The UK Politics & Brexit Thread

[m80]

even if Putin did help elect Trump and pushed Brexit over the line, I am still not seeing what benefit he reaped.

The Western alliance/s were going to get worse for Russia as those alliances grew stronger.

I perceive that Trump could only do America real good if he succeeded in his speak of becoming more insular. He's out, it didn't happen. While there he has caused confusion and division. My perception is that there is more infighting to manage there now (nice to see Biden trying to get a grip on their gun 'epidemic').

Us leaving the eu has weakened them a fair bit. Covid is just more opportunity for Russia to drive in little wedges of eu doubt here and there. The increased awareness in the eu that they screwed up with vaccines can only go away once they have overcome covid, or we are proven to be using bad vaccines (we see that attempt to cause doubt, but it's also a shot in't foot).
Weaken or even break up the eu and a powerful allied threat to Russia is reduced. America also lose the very useful tool of the eu, take your pick which tool I'm referring to.

There is a perceived or even actual energy shortage, Russia has power with their reserves. Really I can't see much else that is at the root of the West wanting Russia to tow the line as desired, aside from the historic Russia / America weapons challenge.

Small point but a couple of years ago Russia were promoting their super, hyper, bl00dy fast missile delivery system. It gets there before the enemy knows it's coming.
A personal view but they can't afford for the defecting ex whatever operatives to tell us that's bs. The result is to remind all operative, ex or otherwise, to be loyal to mummy Russia.
Mrs Me doesn't see the irony in her favourite perfume being Dior 'Poison'.

 

[grober]

even if Putin did help elect Trump and pushed Brexit over the line, I am still not seeing what benefit he reaped.

Politically naive television game show host v the man who ran the KGB-----That's a tough one.

 

[Petrol Pete]

Meanwhile , closer to home , these bad boys get lit all over NI in a few months time , socially distanced of course.

 

[st13phil]

The Salmond affair and the SNP's influence over the Crown Office continues to have repercussions:

Exclusive: Crown Office has no licence to ‘police a free press in a free country’, say senior lawyers

Prosecutors have no licence to "police a free press in a free country", a group of former lawyers who have held high office claim. Writing in Scottish Legal News today, the group, which calls itself Quis? – Latin for 'who' – argues that the Crown Office abused the contempt of court mecha

www.scottishlegal.com

 

[Dryce]

The Salmond affair and the SNP's influence over the Crown Office continues to have repercussions:

Exclusive: Crown Office has no licence to ‘police a free press in a free country’, say senior lawyers

Prosecutors have no licence to "police a free press in a free country", a group of former lawyers who have held high office claim. Writing in Scottish Legal News today, the group, which calls itself Quis? – Latin for 'who' – argues that the Crown Office abused the contempt of court mecha

www.scottishlegal.com

It's all a bit rotten north of the border and it's a real irony that this fuss surrounds Comrade Alexei Salmond because he was involved in the earlier FOI legal advice debacle which was an appalling demonstration of how things were going bad and how disrespectful the Scottish administration had become of the public. So my view is that this is a Scottish institutional problem and that Comrade Alexei is as much part of it as Ms Sturgeon.

 

[C240Sport97]

It's shocking that the Crown Office has been acting like the Stasi.

 

[LTD]

It's shocking that the Crown Office has been acting like the Stasi.

Crown Office ?

The SNP have been acting like the Fourth Reich

 

[C240Sport97]

 

[markjay]

Those who are either advocating for, or ambivalent about, digital "covid passports" (in reality a bioidentity card) in order to be permitted to engage in regular societal activities such as attending a sporting or cultural event, or even using an hospitality venue need to think very hard about what they're supporting. They would be discriminatory, ethically and morally questionable (due to the implied coercion to accept being vaccinated) and represent a massive identity fraud risk. Other than that, they're perfect.

Another practical difficulty is related to people who acquired natural immunity via COVID. An Immunity Passport should include people with confirmed diagnosis of COVID in the past six months (or whatever other length of time that the medical science tells us is viable). However, there's no agreed way on how this can be recorded - a positive PCR test isn't a confirmed diagnosis, many people would have been unwell and didn't get a test, etc. In addition, different countries dealt with this issue in different ways, it will not be simple for the UK to agree to accept someone with an Immunity Passport issued by another country. One way around it would be to issue Immunity Passports based on antibody tests, but this will hugely complicate matters. To clarify, I have no issue with the principle of an Immunity Passport, but I just don't see this happening on a practical level - perhaps its usage will be limited to air travel.

Another interesting question is related to the emergence of new strains. The more times the virus replicates, the greater the chance of new strains developing and re-infecting the population. It would be interesting to see studies done that compare the level of virus mutations in people who acquired natural immunity to those who have been vaccinated. It is plausible that vaccinated people who will already have antibodies in their blood will curb the replication of the virus in their bodies, while people who get sick will see a massive increase in virus reproduction until their own immune system starts developing antibodies to fight it off. If this indeed proved to be the case, then the government's 'suppression until vaccination' approach would appear to be the better strategy compared to achieving natural herd immunity.

 

[C240Sport97]

The man speaks a lot of sense, and his highly articulate.

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[SW18]

The man speaks a lot of sense, and his highly articulate.

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He is very articulate - as you’d expect of a senior member of the judiciary. But he didn’t do very well on The Big Questions back in January when he effectively said he would write off the older and more vulnerable to protect the young and the economy. And couldn’t explain how he’d manage the paradox of an open economy in which substantial numbers of people have to isolate. That old chestnut that was debated extensively on the ‘C-word’ thread of this forum! My feeling was that he’s good at hypothesisation but not at really examining and allowing for real life. And rather too dogmatic in his views.

 

[markjay]

Lord Sumption became a media personality last year, his new career launched in part with the aid of Simon Dolan's high court appeal against the government. His legal opinion is important, however it isn't the majority view at current among the judiciary.

 

[ChipChop]

Another interesting question is related to the emergence of new strains. The more times the virus replicates, the greater the chance of new strains developing and re-infecting the population. It would be interesting to see studies done that compare the level of virus mutations in people who acquired natural immunity to those who have been vaccinated. It is plausible that vaccinated people who will already have antibodies in their blood will curb the replication of the virus in their bodies, while people who get sick will see a massive increase in virus reproduction until their own immune system starts developing antibodies to fight it off. If this indeed proved to be the case, then the government's 'suppression until vaccination' approach would appear to be the better strategy compared to achieving natural herd immunity.

Scientific advisers said it was “hard to see” when the restrictions would end as new variants continued to emerge, delivering a potentially devastating blow to the travel industry. The prime minister said that after progress with vaccinations ”what we don’t want to see is all that work undone by the arrival of a new variant that is vaccine-busting”.

The idea is planted in people’s mind that this virus is mutating in such a way as to evade prior immunity.

This is completely unfounded, certainly as regards immunity gained naturally, after repelling the virus (which well around 99.9% of the population do, fewer, obviously in the very elderly & already ill, more in those younger & well).

It’s important to appreciate that upon infection, the human immune system cuts up an infectious agent into short pieces. Each of these short pieces of protein are presented to other cells in the immune system, like an identity parade. Our cells have a truly astonishing range of abilities to recognise different protein structures, and there will be some which recognise each of the pieces of the invader.

The cells which recognise a piece are instructed to multiply selectively so that, after a few days to a couple of weeks, our bodies contain large numbers of virus piece specific cells. These have a range of functions. Some make antibodies & others are programmed to kill cells infected by the virus, recognised by displaying on their surface signals that tell the body that they’ve been invaded. In almost all cases, accompanied or not by symptoms (ranging from mild to severe) this smart adaptive system overcomes the infection.

Crucially and against what SAGE & HM Government are saying or implying, this event leaves you with many different kinds of long-lived ‘memory’ cells which, if you’re infected again, rapidly wipe out any attempt at reinfection. So you won’t again be made ill by the same virus, and because the virus is simply not permitted to replicate, you are also no longer able to participate in transmission.

To mutations & variants. Many viruses are error-prone when they replicate in your cells. They make “typos” so the virus which results is slightly different from the parent virus. Sometimes these small changes makes no difference to the behaviour of the virus. Other times, the change renders the virus incapable of something important to its survival. It’s possible a change makes it slightly better at surviving and so over time, it becomes a higher proportion of viruses sequenced from clinical samples.

The general ‘direction of travel’ is to become less injurious but easier to transmit, eventually joining the other 40 or so viruses which cause what we collectively term ‘the common cold”. What generally doesn’t happen is for mutants to become more lethal to the hosts (us).

The key point I wanted to get across is just how large SARS-COV-2 is. I recall it’s of the order of 30,000 letters of genetic code which, when translated, make around 10,000 amino acids in several viral proteins. Now you can see that the kinds of numbers of changes in the letters of the genetic code are truly tiny in comparison with the whole.

30 letter changes might be roughly 0.1% of the virus’s code. In other words, 99.9% of that code is not different from the so-called Wuhan strain. Similarly, the changes in the protein translated from those letter code alterations are overwhelmed by the vast majority of the unchanged protein sequences. So your immune system, recognising as it does perhaps dozen of short pieces will not be fooled by a couple of small changes to a tiny fraction of these. No: your immune system knows immediately that this is an invader it’s seen before, and has no difficulty whatsoever in dealing with it swiftly & without symptoms.

To the ‘vaccines’, they are unusually narrow in the way they educate your immune system, because instead of exposing your body to the whole range of pieces of broken or inactivated virus, a time-honoured method of preparing vaccines, all of these instead present only the spike protein. This still comprises 10 or so distinctly immunologically different pieces, so even if mutations did change a couple of these, the majority of the pieces of the mutated virus will still be unchanged & recognised by the vaccine-immune system or the virus-infected immune system & a prompt, vigorous response will still protect you.

The most limited vaccine is, as I understand the molecular biology, the Pfizer / BioNTech version. This encodes only a part of the spike protein and, if mutations were to evolve away from any of the ‘vaccines’, it would therefore be reasonable to expect it to be this one. But even in the worst case, the other vaccines could be used to protect the most at risk demographic.

 

[C240Sport97]

Lord Sumption became a media personality last year, his new career launched in part with the aid of Simon Dolan's high court appeal against the government. His legal opinion is important, however it isn't the majority view at current among the judiciary.

He has spoken out and continues to speak out because he passionately believes what he says. He is not a media personality, in the sense that I think you meant (ie. an insult). He is someone with views which are different to prevailing wisdom, which is always good for debate and for rigorous decision making.

Sumption was famous way before Dolan's case, and way before CV19. He gave plenty of high profile lectures before CV19. Sumption was not part of Dolan's gang nor did Sumption get any benefit or increased media exposure from Dolan's case.

Current members of the Judiciary are not permitted, under the Judiciary's Code of Conduct, to express any opinion on controversial matters or Government policy (except where they are sitting as Judges in say, a judicial review case). Accordingly, no one really knows what percentage of current members of the judiciary disagree with Sumption. Further, there is no poll or evidence that the "majority view at current among the judiciary" is at odds with Sumption's view.

 

[markjay]

I don't disagree with the science, the two points I would make are that (a) the theory is fine, but we need to conduct actual studies to tell us if people who developed immunity to the current strains, are at a significant risk of reinfection from new variants, and (b) we need more studies to tell us if natural immunity increases the chances of mutations compared to immunity acquired through vaccination.

I certainly don't pretend to know the answers, and I don't think the scientists know for certain either, not yet anyway. But they do seem to be concerned about this possibility:

South Africa variant can 'break through' Pfizer's vaccine

The coronavirus variant discovered in South Africa can "break through" Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine to some extent, a real-world data study in Israel found, though its prevalence in the country is low and the research has not been peer reviewed.

www.telegraph.co.uk

So to my mind, these are two questions that the medical science will want to be able to answer, and we need to have studies carried-out to support or disprove it.

 

[markjay]

He has spoken out and continues to speak out because he passionately believes what he says. He is not a media personality, in the sense that I think you meant (ie. an insult). He is someone with views which are different to prevailing wisdom, which is always good for debate and for rigorous decision making.

Sumption was famous way before Dolan's case, and way before CV19. He gave plenty of high profile lectures before CV19. Sumption was not part of Dolan's gang nor did Sumption get any benefit or increased media exposure from Dolan's case.

Current members of the Judiciary are not permitted, under the Judiciary's Code of Conduct, to express any opinion on controversial matters or Government policy (except where they are doing when sitting as Judges in say, a judicial review case). Accordingly, no one really knows what percentage of current members of the judiciary disagree with Sumption. Further, there is no poll or evidence that the "majority view at current among the judiciary" is at odds with Sumption's view.

I am not suggesting that Lord Sumption isn't an honest or knowledge person, and I said so last year in the other (now closed) COVID thread.

In fact I said that he raises some very interesting points as well as compelling legal arguments challenging the government's actions, which I thought should be heard.

See for example:

The UK Politics & Brexit Thread | OT (OFF Topic) Forums

People confuse anti-semitism and and anti-zionism [especially under a crook like Netanyahu] different if related topics. People do, but Corbyn didn't. But Corbyn's faults as leader of the Labour Party go well beyond this anecdote. I believe that if Keir Starmer was leader and running...

forums.mbclub.co.uk

Simon Dolan referred to Lord Sumption's published views on several occasions, including during his high court case, which brought his views to public attention, or certainly to a wider audience. But I wasn't suggesting that the relationship was reciprocal - i.e. Simon Dolan relied (in part) on Lord Sumption, but I am not aware that Lord Sumption actively supported Simon Dolan's legal action or took part in it.

And you are correct that there hasn't been any survey carried out among senior judges. My point was to say that some key elements of what Lord Sumption is saying that the government did wrong were presented to high court judges by Simon Dolan, and the ruling did not go in his favour.

 

[m80]

I would say there is a lot of intelligently written and informative stuff in the previous few posts.

But, assuming we believe what we are told about variant strains, they are there and threatening increased transmission and risks. The strain in Brazil (being careful not to confuse by describing it as one developed by excessive shaving) is seriously affecting the South Americas. Brazil's protections have been lacking and may have aided / caused the new strain to evolve. Chile have seemingly had a successful vaccine programme but are still under threat. How much of their Chinese vaccine was used and how effective that is / isn't is a relevant consideration though.

If new strains can and will overcome which ever vaccines that then questions if we are merely deferring it's effect on us.
If the various Gov't's are merely buying some time let's hope they're using it wisely for preparations.

 

[st13phil]

If new strains can and will overcome which ever vaccines that then questions if we are merely deferring it's effect on us.

Past experience with similar pathogens suggests that there will be one of three primary outcomes:

1. SARS-Cov-2 will (perhaps totally) disappear, in the same way the original SARS did
2. SARS-Cov-2 will continue to mutate but without significant "escape" variants, meaning that immunity afforded by the current vaccines will be largely unaffected
3. SARS-Cov-2 will continue to mutate to include one or more significant "escape" variants that render the current vaccines to a significant extent ineffective

Case #1 is not totally implausible but is probably less likely than case #2.

Case #3 is the "doomsday scenario" being stoked by the media (and the SAGE modellers), but is actually what the influenza virus does so isn't without precedent in terms of how it's dealt with: reformulated vaccines with a regular program of vaccination for the most vulnerable. Furthermore, Prof Francois Balloux (director of the UCL Genetics Institute) who knows more than many about the topic had the following to say on the matter:

1. A proportion of breakthrough infections are expected. Otherwise, vaccine trials would all have reported 100% efficacy.
2. Breakthrough infections are a trivial concern as long as they don't lead to serious disease in the infected, and onward transmission of the virus remains limited.
3. The frequency of breakthrough infection is expected to be highest soon after after the first jab and go down over time. For vaccines with two doses, it is questionable whether infections prior to the booster should even be referred to as 'breakthrough infections'.
4. Breakthrough infection frequency is expected to vary for different SARS-CoV-2 'variants'. Though at this stage, there is no 'vaccine escape' viral lineage in circulation, despite claims to the contrary.
5. Breakthrough infection frequency is expected to vary between demographies, i.e. highest in those least able to mount a robust immune response.

So in other words, despite media fear-mongering to the contrary, there are no currently circulating variants that fit into case #3 so while it remains a possibility, 12+ months in it hasn't happened and even if it did happen it's by no means a certainty that it becomes a problem.

If the various Gov't's are merely buying some time let's hope they're using it wisely for preparations.

History suggests that hope may be misplaced

 

[SW18]

Scientific advisers said it was “hard to see” when the restrictions would end as new variants continued to emerge, delivering a potentially devastating blow to the travel industry. The prime minister said that after progress with vaccinations ”what we don’t want to see is all that work undone by the arrival of a new variant that is vaccine-busting”.

The idea is planted in people’s mind that this virus is mutating in such a way as to evade prior immunity.

This is completely unfounded, certainly as regards immunity gained naturally, after repelling the virus (which well around 99.9% of the population do, fewer, obviously in the very elderly & already ill, more in those younger & well).

It’s important to appreciate that upon infection, the human immune system cuts up an infectious agent into short pieces. Each of these short pieces of protein are presented to other cells in the immune system, like an identity parade. Our cells have a truly astonishing range of abilities to recognise different protein structures, and there will be some which recognise each of the pieces of the invader.

The cells which recognise a piece are instructed to multiply selectively so that, after a few days to a couple of weeks, our bodies contain large numbers of virus piece specific cells. These have a range of functions. Some make antibodies & others are programmed to kill cells infected by the virus, recognised by displaying on their surface signals that tell the body that they’ve been invaded. In almost all cases, accompanied or not by symptoms (ranging from mild to severe) this smart adaptive system overcomes the infection.

Crucially and against what SAGE & HM Government are saying or implying, this event leaves you with many different kinds of long-lived ‘memory’ cells which, if you’re infected again, rapidly wipe out any attempt at reinfection. So you won’t again be made ill by the same virus, and because the virus is simply not permitted to replicate, you are also no longer able to participate in transmission.

To mutations & variants. Many viruses are error-prone when they replicate in your cells. They make “typos” so the virus which results is slightly different from the parent virus. Sometimes these small changes makes no difference to the behaviour of the virus. Other times, the change renders the virus incapable of something important to its survival. It’s possible a change makes it slightly better at surviving and so over time, it becomes a higher proportion of viruses sequenced from clinical samples.

The general ‘direction of travel’ is to become less injurious but easier to transmit, eventually joining the other 40 or so viruses which cause what we collectively term ‘the common cold”. What generally doesn’t happen is for mutants to become more lethal to the hosts (us).

The key point I wanted to get across is just how large SARS-COV-2 is. I recall it’s of the order of 30,000 letters of genetic code which, when translated, make around 10,000 amino acids in several viral proteins. Now you can see that the kinds of numbers of changes in the letters of the genetic code are truly tiny in comparison with the whole.

30 letter changes might be roughly 0.1% of the virus’s code. In other words, 99.9% of that code is not different from the so-called Wuhan strain. Similarly, the changes in the protein translated from those letter code alterations are overwhelmed by the vast majority of the unchanged protein sequences. So your immune system, recognising as it does perhaps dozen of short pieces will not be fooled by a couple of small changes to a tiny fraction of these. No: your immune system knows immediately that this is an invader it’s seen before, and has no difficulty whatsoever in dealing with it swiftly & without symptoms.

To the ‘vaccines’, they are unusually narrow in the way they educate your immune system, because instead of exposing your body to the whole range of pieces of broken or inactivated virus, a time-honoured method of preparing vaccines, all of these instead present only the spike protein. This still comprises 10 or so distinctly immunologically different pieces, so even if mutations did change a couple of these, the majority of the pieces of the mutated virus will still be unchanged & recognised by the vaccine-immune system or the virus-infected immune system & a prompt, vigorous response will still protect you.

The most limited vaccine is, as I understand the molecular biology, the Pfizer / BioNTech version. This encodes only a part of the spike protein and, if mutations were to evolve away from any of the ‘vaccines’, it would therefore be reasonable to expect it to be this one. But even in the worst case, the other vaccines could be used to protect the most at risk demographic.

I have to query the 99.9% repel COVID claim. It’s not true. If 99.9% of the population repel COVID, then that would mean that 0.1% do not. However, in the U.K.:

0.2% of the population have already died with COVID (and last year the excess death count was already the equivalent of 0.1% of the U.K. population so COVID demonstrably caused at least that many deaths).

0.1% of the population have had COVID for at least a year (ONS data) so they haven’t ‘repelled’ it yet.

A further 1% of the population reported they still suffer COVID symptoms weeks or months after being infected (ONS data), so they have not repelled it yet either.

The cost of dealing with long COVID has not been calculated, but will be £bns. In particular many NHS staff have it, which will hamper healthcare delivery.

 

[ChipChop]

I have to query the 99.9% repel COVID claim. It’s not true. If 99.9% of the population repel COVID, then that would mean that 0.1% do not. However, in the U.K.:

0.2% of the population have already died with COVID (and last year the excess death count was already the equivalent of 0.1% of the U.K. population so COVID demonstrably caused at least that many deaths).

0.1% of the population have had COVID for at least a year (ONS data) so they haven’t ‘repelled’ it yet.

A further 1% of the population reported they still suffer COVID symptoms weeks or months after being infected (ONS data), so they have not repelled it yet either.

The cost of dealing with long COVID has not been calculated, but will be £bns.

My post states around 99.9% repel the virus through a functioning immune response. To be precise the peer reviewed global average infection fatality rate is 0.15% so 99.85%.

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