Blah Blah

Yes, report it to Police as you have a number plate. They can track the owner immediately and pay them a visit.

Yes, Johnson has a difficult month ahead, irregardless of what happens. And as he is talking directly with Ursula Von Der Leyen now, the final decision will be on him personally. Even on the vaccine front, they are overplaying their hand. The vaccines ordered from Pfizer are a one off order that will be delivered gradually over time. The reality is that we may only see 800,000 shots in the near future, well short of the millions ordered. So this is not a magic bullet by any means. And there are real logistical problems with getting that vaccine out to care homes.

Also, how on earth do police catch one if they want to enforce the law? Some of this is down to people being priced out of safer forms of transport, especially for the young. Insurance companies have made driving a pipe dream for the young, unless they have parents who can pay for their insurance or incredibly well paid jobs. So for me, it is more than being about addressing illegal vehicles, but also about asking questions around options for people who want to use the roads, get about inexpensively.

Yeah I got this email too, and with expecting parcels to arrive for xmas presents etc, had a good look at it. But as with always with phishing emails, the sender email is always the giveaway. Plus no courier ever charges the recipient for redelivery, and leaves a card on failure of the first delivery.

Effra Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Agreed it does not control when an > individual country commences its roll out of an > approved drug, but that is beside the point. But is not besides the point. Hungary have already gone ahead and ordered the Russian vaccine. So there is one EU member not waiting for the EMA to decide for them. What Mogg et al were saying in reality, is that if the UK were still part of the EMA, we would be playing ball and waiting for their decision. However, that is not what they implied by their comments. They distinctly gave the impression that membership of the EU would have held up the rollout of a vaccine. This is blatantly not true.

TheCat Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Rule number 1 of being a remainer on the > EDF.....never, ever admit there may be the finest > thread of truth to anything remotely positive said > about brexit.... Rule number 2...... never ever let a Brexiter get away with mistruths, especially when they double down. FACT There was no requirement for EU member states to agree a unified moment for rolling out a vaccine. FACT EU member states are free to make that decision for themselves if they want to. FACT Mogg, Dorries and Hancock all lied when they implied that if we had not left the EU we would still be waiting for permission to roll out the vaccine.

It's a difficult one isn't it. Everyone wants the extra speeds and bandwidth of mobile technology, but no-one wants the rather ugly masts in their immediate line of sight. No right or wrong here, just the practical difficulty of finding places to put the masts.

jimlad48 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > So in other words you think we can tax the living > daylights out of the online high street and thats > all thats needed? Thats a very 'optimistic' > approach that will end in tears. > > If you want a world class NHS then you need to > open the economy up - every day you delay is > making it harder and harder to recover from this > self-inflicted disaster. Taxes have been arguably too low for some time. You can't have good public services and ever falling taxes. At the same time, the wage gap has been increasing. The top ten percent are responsible for more than half the income tax receipts collected. As for the NHS, we spend less on universal healthcare than most other countries in Europe but get extremely good value from it.

Jimlad, you just don't understand what the problem really is do you? We have 9 million people over the age of 70 in the UK. 1 in 20 of those who get covid, die (according to available data so far). Now let's see how that scales up to half that age group getting infected. That is potentially at least 400k deaths. Now add the many more that need ICU treatment but recover. We do not have that NHS capacity....nothing like it. No country in the world does. THAT is why most of it have shut down their economies. If you really think governments willingly trash their economies then you must live in an alternate universe. Stop looking at the numbers of death as they are, because they have been kept down by the restrictions and ask yourself how much higher you would be prepared to see them go so that you can have less restrictions. When you have decided what your personal limit is, come back to me and we can discuss how palatable that would be to both the public and a government who will seek re-election in four years time.

The same people vilifying Rita Ora are defending Laurence Fox after he boasted about breaking covid rules by holding a lunch party. Interesting how you fail to mention the latter, when both are headline news today. https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/piers-morgan-slams-selfish-laurence-23090261 Maybe you want to extend the discussion to the entitlement of both? And then we can look at how one instantly apologised and offered to pay any fine imposed, and the other doubled down and made a dig at the NHS, and decide who is the biggest tw@t in the end. For the record, I think they both should be fined and made examples of. But hard to justify that when MPs and government advisors (on all sides) get away with it I suppose.

Rockets Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > E-scooters create a couple of > challenges due to the speeds and acceleration and > their upright riding position creates a centre of > gravity issue that means they can become unstable > very quickly. This is the issue. These scooters come in different sizes with different size wheels etc. The smaller they are, the more unstable they are, the poorer the braking torque etc. The twist and go accelerator is also an issue if it only goes from zero to top speed. Without enforcement of regulation, the market is being flooded with cheap, smaller e-scooters and it is those that are going to lead to some casualties. Sure, there are casualties with all forms of road use. But that does not mean we should throw safety out of the equation and not have these discussions.

Actually they are not legal anywhere on the public highway. Only the rented ones are legal and you have to have a driving licence and insurance to legally use one. Police just aren't enforcing the law, probably because they are difficult to catch if they don't stop voluntarily. I nearly had a collision with one on Rye Lane a month ago. On my bicycle, he zipped out from behind a cyclist coming the other way and only avoided a accident by inches. Another problem are electric bikes that are more like mopeds. They can do speeds of 20-30 mpr, but have no plates, also illegal, but used increasingly by takeaway delivery riders. They ride on pavements and pedestrian areas too. Some enforcement is needed.

That is an interesting perspective Effra, but as you point out, the USA's global dominance was short lived, compared to European Empires. The truth is that capitalism is in an extreme form, in a time where oligarch philanthropy is no longer acceptable. So it either comes back to the center ground, or it fails, with all the end game chaos that ensues. Back to the masters of the universe to decide I guess (and yes I jest).

This was always the worry. How much vindictive damage Trump would do before actually leaving office if he lost the election? Personalities like his advocate for total war. He cares not a jot if other people are destroyed by his personal ambition. But even more tragic is seeing ordinary people buy into that. Trump got more votes than any president in History. Biden had to get millions more to win that office. America is broken in more ways than the world realises I think.

Corbyn's problem is that he is so bad at showing contrition that no-one would ever believe him anyway, apart from the cultists that hang onto his every breath of course.

Trump is deranged. His twitter feed is a succession of false claims. The was on the golf course when he should have been attending a G20 Pandemic Summit online. January can not come quick enough. America needs a President, not a lazy, entitled narcissistic ohild.

diable rouge Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > It's because of this that the jump from far left to far right isn't as difficult as most people assume. The Alt-Right crowd of > Brendan O'Neil, Claire Fox et al were once revolutionary Trots/Marxists. Even our resident racist has followed a similar > path... Exactly this. They share the same authoritarian intolerance of the center to moderate ground, but seek the credibility of that. So that is how you end up with nuanced characters like Farage and Corbyn, creeping into the mainstream. In reality, they are prizing the door half open for the voices and ideas of the fringes, claiming an attack on freedom of speech, if anyone dares call them out on it.

You are right about the hypocrisy when it comes to singling out comments or views held by the other side. The issue of antisemitism on the harder left is more nuanced than the antisemitism of the harder right, but both tap into the same tropes around wealth, power and influence. Corbyn essentially emboldened the voices of this harder left because he shares the same platforms as them. That is the voice of the idealistic revolutionary socialist left. For those people, America is the worst imperialist superpower, backer of Israel and influenced heavily by a wealthy Jewish cabal. THAT is where the antisemitism of the left is found. It is that anti-capitalist/ anti-imperialist stance that makes Israel a target specifically. This is why they do not show the same obsession for human rights abuses in countries like Russia, China, or any acknowledgement of the human rights abuses committed by Hamas. For these ideologues, Zionists have too much power in the global capitalist hierarchy and that is all that concerns them. So right there, is the same antisemitic trope found on the far right.

Actually no he isn't. Lansman is pro Israel, a Zionist and was targeted at some point by the harder left faction of Momentum who tried to remove him. The result was a splinter group called Grassroots Momentum, headed by people who are now expelled from the Labour Party. As for Corbyn himself, in light of the ECHR report and his response to it, he is finished. Without the whip, he can not stand as a Labour candidate at the next election. So it will be a question of whether Starmer blinks and restores the whip, or stands his ground hoping for electoral gain as a result. Either way, this is going to rumble on and it is that factional internal battle that will hurt Labour if he can't do something about it.

Because you were not clear if the bike was actually stolen. You didn't see them cut or pick a lock, so the guy loading it could have had a key and been collecting it for someone. I think until you hear from Police as to whether a theft actually did take place (an expensive bike would be reported as stolen if it indeed was), it is premature to post as though a theft had taken place and identify the vehicle you believe was engaged in a theft. Given that you can not confirm the bike was indeed stolen, I suggest you amend the title of this thread to reflect that, because right now you are potentially libeling the driver and his passenger. Your impression does not constitute fact, until someone definitely reports that bicycle as stolen. To illustrate that, you believe you saw one bicycle being stolen, and yet you use plural in your title. See the problem?

Meetup.com seconded. There are London based groups on there running zoom events for small groups, nattering about everything from what's on the telly to the latest novel by so and so. So not only a way to find a local group of people who share your interests, but also to find longer lasting new friendships too.

The vehicle is not stolen and the plates match the make and colour of the van. They could just be junk and scrap metal dealers as opposed to thieves, so clarification is needed.

I wouldn't be so sure about Boris. He won an election with an 80 seat majority and that makes him very difficult to oust. And while I agree that Cummings has not gone for long, I doubt Gove would win any leadership election against Sunak. I think Farage will be more of a problem to be honest, but there are no elections in sight, so who cares?

Ha Ha Seabag. Someone should animate that, like South Park. That weird press conference reminds me of how Trump sycophants also credit Trump with defeating ISIS, when in fact, it was intervention by Putin that helped Assad drive ISIS out. This is the deal with Trump - alternate realities. But I also think that Trump has now accepted the election is lost, and while he remains angry about it, won't concede etc, the direction has clearly shifted to the image he wants to leave the Whitehouse with. The man who saved the world from Covid in this episode. This is typical narcissist hero/victim playbook material from him. Who knows where he goes next.

Jury service uses the electoral register to select people. The electoral register does not hold phone numbers. There seem to be a wave of scam emails and texts at the moment, but fundamentally, anything you are not expecting that asks you to click a link, is usually a scam.