decision-making capabilities, or how politically unacceptable a government going against them would have been considered to be by the opposition, the press etc.
Another key variable in terms of transparency is how quickly the information from key meetings is made public. When it comes to headline decisions and policy implications that are acted rapidly upon, the delay may be incredibly short, and the key March 2020 period of the pandemic was a good example of that. But when it came to the detail, there is usually some lag, especially when notes or minutes from the previous meeting have to be signed off by the group in a subsequent meeting. Having a well enshrined right to info in a timely fashion can help bring consistency to this area and reduce the temptation for political shenanigans. The UK was a poor example of this because SAGE publications were belatedly made public in a rather variable fashion, especially when it came to more sensitive topics. And even much more than a year intot he pandemic, it was not unusual to see some documents not being published for months, and some SAGE documents coming out very quickly if they involved some new policy the government had actually decided to finally implement.
I did look into Ireland and their key documents from the important March 2020 period. Some expert subgroups documents didnt start being properly published until April or May of that year. And there was an interesting gap in publication of some of the most important NPHAT meeting notes. For example their March 11th meeting was an important one, but using wayback machine I established that that meetings documents did not appear on the site until some time between April 13th and April 22nd 2020. However unlike our SAGE, their NPHAT was also responsible for daily public data and narrative documents via press release, so certain details did emerge in a more timely fashion or, like the UK, were obvious due to the policies government adopted. In the UK we were sometimes 'treated' to such things via leaks to the press instead, another kind of information control and selective filtering that belongs in a broader discussion about this stuff, and can serve as a more 'flexible' UK equivalent to mechanisms for provision or restriction of information in other countries.
Or there's the old faithful "Two world wars and one world cup, do dah, do dah..."
Gotcha. My “nailed on” choice has changed since the day Boris resigned.
I suppose yours hasn’t.
My first thought was : “they’ll go populist and familiar” — ie Sunak.
My second thought was : “they’d say screw that, we need new brooms” — eg Braverman.
However, once it became clear where the RW press were going, then Truss became the obvious and only candidate.
I think I said (when she was still the “fave”) that Mordaunt would be voted out for fear of “embarrassing” the wider party membership.
Which happened.
Good on you if you predicted Truss as well without following similar logic
Cheers, MW
Last edited:
elbows
Well-Known Member
Sorry that last post was long and that I have one more point which the pandemic version of such documents rather throws up.
Countries in Europe had the advantage of responsibility for a lot of public health emergency planning and advice being centralised at the ECDC. Individual countries could still have their own public health expert bodies to deal with the pandemic, but at key moments those entities in their meeting documents would then refer to the very latest ECDC pandemic advice. Ireland certainly took advantage of that fact, and this was relevant because during the key March 2020 period of thinking the unthinkable, a couple of benign-looking sentences that were added to the latest ECDC document at the time, once Italy had gone to pandemic shit, made all the difference when it came to very quickly implementing huge social distancing (of the close stuff/lockdown variety) policies.
In theory the UK also had that luxury available to it, because we were still in a Brexit transition period where the ECDC had to use clunky language in all its documents by referring not just to the EU but the EU and UK. Pointing to that advice offered governments an easy mechanism to justify the need for strong, rapid action, governments can defer to a centralised authority in order to take most of the grubby politics and national exceptionalism out of the picture, and bypass any national lack of expert analysis resources and decent pandemic planning.
However of course the UK was not likely to do that, because of the government we happened to have at the time, and all the Brexit politics. I would also suggest that even if we hadnt had Brexit and were still fully fledged EU members at the time, our establishment might well still have not drawn attention to the ECDC at all. Our establishment always loved to project an image of highly concentrated power, and of decisions being made by one or a few elected politicians, even when some of the policy directions were actually part of a broader EU trend. Such is the level of absurdity that this country indulges in such things in that I would even extend this description to entities such as the section of the press that spent decades moaning about EU decisions - they tended to pick a few examples of that to cry about while leaving others that could seriously have been included totally untouched. I suppose Brexit at least tidies up one layer of these glaring contradictions when it comes to the UKs presentation of its own power and the nature of decision making.
I expect relevant experts and some layers of government in the UK were actually reading the ECDC pandemic stuff at the time, but you'd be hard pressed to be made aware of it no matter what source you use, it doesnt tend to get a mention in even the most damning of UK press post-mortems of our first wave pandemic failures. If it receives no mention at all in the pandemic public inquiry then that will be another sign that the full story is still not being told, and I will probably feel the need to go into boring detail about some of the key ECDC documents from March 2020 all over again.
Countries in Europe had the advantage of responsibility for a lot of public health emergency planning and advice being centralised at the ECDC. Individual countries could still have their own public health expert bodies to deal with the pandemic, but at key moments those entities in their meeting documents would then refer to the very latest ECDC pandemic advice. Ireland certainly took advantage of that fact, and this was relevant because during the key March 2020 period of thinking the unthinkable, a couple of benign-looking sentences that were added to the latest ECDC document at the time, once Italy had gone to pandemic shit, made all the difference when it came to very quickly implementing huge social distancing (of the close stuff/lockdown variety) policies.
In theory the UK also had that luxury available to it, because we were still in a Brexit transition period where the ECDC had to use clunky language in all its documents by referring not just to the EU but the EU and UK. Pointing to that advice offered governments an easy mechanism to justify the need for strong, rapid action, governments can defer to a centralised authority in order to take most of the grubby politics and national exceptionalism out of the picture, and bypass any national lack of expert analysis resources and decent pandemic planning.
However of course the UK was not likely to do that, because of the government we happened to have at the time, and all the Brexit politics. I would also suggest that even if we hadnt had Brexit and were still fully fledged EU members at the time, our establishment might well still have not drawn attention to the ECDC at all. Our establishment always loved to project an image of highly concentrated power, and of decisions being made by one or a few elected politicians, even when some of the policy directions were actually part of a broader EU trend. Such is the level of absurdity that this country indulges in such things in that I would even extend this description to entities such as the section of the press that spent decades moaning about EU decisions - they tended to pick a few examples of that to cry about while leaving others that could seriously have been included totally untouched. I suppose Brexit at least tidies up one layer of these glaring contradictions when it comes to the UKs presentation of its own power and the nature of decision making.
I expect relevant experts and some layers of government in the UK were actually reading the ECDC pandemic stuff at the time, but you'd be hard pressed to be made aware of it no matter what source you use, it doesnt tend to get a mention in even the most damning of UK press post-mortems of our first wave pandemic failures. If it receives no mention at all in the pandemic public inquiry then that will be another sign that the full story is still not being told, and I will probably feel the need to go into boring detail about some of the key ECDC documents from March 2020 all over again.
Artaxerxes
Look out, he's got a gnu!
What is that fucking wallpaper.
elbows
Well-Known Member
It may have a formal or informal role in gammon colour-matching charts.
Puddy_Tat
naturally fluffy
surplus from the refurbishment of that twat johnson's living quarters?
Calamity1971
If Mr Peanut says It's okay, then it is.
Good to see it's the woman serving the tea.
Elpenor
a clown’s heart and a mandolin
Hopefully it has strychnine in it
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
We've had something very similar to this 5 or 10 pages back
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Hemlock would be more traditionalArsenic is traditional, there's loads of it round my place
PR1Berske
Alligator in chains by the park gates.
Okay.
two sheds
Least noticed poster 2007
True, although not on wallpaper.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Like to see the fuckers thrusting fingers down their throats trying in vain to vomit up the poison
sleaterkinney
Well-Known Member
You would prefer that to a Labour govt?.
ska invita
back on the other side
Would get more joy from seeing Starmer lose than win, so yeah
If he cant beat Truss just maybe the Labour party might learn some kind of lesson. Him winning teaches them the worse lesson of all, and reinforces our one party state. So yeah a better outcome would be he loses.
Blair winning was a massive fuck up and set back for this country, no reason to think the same isnt true of Starmer winning
Humberto
Relax
Tories out shirley
Puddy_Tat
naturally fluffy
no, if the labour 'centrists' lose an election or do badly in a poll, they take it as an indication that they haven't moved far enough to the right
yes, but what's the point of voting the blue tories out only to get the red tories?
i'm struggling to get enthusiastic about a "marginally less shit than the tories" platform
Humberto
Relax
It doesn't especially matter. By the time Labour ever nominally gets its shit together it would be far too late.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Truss winning a GE in 2024 would be a disaster for ordinary people. As I’ve said repeatedly Johnson’s spell in office will seem like a utopia given what comes next from them.
But, what’s truly bizarre is the idea that a fifth general election defeat would somehow purify and revitalise Labour who, in this fantasy, would presumably sweep to power in 2029 after 19 years in opposition on a socialist programme.
The last 100 years tell us that Labour is far more likely to move even further to the right if Starmer loses. In fact that’s exactly what the Blairites plan to do and they are carefully biding their time. Labour could even split and a new elite liberal centrist vehicle emerge free of ties to the labour movement.
I’d take - any day of the week- a useless Starmer Labour Government subject to pressure from the unions and what passes for the labour left these days over Truss and the insurgent Tory right characterised by Badenoch.
Electorally, a shit labour government is always the best we are going to get. So, regardless of electoral politics what really matters is what we can build and achieve collectively in our workplaces and communities. How successful that is, is up to us as it always has been.
Last edited:
platinumsage
HaveMyPassword123
Similar threads
