Both are possible.

I dont doubt the racist and classist element in all this but as long as progress for all is the aim then I dont think we should go down the silly 'merican thingy path of minimising the issue of violence towards women when we get a chance to draw attention to such a big problem.

Sure. I'm arguing for a real (ie not Johnsonian) levelling up when victims belonging to other groups get a more equal response from our horrid media.

The issue here is violence towards women. Detracting from that is a bad mistake imo.

It's not either or. It's possible and good to condemn violence against women and highlight the cases where victims weren't white and middle class.

In fact this approach does much more to further public awareness of the problem than your usual prescription of brushing racial bias under the carpet.

Absolutely. Highlight all cases

Making it about the press would be a bad mistake.

The press have always obsessed over attractive middle class white victims (and perpetrators, see: Amanda Knox), and in some ways it was depressing to see this pattern emerge with the most recent tragic example.

However, if it helps illuminate a problem in society that results in moving the needle on what is acceptable behaviour from men, then it can still be a positive example. Making kerb crawling and cat calling criminal offenses would be a start.

Got my jab appointment which I'm very happy about but something is worth knowing. The invite guides you to use Accurx which is some private company. Fortunately someone had warned me and I instead booked via the NHS. I recommend others do the same.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/corona...s-vaccination/

Apart from not wanting to use a private company, accurx only offers a few sites that for me are 3+ miles away. The NHS site has far more sites which are far more local - 1 mile away. I'm walking home which would normally be no big deal for but if there's some chance I might not feel great after the jab then that's a big difference.

How are people generally being contacted for their jabs? Post? Phone? Email?

In my case it was a txt mesage from accurx that appears to come from my GP practice. Pretty sure they just use the name of your GP practice who aren't actually involved at all.

I got a text for mine a month ago. My area is ahead of most of the country and judging from yesterday's queue seems to be vaccinating people in their 30s now.

Getting the vaccine will probably be my most risky moment for catching covid since mid March last year.

But dying of irony isn't such a bad way to go.

Yeah the 15 minute queue was a big worry outside and even more of one inside, even with an N97.

By-election triggered by resignation of Red Wall Labour MP

Looks like potentially bad news for Starmer unless they pick a very strong candidate.

Yeah I got a text about a jab and sorted it, but also got a letter about it about 2 days after. Having mine on Saturday

When I took my mum, the whole operation was managed superbly. There were loads of volunteers, plenty of room and the whole thing had the feel of being organised by people who know what hey are doing (the military and doctors).

Would guess your chances of catching covid are no greater than going to a supermarket.

I expect it will be well run but I haven't been to the supermarket in well over a year

I wouldn't expect anything because there will be enormous post code differences. The GP clinic I went to was small with a minimum of space inside for queuing which wasn't a comfortable experience. The people working there were wonderful, as usual.

Can't remember who it was that proposed a one-off bonus (and too lazy to check), but Drakeford has only gone and tried it:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-56430683

Depends on what the media think the issues are, and what they think is important, and what they think will go down with the public. The 1985 police shooting of Cherry Groce, which sparked riots in Brixton, attracted immense publicity. So did the 1993 asphyxiation of Joy Gardner while under police restraint.

And the 1993 racist murder of Stephen Lawrence became part of national folklore. In 1999, Boris Johnson's father-in-law Charles (later Sir Charles) Wheeler presented a BBC doc called 'Why Stephen?' which sought to explain the PR effort to bring the crime to greater notice. One would slightly question that doc for giving too much credit to something called the Anti-Racist Alliance, a self-serving pressure group fronted by one Marc Wadsworth, himself a massive racist (specifically an anti-Semite), who has since been expelled from the Labour Party for bringing the party into disrepute by making anti-Semitic remarks to a Jewish Labour MP at, of all occasions, the public launch of the now-discredited Chakrabarti report into Labour's anti-Semitism problem.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/278369.stm

In reality, it is likely that Stephen's murder gained so much traction in part because the appalling Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail happened to have employed Stephen's father to do some work on his house, and quite liked him, and was therefore shocked by the case. But it also helped that Stephen was photogenic and a model citizen. Those two factors may also apply, of course, in murder cases involving women.

Where I went, a rec centre attached to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, they managed the human traffic very well and it was all socially distanced except, by necessity, in the actual cubicle where you got the actual shot in the arm.

Highlighting necessarily involves selection, so that would be a contradiction in terms. Space and time and bandwidth and audience attention are limited, so there's selection.

Good to see a significant delay in the vaccination programme here dismissed as a technical issue by Hancock yesterday.

We apparently produce 1-2m AZ doses a week in the UK, which has been the main supply chain thus far. The delay is due to an extra shipment of 5m doses produced in India being delayed by a month.

So it's probably not so much a significant delay as a bottle neck, although given we have been administering 3.5m a week on average so far, it will bend the curve somewhat.

Which is fine, but then Hancock should simply say so. There's really no need for them to be secretive over it. This is a national emergency where transparency will build trust and people want and need to be kept informed, not the usual political **** where the government is covering up whoever Boris has been impregnating that week.

Good point, well made.

The counterpoint is you can probably argue the government is perhaps right to not point the finger at certain countries or manufacturers and blame them for the problem.

Unlike some.