It's true: people who have been vaccinated are very unlikely to die (though this cannot in fact be guaranteed). That's not true of those who haven't yet been vaccinated, and we are coming to realise that "long Covid" can affect as many as 10% of those infected, and can be seriously and possibly permanently debilitating for people of any age. When I think of the amount of money we have spent over the past 50 years in reducing the number of premature deaths from road accidents by 3,000 a year, I am not impressed by Mr Walshe's complacent and compassionless attitude to the effects of this exceptionally nasty and contagious disease.
22,000 civil service jobs relocated over ten years is 2,200 a year. 15m people live in the three English northern statistical regions. That's a population increase of 0.01% per year. I'm afraid that it isn't quite going to increase housing demand as Ms Gill hopes.
I'm afraid it's no longer the case that Britannia rules the waves. The sooner we abandon unrealistic imaginings of massive new trading links with the other side of the world, the better.
There are two good reasons why Ms Carver is wrong. One is that we need to fund our essential public services, to safeguard public goods and to avoid the free rider problem, and that means taxes which fall on everyone in a fair distribution; and it is unfair that internet firms are exempt. The other is simply that retail is retail and it is unjust that some retailers pay a tax related to that activity (i.e. rates) and others do not.
Conservative councillors had the opportunity to resist Osborne's austerity programme, which used the myth of national economies behaving like personal finances to drive a merciless programme of cuts to public services. Councillors failed to do so. The result is seen in the lack of spare capacity in public health and in the NHS which has been at the root of so much death, loss and economic damage over the last twelve months. Councillors, who are experts in the local services which really matter to the public and in how they can be most efficiently provided, should not be afraid to speak out: it is not the case that spending less in the short term always produces best value in the long term.
Surely the last thing we want to do at the moment in relation to China is to encourage trade which will increase our dependency on it, and so our vulnerability to it.
An excellent case well made. The current situation is a scandal and I am shocked that it has persisted so long. This of all governments has no business permitting us to remain a mere poodle of the Americans.
"The Union" is an uncomfortably portmanteau term these days. I suspect that quite a lot of activists have rather different feelings towards the English links with Wales, with Scotland and with Northern Ireland. Perhaps future surveys should explore this in more depth.
You should be cautious interpreting these figures. They do look pretty good. But they are a survey of party members, who are by definition more committed to the leadership than are Conservative voters. There are 190,000 party members. At the last election 10.3m people voted for Corbyn's Labour party and 13.9m for the Conservatives. How are those 13.9m feeling now? The YouGov poll on 25 January found that 30% of those surveyed approved of the Government's performance and 50% disapproved. Not so positive.
This was evidently a clumsy error by someone in the Commission which has now been corrected. It is time for everyone to calm down and stop scoring points: the truth is that the virus is everyone's enemy and no-one is safe until everyone is safe, so vaccine nationalism is not only morally disgraceful but a pointless waste of time and effort.
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