Traitor news

[perrykneeham]

Yeah, people are more willing to pay if they're confident that it'll be spent wisely.

Perhaps we should have a national conversation about what it is that we are prepared to fund.

[mids]

I imagine there'd be huge resistance from some quarters about having a conversation that revealed just how much money is being spent, on what and to what end.

[perrykneeham]

Taxpayers money is the holy grail of business. If you can only get your snout in the trough. FE is very like that - it's awash with money and there are plenty of sharp operators out there coining it in.

[moggyonspeed]

Test & Trace or PPE ring any bells?

Matt Hancock, Michael Gove, Esther McVey MP, Julian Lewis MP, Andrew Percy MP, Steve Brine MP, Baroness Mone and Lords Agnew, Deighton and Feldman all referred their friends successfully to provide either PPE (some companies have still to deliver a single mask) or Test & Trace "expertise".

All Tories, funnily enough.

[flatandy]

Jun 8, 2022 8:49:12 GMT mids said:

I imagine there'd be huge resistance from some quarters about having a conversation that revealed just how much money is being spent, on what and to what end.

Indeed.

Although my experience is that the people most upset about where tax is being spent are the ones who pay little tax and take quite a lot from the system while pushing the envelope of what the system allows.

There are a lot of people who’re completely oblivious that their state pensions and disability benefits and needy demanding healthcare and so on and so forth are part of the expenses of the state. They always think it’s other people who’re the undeserving poor who are fiddling the system, while they’re just getting what’s theirs by right.

[happyhammerhead]

In the past, that kind of conversation often boils down to 'why are our taxes paying for freaks to have sex-change ops?' kinda thing.

[flatandy]

It would be interesting to have it broken down as percentages of the total spending. We’d discover almost nothing was going to sex-change ops for people whose wellbeing depended on them, and lots was going to state pensions for people who already have over half a million quid in assets. We’d discover lots was going to military contractors and PPE and track-and-trace and so on. We’d discover lots was going on healthcare for the kind of people who enjoy the whine about the state of healthcare and the rate of their taxes. We’d find that not a huge amount is going to support the arts (and most of that is posh-person-arts). If we tried to have an actual conversation about the numbers without people spinning it to focus their personal pet-peeves, there would be a lot of resistance in some quarters and a whole lot of “look at that tiny squirrel” to try and distract us from the various elephants.

[moggyonspeed]

Why not engage in a regular survey (every 10 years or so) as to what the British public expects of its public services? That way, questions similar to those some of you have raised can be brought out into the open for prioritisation, allowing each political party to formulate a response as to how they will finance and address these priorities. Clearly this would be more practical in some areas than others - healthcare cf. defence for example - but, to my mind, without exploring what the covenant actually is between the public and, say, the NHS allows politicians of all stripes to kick these things around like a football, thus talking much and achieving little.

Sweden has conducted surveys like this in the past with some success, so perhaps it's worth a try here.

[perrykneeham]

Jun 8, 2022 10:34:14 GMT moggyonspeed said:

Test & Trace or PPE ring any bells?

Matt Hancock, Michael Gove, Esther McVey MP, Julian Lewis MP, Andrew Percy MP, Steve Brine MP, Baroness Mone and Lords Agnew, Deighton and Feldman all referred their friends successfully to provide either PPE (some companies have still to deliver a single mask) or Test & Trace "expertise".

All Tories, funnily enough.

Labour seems rubbish at commerce shockah!

[mids]

Jun 8, 2022 10:34:14 GMT moggyonspeed said:

Test & Trace or PPE ring any bells?

The test part of it was wildly successful and that's what took the bulk of the cash. The trace part less so although its investment was tiny in comparison. £26 million rings a bell vs a few 10s of billions for the envy of the world testing.

[moggyonspeed]

Tories demonstrably excel at bunging public cash to their mates. "Business as usual" squeals Boris.

Sorted.

[moggyonspeed]

The test part of T&T was LATE ("wildly successful"?) compared to other countries, some of whom even offered us their proven-in-the-field T&T systems f-o-c. Consequently, this lateness ramped up the UK's death curve dramatically compared to others.

UK population: 66M, deaths 179,000, fully vaccinated: 74.4%; German population: 85M, deaths 139,000. fully vaccinated: 77.5%. Go figure.

[mids]

Reported deaths, mortality rate, excess death, excess mortality rate, ratio of last two. Look at how close the excess mortality rates are between the two countries. Then look at the excess death/excess mortality ratio. Britain is spot on, meaning our reported covid deaths and excess mortality match- we reported on covid deaths very, very accurately. Look at Germany, their ratio is above 1 by a lot, meaning that they seemingly under-reported on covid deaths. Touch of dieseling going on with our sausage-munching chums? Again.


UK         173000 130·1 169000 (163000 to 174000) 126·8 (122·3 to 130·9) 0·97 (0·94 to 1·01)

Germany 112000 66·4 203000 (193000 to 210000) 120·5 (115·1 to 125·1) 1·82 (1·73 to 1·88)

www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2821%2902796-3

[flatandy]

So Britain had a higher excess mortality rate, was killing more people more effectively, but reported it better?

[mids]

A bit higher but not by much. I blame our higher proportion of wheezy minorities and our much, much bigger international hubiness.

[moggyonspeed]

Wow - that took you a long time to Google. Moreover, that analysis of yours, "... meaning that they (Germany) seemingly under-reported on Covid deaths" is not borne out anywhere in the text.

Then there's this ...

"COVID death tolls: scientists acknowledge errors in WHO estimates" from the first of this month - www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01526-0

So Germany's (and Sweden's) numbers may well be audited (not skewed, audited) downwards once the dust settles.

[mids]

Jun 8, 2022 12:19:23 GMT moggyonspeed said:

The test part of T&T was LATE ("wildly successful"?) compared to other countries, some of whom even offered us their proven-in-the-field T&T systems f-o-c. Consequently, this lateness ramped up the UK's death curve dramatically compared to others.

UK population: 66M, deaths 179,000, fully vaccinated: 74.4%; German population: 85M, deaths 139,000. fully vaccinated: 77.5%. Go figure.

By the way, raw vaccination figures are a crude way of measuring vaccine success. We had a more targeted regime of vaccinating the vulnerable and changing the time between vaccinations- again a wildly successful strategy poo poo-ed by the Euros and their minions here.

[mids]

Jun 8, 2022 13:11:05 GMT moggyonspeed said:

Wow - that took you a long time to Google. Moreover, that analysis of yours, "... meaning that they (Germany) seemingly under-reported on Covid deaths" is not borne out anywhere in the text.

Then there's this ...

"COVID death tolls: scientists acknowledge errors in WHO estimates" from the first of this month - www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01526-0

So Germany's (and Sweden's) numbers may well be audited (not skewed, audited) downwards once the dust settles.

As a peer-reviewed public health scientist with a PhD, that's my interpretation (I genuinely hate doing that but you will insist on being slapped down). Interested to hear yours? Also, I'll await the correction to the Lancet article.

[moggyonspeed]

Well, you said it, but I wasn't quoting raw vaccination figures, was I? I was quoting vaccination rates (per-capita vaccination). Clearly, with "fully-vaccinated" meaning three doses in the UK and two in Germany, it doesn't take a rocket-scientist to realise that the raw vaccination numbers tell us little, and certainly cannot excuse the high death-rates in some countries in the early stages of the pandemic. In those early stages, Germany was much faster out of the blocks testing-wise than was the UK, and it was THAT that made a big difference.

Still, Johnson and Co. are happy to spout the usual vaccination cant, and the gullible allow them to get away with it.

[ootlg]

Jun 8, 2022 8:49:12 GMT mids said:

I imagine there'd be huge resistance from some quarters about having a conversation that revealed just how much money is being spent, on what and to what end.

Nail on head. The root cause of leaving the EU.