Westminstenders: Operation Shock and Awe

[RedToothBrush]

The government is launching its get ready for the end of transition campaign which has been dubbed a 'shock and awe' campaign.

In this campaign we will learn all about what Brexit means and what amazing opportunities lie for having increased customs and borders, beaucracy and increased costs. Bet you are all really excited and looking forward to this.

We will also get a 'Farage Garage' in Kent to cope with these wonderful opportunities in traffic jams. This will be something that businesses throughout the country will be super excited to plan for in their socially distanced Zoom meetings or across warehouses with their face masks on. And banks will be delighted to see an uptick in applications in CCJs and debt reconstruction plans.

It will be a super fun time for the under 30s who have zero hours contracts, worked in retail or hospitality. Or should I say 'worked'.

Meanwhile the right to a jury trial has been binned due to 'long covid delays' which are shorter than they were several years ago. The NHS isn't getting the funding it expected, and waiting lists are longer than ever with no way to clear them. The plan to build more hospitals seems to have disappeared with the Nightingales. Many councils are about to go into insolvency and be taken over by accountancy firms. The civil service is being dismantled and conservative loyalists with no experience being put in charge of important functions of state. Communications with the press are being 'streamlined' to make them incredible of holding power to account and only able to repeat government public announcements.

Anyone looking forward to Christmas? When you write a letter to Santa remember to add 'visa application form', 'a sleeping bag for use at Dover', 'tinned tomatoes' and 'packets of seeds to grow your own' to the list.

Interesting analysis on why Brits (& some others) are so reluctant to wear masks

Although we are a very deferential society to the uc - maybe we need her Maj or Wills telling us

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/20/british-conformist-individualist-face-masks-coronavirus

According to social psychologists, behavioural norms have two dimensions:

first, how much a behaviour is exhibited, and
second, how much the group approves of that behaviour.

"So why doesn't the official advice say 'if you are contacted through track and trace, get a test straightaway'?"

I suspect it's because they're flying by the seat of their pants regarding official advice AKA "making it up as you go along".

The advice is being changed all the time and, as a result, much of it is unclear and contradictory.

I can allow children to play in the garden, but they must not play in the sandpit, but they may dig elsewhere in the garden.

If we have a suspected case, I must exclude until they've had a test, but the rest of us carry on as normal until the test is positive, then we isolate for 14 days.
In the meantime, I must deep clean with PPE that I apparently do not need, according to other guidance.

I do not need a mask; I do need a visor mask when deep cleaning. I do not need hand gel. I do need hand gel. I must make the children wash their hands after sneezing. Covid-19 symptoms do not include sneezing.

I cann

The UK has a sense of fashion we don't share with either the US or Europe.

We are leaders in disposal, short lived fashion.

The Europeans are far more practical in what they wear. For example coats. God forbid you ask a young person to wear a coat on a night out in the UK in the middle of winter.

And whilst the US, women are more fashion conscious in some senses, they are also more conservative with classic styles that stay the same year after year and there is the religious soberness of some which is just none existent in the UK.

Our fashion has followed our faddy nature and love of music.

And then there's the British man who gets his wife to shop at M&S and wears the exact same thing every day of his adult life, because its 'safe' and they are familiar with it. The man who has always done things this way since 1954 and has will always do it that way (even if born in 1976) and that's his birthright.

And masks are practical and imposed on us rather than being an expression of who we are in fashionable terms. And it's really unfamiliar and new to those who simply refuse to accept change with their English stubbornness.

I think looking at it through the lens of rule takers and obedience and conformity is the wrong way for our mindset. It's viewed as an inconvenience and we aren't practical. It's unfashionable when we want to trend set. Its kind of against all our normal fashion decision making.

Without making it trend on insta whilst simultaneously being sold free in dull grey with a pint at the local or packed with black socks and modelled by Charles and William it won't catch on because we are obsessed with image and how we present to the world in a way which isn't about straight conformity but isn't about individuality either.

Front page of the telegraph...

... Surprise!!!! We are going for no deal.

either they utterly ignore the T&T guidance
or they bring the system to its knees in day

Same goes for schools and the families of those in school, and the co-workers of the family members, and so on.

Either way, the system is headed for the floor.

I disagree with Verhofstadt - Brexit was and is American neo-cons' gift to themselves and all their rich friends. They visualised it and financed it and engineered the campaign that brought it into being. The American neo-con lobby wants to destroy the EU and had high hopes of doing that - the UK was supposed to be the first domino to fall, with France and the Netherlands to follow.

Group psychology in teens often mirrors those in older age groups BCF and it may indeed be connected to fashion for some Red, but behaviour is usually based on past experience and cultural/familial norms. If you leave a void instead of educating you leave the norm to be made up from the group you associate with most for your locus of control and the social norms they gravitate towards. So if you don't have a strong family set up that might be your friends - teens seem to be more linked to this as they are finding their way in life hence the smoking ref earlier. However for many adults the lens they see the world in becomes political when they work - which is why the masks have become cultural along these lines. If you are a manual labourer you are less likely to work with and spend time with people wearing masks on a daily basis - your group. If you are a teen it is likely you will be with friends in a bubble and they won't want to wear a mask, etc. It is very dependent on your group's behaviour but that can change with one person going from group to group (like the school mum who goes veggie when she goes out with the vegans for eg). The differences with authoritarian groups this time around is that they have to follow a rule others can see, I think. I personally think that this singles them out in a way they don't like. Many, again my personal feelings here, are secretive authoritarians and largely because they like rules because it's less thinking but they don't actually like following some of them and don't. The cash in hand workers, the dad's who don't pay maintenance, etc. There's the "keeping up with the Jonses" mentality which is strong in them and the defiant and often childish streak that has largely been supported by govt through loopholes. Those are the groups who will be having trouble complying.

Math I agree, and I think US and UK had help from Russia in doing it.

Unless it's a really subtle double bluff. In which was it would have been wasted on most, if not all our current politicians. Most of whom think "The Usual Suspects" was impenetrable, and "The Sixth Sense" positively Joycean.

😂 😂 😂

God forbid you ask a young person to wear a coat on a night out in the UK in the middle of winter.

I am not sure that this is just a British trait. I have been to Tromsoe in February (Arctic, cold) and see young people spilling out of clubs at midnight without coats.

You know people might just resist wearing masks because they’re stuffy and uncomfortable?

@RedToothBrush

Front page of the telegraph...

... Surprise!!!! We are going for no deal.

And if you look at the mast sentence there... It's the mean old EU's fault.

*last

The Newspaper headlines are interesting.

It is a pity though that it didn't happen under a Labour Government - so they could have given full rein to a Labour hate fest. Although it's not a serious paper the Daily Star got it right, leading on Bozo as a clown for not giving cleaners, carers, bin min and bus drivers a pay rise. Not that it is a real pay rise when there is no new money involved.

The NHS is for sale, and No Deal is definitely on the cards. This is not what was promised - our NHS standards weren't going to be compromised and we were going to get a great deal.

What I don’t get is why is the government so obsessed with fishing when it makes up such a tiny part of our gdp....
I can’t get my head around the fact they’re happy to tank the economy even more, thousands more people will lose their jobs..... I don’t see how they can think that’s a good idea.....

They can’t honestly believe all these new trade deals will make up for leaving the single market. Are they really that stupid or is it just that actually they really don’t give a toss? They’re happy for thousands of their ‘red wall’ supporters to lose their jobs, homes etc....

My company survived Covid as we are part of the food supply chain, but we ship a lot of our goods to the EU.... so we’ll be fucked with a no deal.

It’s such insanity. I can’t believe we have a government that is so unbelievably stupid.

@SabrinaThwaite there was the same issue with seat belt wearing a couple of decades ago... done properly public health campaigns can do a lot of good.

While watering the veg garden I realised that the common theme linking

• UK government shambolic handling of cyber spying
• UK government shambolic handling of Brexit
• UK government shambolic handling of COVID

can be summed up in one sentence Oh I was rubbish at science at school

It is acceptable even a badge of pride in many social circles
to be able to quote Shakespeare and Latin
but not to understand an exponential function or the carbon cycle

T&T fails because of cascade effects
Lorry customs clearance will fail because of cascade effects
Climate change is all down to cascade effects
Social Media fake news is one big cascade effect

and spouting off in Latin will not deal with any of them

Most of the Government don't venture much further north of Watford, so they probably don't understand the people in the north and think they will become the same smug Tories as in the South East.

What beats me is that the Govt. wants to join the Trans Pacific Partnership. Madness. How about joining one on the doorstep?

but not to understand an exponential function or the carbon cycle

Absolutely. How many people boast "I'm no good at maths."? They wouldn't dream of saying that their reading level was only as good as an 8 year old's.

After a frustrating parents evening, a Maths colleague joked with me once that could I please draw him a genetic cross for maths ability because so many parents seemed to think lack of mathematical ability was genetic and therefore they didn't care their children were failing.

Peregrina
The media are some of the worst offenders
when a TV crew rock up to a Science Festival and start the interview with
I hated science at school, convince me
it is just insulting and undermines the teachers and the kids and the educators

but the "wiff waff" brigade think that studying politics is all that matters

Whitewashing of history to ensure we only get the right kind of immigrants staying here continues www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jul/22/home-office-urged-to-correct-false-slavery-information-in-citizenship-test

And another example of how above a certain pay grade, everyone below is the same level as a cleaner www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jul/22/tesco-staff-in-nearly-2000-stores-to-clean-shops-after-contractors-axed

How much do we want to bet that the women are disproportionately asked to do this "extra" bit of the job?

Anyone else thinking how lucky it is that Boris only gets 2 days of The Russia Report before Summer recess starts today?

@Tanith

Nothing subtle about Salisbury. It was a really, really clumsy sledge-hammer attack that could have killed thousands. Not at all up to Russia's usual assassination attempts: they didn't even manage to kill their intended victim.

So I think JeSuisPoulet has a point about it being a warning of what the perpetrators could do.

The problem with that interpretation is it relies on an assumption that the government would want to avoid unnecessary deaths.

An assumption we now know was flawed from the off.