Westminstenders: Move Your Business To The EU

[RedToothBrush]

The government is advising people to move their businesses to the EU to avoid UK taxation and red tape.

Why would you do this?

For the interests of the uk?

Or is it about power WITHIN the uk?

@mrslaughan

I am wondering why there was all of a sudden the focus on schools going back - the will they won't they. Boris talking about loosening restrictions..... whips up a media frenzy - is that a distraction from the approaching debacle over vaccines....

Johnson has internal politics to deal with. If there are incoming issues with supply the uk government already know and they know roughly when it will hit. I note that the CRG wind nuts are lining up for a revolt in mid march when the current legislation runs out and parliament must renew. There is already talk that Johnson may need opposition support to extend restrictions. A vaccine shortage coming at the same time vastly weakens his hand.

If im working this out, i think both the pfizer and oxford vaccines need to be handed over 3 maybe 4 weeks before roll out as they need some sort of treatment before they are ready to go and theres the logistics of actually moving it to add in.

So what we have in uk hands as of around now is significant in your timings and calculations over how many vaccinations we can do and by when.

What else do you think is behind the government's nervousness, Red?

I think your intuition that they seem rattled is also spot on.

@mrslaughan

I am wondering why there was all of a sudden the focus on schools going back - the will they won't they. Boris talking about loosening restrictions..... whips up a media frenzy - is that a distraction from the approaching debacle over vaccines....

Yes, looking at recent MN threads plus the features in the media, it has a whiff of coordinated deliberateness about it.

🐿🐿🐿 as above so below 🐿🐿🐿

Re schools .... saw a spokesperson from "UsForThem" interviewed on C4 last night... very polished .... very disappointing as C4 allowed a number of claims to go unchallenged...like "a huge amount of resources have been committed to make schools safe" - really? That must have skipped the notice of most head teachers......

Who are these people and who are finding them? ..... it felt very Vite Leave in very clever us of disinformation, presented in pleasant packaging (concerned mum.... blah blah blah - who I would , reading between the lines has her kids at private school)

U4T remind me of the VoteLeave, BeLeave lot.

It's triggering flashbacks for me. ☹️

C4 went for the U4T Achilles Heel:

• who are they?
• do they want a 'safe' return? What is a safe return in their view?
• do they really want to throw the vulnerable under the bus?

All good points - but need far more hammering home because a lot of people won't pick up on that.

Jon Snow's question about their libertarian (he used that word) links is like a bat signal for people like us, who've been following Brexit/Trump politics.
But I can't imagine that many people have an alarm going off in their heads whenever 'libertarian' is mentioned.
It's kind of depressing that so few news programmes offer that level of scrutiny, analysis and questioning.

University of Oxford and Astra Zeneca both pushing back on German media reports of poor efficacy of the Astra Zeneca vaccine on the overs 65s.

www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-reports-from-germany-that-the-oxford-astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine-has-8-efficacy-in-over-65s/

@thecatfromjapan

What else do you think is behind the government's nervousness, Red?

I think your intuition that they seem rattled is also spot on.

At a guess I’d say the prospect of the wholesale collapse of UK business as a result of Brexit. It’s massive, inevitable and inescapable, like one of those boulders in Indiana Jones movies. But BJ had it covered! “Fuck business”. He delivered on something, at least.

I can hear ds1s lecturer telling them about the T4 programme and the holocaust.

Its holocaust memorial day tomorrow and he is asking them all to observe a minutes silence if they can.

I'm sat here in my bedroom sobbing quietly.

Feeling very low today. So many "it could never happen" things have happened in the last 5 years...I feel as if I'm on a precipice and have no way down.

I think the scales have finally tipped too far.

There can be no return to decency or democracy until we have all suffered.

Trump, brexit, tory 80 seat majority, huge increase in poverty, armed incursion in the US capitol....

Did any of this ^ seem remotely likely 5 years ago???

@mrslaughan

Re schools .... saw a spokesperson from "UsForThem" interviewed on C4 last night... very polished .... very disappointing as C4 allowed a number of claims to go unchallenged...like "a huge amount of resources have been committed to make schools safe" - really? That must have skipped the notice of most head teachers......

Who are these people and who are finding them? ..... it felt very Vite Leave in very clever us of disinformation, presented in pleasant packaging (concerned mum.... blah blah blah - who I would , reading between the lines has her kids at private school)

info here about usforthem -

Johnson re-opened schools too early and delayed closures in 2020 under pressure from a ‘parents’ lobby group which receives PR support from a former Conservative parliamentary candidate and communications advisor to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign.

The same figure has extensive ties across the Conservative Party – and is currently managing PR for the COVID Recovery Group, founded by Conservative MPs who oppose the Government’s second lockdown.

bylinetimes.com/2021/01/21/parents-campaign-against-school-closures-receives-pr-support-from-boris-johnson-advisor/

twitter.com/NafeezAhmed/status/1352241206059798530

cat you’re right.
Johnson has staked everything on a fast vaccination programme not just leading us out of the pandemic but also getting him out of the tussle with the CRG.

Honestly how many times in the last month or so has Johnson been filmed visiting a vaccine lab or vaccination centre? Ridiculous shots for the media of him carrying boxes of vaccine and asking dim questions of nurses. He’s trying to associate himself personally with the vaccination programme in our minds.

He’s staking his political future on having this one success, and it masking the Brexit fallout. If it goes wrong, what’s he got to show?

Its holocaust memorial day tomorrow and he is asking them all to observe a minutes silence if they can.

I would much rather see that be made a national event rather than the minute's silence on 11th November which has now become de rigeur in addition to Remembrance Sunday. Remembrance Sunday was a good and fitting commemoration and enough for those who fought in WW1 and 2 up until about 2000 so why wasn't it enough for those born many years afterwards?

twitter.com/AndMedh/status/1353989310773649408

@Peregrina

Its holocaust memorial day tomorrow and he is asking them all to observe a minutes silence if they can.

I would much rather see that be made a national event rather than the minute's silence on 11th November which has now become de rigeur in addition to Remembrance Sunday. Remembrance Sunday was a good and fitting commemoration and enough for those who fought in WW1 and 2 up until about 2000 so why wasn't it enough for those born many years afterwards?

The two minute silence was held at 11am on 11th November for 20 years from 1919 to 1939, and only moved to the nearest Sunday initially in order not to interfere with wartime production.

I have a feeling, though I can't currently find any evidence for this, that the custom of holding a two minute silence on the 11th November in addition to Remembrance Sunday started as the commemorations of the First World War got into their stride.

[quote SabrinaThwaite]University of Oxford and Astra Zeneca both pushing back on German media reports of poor efficacy of the Astra Zeneca vaccine on the overs 65s.

www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-reports-from-germany-that-the-oxford-astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine-has-8-efficacy-in-over-65s/[/quote]
Also Zawhai said live on TV this morning Germany are wrong.

I am only vaguely aware of schools (deliberate choice)
but I do think that the business impact of Brexit is scaring the bejeesus out of the Tories
if its this bas only 26 days in
by Easter it will be horrendous.

The Vaccine rollout might be going well, might be going badly
BUT
by Easter when other countries are hitting "herd immunity" and their economies start to bounce back
the UK's will not
because of Brexit

Chersfrozenface. Thanks I hadn't known that.

I think you are right about the Commemorations for WW1 - Cameron started bigging it up as the Great War, and it was in real danger of becoming a jingofest of We Won the War, We Beat the Germans, which all fed into Brexit. I think wiser people than him stopped the worst excesses so that it became a remembrance of lives wasted.

GF fought in WW1 - he was lucky, as a Royal Engineer he probably escaped the worst of it. He never talked of the war for the rest of his life.

The two minute silence was held at 11am on 11th November for 20 years from 1919 to 1939, and only moved to the nearest Sunday initially in order not to interfere with wartime production.

And no one saw the irony ?

The problem with the vaccine nationalism/regionalism game is that once the cat is out of the bag, putting it back in is going to be painful.

Do I think the EU has covered itself in glory here? No, but that's irrelevant. As one of my favourite twitter follows once wrote, there are two basic category errors committed by British commenters on Brexit: brexiters think that the EU is weak (it isn't) and remainers think the EU is nice (uh, just no).

The vaccine issue is going to be an inglorious exercise in showing just how wrong both camps were. The EU may be fallible but it is not weak and it is not averse to playing hard ball.

There are a number of important issues here:

• at least 5 out of the (likely) first 7 covid vaccines to market will be made or partly made in the EU.
• vaccine escape: what if the AZ vaccine provides less immunity to variants or is less easy to update than Moderna or Pfizer? Um. Houston, we have a problem.
• making vaccines is hard. No way to rule out future technical problems at the U.K. plant. If you've played the nationalism card, you might find that it's played back at you 27 times over.

The U.K. also has a major comms problem if EMA does not approve the AZ vaccine or only approved it for certain groups.

Note that even if that happens it does not necessarily mean that the MHRA was wrong to grant conditional approval. (The UK was in a uniquely bad way with regard to Covid in December). But it does mean that it will have a careful PR job to do, by a government that does not know how to do careful.

I think many - most? - people that voted to remain in the EU didn't do so because they think the EU is 'nice', but that it was the best option - to be one of the key members of one of the largest trading blocks, rather than not; to remain for the benefits of membership and influence; to retain personal freedoms as citizens of a country within the EU. Not because it was 'nice'