I have no particular horse in the SNP/everyone else stakes, I'm merely saying that there could be very good reasons why the care home figures appear so bad in the UK in general, sure it could have been managed a lot, lot better and the idea of discharging to care homes is lunacy, but barring completely isolating just the vulnerable (which seemed a good idea at the time and pretty ****ing obvious in hindsight) then what has happened was going to happen more or less regardless

What's important now is to correctly assess the risk of coronaplague, realise that it is incredibly low both in terms of likelihood of catching it and risks if you do, and restart the economy properly so that we still have a functioning health service for those that might actually be at risk

Antifa doesn't exist in the UK and I'm not aware that Marc Quinn has any Communist connections. And people don't kneel to statues, except in your racially paranoid imagination.

The simple solution was to test people before discharging them back into care homes and isolating them in Covid wards in hospital if they tested positive. And then for good measure not to attempt to lie and spin your way out of the scandal.

lmao my cousin is in antifa
it turns out money has been funnelled away from adult social care and child social services to pay for this skip so the champagne communist can make a point

the homeless of bristol* can now starve in a pandemic

*bristol is like the san francisco of england for homelessness
walk a mile and you get sold five big issues
i've spent time in both places

Haven't followed NS much but she must be better than Boris' 'hope for the best and prepare for the worst' idiocy

Prepare for the worse - sure but the main part of the strategy needs to be about preventing the bad, not re-opening everything like it's all under control and hoping. All (I don't think I exaggerate) the experts disagree with boris now.

The only hope is a vaccine - we desperately need boris to get very lucky.

This might sound a bit odd but if she is able to return, can she be arrested once she gets off the plane or would this not be possible, due to the appeal?

Due to membership of an illegal organisation (and a slightly alarming interview indicating that she is by no means de-programmed, since she was keen to say that she wasn't bothered by seeing a non-ISIS Muslim's head in a bin), she might well be arrested, bailed, tagged and placed under strict supervision and reporting conditions. I don't think the Court of Appeal's finding would affect that, since it relates only to her immigration status. In her interviews, she dopily suggested that she could just come back and be 'given a flat' and an income. She clearly isn't up to speed with regard to council housing or the 'benefits' system.

Yes she can be arrested. What precise laws she has broken, I don't know but there's bound to be one.

The important thing is that she is British and as someone who was a child when they left the UK, should definitely be subject to our law. I trust the court will agree if the government don't manage to stop her fighting the case.

Antifa is a stupid social cult among privileged white Americans. It doesn't exist in the UK.

No it hasn't. The sum is trivial in terms of the city's budget and it was the mayor's decision to take the statue down because it was unauthorised.

Bristol is nothing like as bad as San Francisco, as my nephew and his wife, who live just outside Bristol and visited San Francisco not long ago, were telling me on Thursday. San Francisco is a nightmare compared to Bristol.

Membership of an illegal organisation. That is actually a crime.

The government shouldn't be allowed to pretend she's a Bangladeshi national, no. Anyway, the Court of Appeal says she should at least be allowed entry to the UK to take part in her appeal against deprivation of citizenship.

https://www.freemovement.org.uk/cour...shamima-begum/

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/...dgment-NCN.pdf

Yes but there's a big gap between the court saying she should be allowed entry and her actually gaining entry.

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...n-tells-huawei

Apart from anything else, it indicates just how important the USA election is for the UK

The UK should bribe Bangladesh to take her in as they are willing to deal with her appropriately.

She was asked the question from sky news?

Scottish tories spent the last few months telling Nicola not to politicise the pandemic, whilst politicising it at every opportunity they could

If anyone wants to read the ISC's Russia report, here it is, with redactions galore.

https://docs.google.com/a/independen...EyN2Y3NjM0OWFl

Essentially, the ISC find that Kremlin-linked Russian 'businessmen' have been laundering money and corrupting politics in London for some time, while Russia has been engaged in extreme hostile activity instanced by the Litvinenko assassination and the Salisbury-Amesbury poisonings, and the government, which was quick to issue an intelligence report on Russian fiddling with the US 2016 presidential election, has deliberately avoided any investigation of such influence in the 2014 Scottish referendum, the 2016 Brexit referendum, or the two subsequent UK general elections. Reading between the lines, the security services were obviously 'warned off', as we know they were when May forbade MI5 to investigate Arron Banks. Russian bankrolling of mostly Tory MPs and peers, of Leave.EU and Vote Leave, is a thing the security services have been forbidden (by Tory ministers) to look at. The committee finds that no one in government or the security services considers it their business to analyse or inquire into Russian threats to the British democratic process -- that's a 'hot potato', as the committee puts it. Which is very, very concerning.

Thanks for that, very interesting and will be interesting to read.

How is the response to the report locally? Do people generally accept it?

The committee -- and bear in mind this is the successor committee, it's not the one that wrote the report eighteen months ago -- believes there should be an inquiry into the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Yeah, I think so. It's something you can't really argue with. The BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg evidently gets it.



Sky's political editor appears to have deleted one or two tweets but clearly also gets it, quote-tweeting things like this:-



And this, from anti-corruption campaigner Bill Browder, a witness to the committee who is quoted in the report:-



And this, from Boulton's Sky colleague Sam Coates:-



And HM Loyal Opposition, in the form of the Shadow Home Secretary, are, obviously, on the case.



It's breaking quite big, basically.

That is a good at least. And Bill Browder is damn treasure.

Ah. I see Adam Boulton at Sky hasn't deleted this one after all.



Jim Pickard of the Financial Times quotes committee member Kevan Jones MP:-



The BBC point out that committee member Stewart Hosie MP really isn't very pleased:-



As I say, it's quite big.

Orbis has been given the ISC's permission to publish Christopher Steele's confidential 2018 evidence to the committee. (US readers will know who Christopher Steele is -- former head of MI6 Russian Desk.)



https://orbisbi.com/wp-content/uploa...quiry-2018.pdf

I love this excerpt from that pdf:

It is a perfect summary. I also like that it doesn't do the normal portrayal of Putin like some evil genius, but more as a cornered demagogue.

This is awful, perfectly awful.

That nothing is being done to prevent future interference is pathetic.

The Tories are crooks straight and simple

have the BBC completely ignored the clause 17 vote yesterday? can't see anything on any their social media, nothing on the news.. they can't stop updating us about amber turd tho

scotland needs out of this shitshow ASAP

It does appear to be tumbleweeds on Main Street, true.

Then again, have you seen the SNP's insane Hate Crime Bill, which would outlaw most public discourse including most of the Edinburgh Festival? It takes a particularly hard line on theatrical performances, for some reason, going far beyond even what a Tudor or Stuart monarch would consider reasonable limits on speech. Shakespeare would become pretty much unperformable in Scotland and no stand-up comedian would be safe. The one-party state of Indyland is going to be deeply uncongenial.