UK Politics Thread XII: The Lockdown

[Ifreann]

It sure is cool how the Tories openly detest the idea of people having their human rights defended by a qualified expert in the relevant laws.

[The Blaatschapen]

I would think that most employers would prefer someone who's dead inside, as they'll fit in with the office culture.

I miss the old days where the job interview was going for drinks and doing blow off strippers. Office culture was far more interesting then.

Wait, they stopped doing that in the USA/UK?

Damn, it's good that I didn't move there.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

It sure is cool how the Tories openly detest the idea of people having their human rights defended by a qualified expert in the relevant laws.

After all what rights do serfs have really?
/Sarcasm

[Celritannia]

I stand as evidence that it's possible to succeed in your chosen career without any secondary school qualifications at all.

For complicated reasons that have to do with attending secondary school in three very different school systems (private school in Scotland, the US, and Iceland), I never finished school in any of them.


That said, I'm not necessarily evidence that it's easy, and I was obviously highly unusual given my international childhood; and by the time you have a doctorate, nobody particular cares about secondary school qualifications anyway.

Wouldn't that also be a generational thing as well?

(I apologise if this comes across in a negative manner.).

[Greed and Death]

I miss the old days where the job interview was going for drinks and doing blow off strippers. Office culture was far more interesting then.

Wait, they stopped doing that in the USA/UK?

Damn, it's good that I didn't move there.

Yes damn sexual harassment culture. Apparently expecting a female intern to do coke off a stripper is degrading.

[Vassenor]

So it would seem that the PHE replacement is to be headed up by someone who's main qualifications are running the Test And Trace system into the ground and being the wife of a Conservative MP.

And they say this government isn't corrupt.

[Celritannia]

So it would seem that the PHE replacement is to be headed up by someone who's main qualifications are running the Test And Trace system into the ground and being the wife of a Conservative MP.

And they say this government isn't corrupt.

Indeed:

John David Penrose appointed member of the Advisory Board to discuss PHE being scrapped.

If the Tories want to edge closer to serious protesting, then this is one sure way to do it.

[The Blaatschapen]

Wait, they stopped doing that in the USA/UK?

Damn, it's good that I didn't move there.

Yes damn sexual harassment culture. Apparently expecting a female intern to do coke off a stripper is degrading.

Well duh, any workplace worth its salt has that being done off two strippers.

[Vassenor]

It sure is cool how the Tories openly detest the idea of people having their human rights defended by a qualified expert in the relevant laws.

Probably because that would require admitting that migrants are in fact human and not some sort of untermenschen species.

[Vassenor]

So it would seem that the PHE replacement is to be headed up by someone who's main qualifications are running the Test And Trace system into the ground and being the wife of a Conservative MP.

And they say this government isn't corrupt.

Indeed:

John David Penrose appointed member of the Advisory Board to discuss PHE being scrapped.

If the Tories want to edge closer to serious protesting, then this is one sure way to do it.

Also I forgot the bit about presiding over that massive TalkTalk data breach.

[The Blaatschapen]

Indeed:

John David Penrose appointed member of the Advisory Board to discuss PHE being scrapped.

If the Tories want to edge closer to serious protesting, then this is one sure way to do it.

Also I forgot the bit about presiding over that massive TalkTalk data breach.

Yeah.

It's such a shame.

[Celritannia]

Also I forgot the bit about presiding over that massive TalkTalk data breach.

Yeah.

It's such a shame.

Definitely the more important of the 2 issues.

[Salandriagado]

I stand as evidence that it's possible to succeed in your chosen career without any secondary school qualifications at all.

by the time you have a doctorate, nobody particular cares about secondary school qualifications anyway.

You say that, but someone actually wanted my GCSE results recently. Never overestimate the thinking ability of a HR manager with a checklist.

[North American Imperial State]

So it would seem that the PHE replacement is to be headed up by someone who's main qualifications are running the Test And Trace system into the ground and being the wife of a Conservative MP.

And they say this government isn't corrupt.

Christ this government never ceases to amaze me with it's corruption

[Celritannia]

So it would seem that the PHE replacement is to be headed up by someone who's main qualifications are running the Test And Trace system into the ground and being the wife of a Conservative MP.

And they say this government isn't corrupt.

Christ this government never ceases to amaze me with it's corruption

So, I may have reworked the entire opening lyrics for MLP, for the title of My Little Crony

[The New California Republic]

Peers will not be packing their bags and moving to York after a proposal to relocate the House of Lords during rebuilding work was effectively axed.

Boris Johnson wants the Parliamentary authorities to look at the idea of moving the Lords out of London while the Palace of Westminster is revamped.

But the body in charge of the project said it would not be considered.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-53837718

[Philjia]

Exam results chaos latest:
Pearson are pulling their original BTec results to review them to ensure they're in line with the new A level and GCSE guidance: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-53843148
Labour suggest algorithm originally used to generate grades breached equality laws: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-53837722
Durham university is offering financial incentives for students to defer entry until 2021 in order to cope with the much higher student numbers: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-53840379

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

Dear Britain: Why is an exam board in private hands to begin with? And why was "algorithms" even involved?

[Salandriagado]

Dear Britain: Why is an exam board in private hands to begin with? And why was "algorithms" even involved?

Exam boards: basically because they always have been. When we started offering qualifications through schools, universities were the people who had experience with exams, so basically just started doing the school exams too, and set up the exam boards to do that job (except in Wales, where the local authorities banded together and made their own exam board). Since then, they've all slowly merged themselves down to the modern ones (with the exception of WJEC, which has been around in its current state for ages, and is jointly owned by the various Local Authorities in Wales). Scotland is different, as is Northern Ireland.

Algorithms: so, there was a pandemic. As a result, none of those exams happened this year. Since we've got a frankly silly obsession with high-stakes final exams, and the Tories went even harder down that road back in 2012 (I think?), when they switched most GCSEs and A-levels from consisting of a mixture of coursework and a bunch of smaller exams to just a single exam at the end. As a result, none of the people who were supposed to take those exams have any actual formal exam performance to base awards on, so they needed something else.
They started with the obvious: they just asked the teachers what result they thought their pupils would have gotten, had they sat the exams (and also for a rank-order list of their pupils by ability, which seems like an awful thing to have to produce to me). The results that they got back were... optimistic, to say the least (and this isn't necessarily just teachers overstating things: predictions are inherently "if this person put in the work and did OK on the day, what would they get?" - some people won't put in the work and won't do OK on the day, so the actual average results will always be lower than the predictions). They were really very optimistic, though. The government's solution to this was to take all of the data they had and try to come up with an algorithm to adjust the results down to something more reasonable. Said algorithm was completely shit in a great many ways, so they've now caved and given people the better of the output of the algorithm and what their teachers predicted in the first place.

[Thanatttynia]

The best thing to come out of this otherwise shambolic government:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/861832/Living_with_beauty_BBBBC_report.pdf

‘Living with Beauty’ report. Heartening to see some resistance to the kind of anti-aestheticism that has been the most evil and most absolute ‘feature’ of post-war planning. Now the govt. must accept these recommendations and run with them as they replenish our housing stock. Antagonism to beauty is ideological, not practical - and an end to this could not come soon enough.

Very interesting reading for anyone concerned with our communities, planning, urbanism, etc.

[The New California Republic]

The best thing to come out of this otherwise shambolic government:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/861832/Living_with_beauty_BBBBC_report.pdf

‘Living with Beauty’ report. Heartening to see some resistance to the kind of anti-aestheticism that has been the most evil and most absolute ‘feature’ of post-war planning. Now the govt. must accept these recommendations and run with them as they replenish our housing stock. Antagonism to beauty is ideological, not practical - and an end to this could not come soon enough.

Very interesting reading for anyone concerned with our communities, planning, urbanism, etc.

The real problem is these soulless new-build suburban housing estates that pop up like weeds everywhere, using similar cookie-cutter designs in terms of layout and house design that have no real sense of place or community or amenities. They are the slums of the future, that will give birth to a new wave of serious antisocial problems just as surely as the tower blocks of the sixties to eighties did. These lessons were meant to have been learnt from that, but clearly they haven't as the recipe for the same problem has just been created again, albeit with slightly different ingredients.

Do you know where this report is going to go? Straight in the bin. The government has already made its bed and is lying in it, by charting a course of loosening up planning restrictions that'll make it easier for the problem to perpetuate itself.

[Souseiseki]

within the past two days we've had data putting support for scottish independence at 55% (or at 51% with don't knows excluded) and data showing 75% support in under-35s and 59% support in 35-54s. overall, the trend for the past three months has been majority support for independence. if this continues then the UK is truly dead.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Efx7cIpWoAA ... name=small

there's also this doozy, showing scottish independence at 55%, english independence at 49%, united ireland at 49% and welsh independence at 32%. so i guess by 2050 the banner of the britishness will be carried by wales and cosmopolitans in london.

what an odd timeline. like imagine the scenes if scotland and northern ireland leave then england kicks wales out.

[Philjia]

within the past two days we've had data putting support for scottish independence at 55% (or at 51% with don't knows excluded) and data showing 75% support in under-35s and 59% support in 35-54s. overall, the trend for the past three months has been majority support for independence. if this continues then the UK is truly dead.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Efx7cIpWoAA ... name=small

there's also this doozy, showing scottish independence at 55%, english independence at 49%, united ireland at 49% and welsh independence at 32%. so i guess by 2050 the banner of the britishness will be carried by wales and cosmopolitans in london.

what an odd timeline. like imagine the scenes if scotland and northern ireland leave then england kicks wales out.

On the one hand I wouldn't like Scotland to leave the union because it's probably a bad idea and will cause a lot of disruption who live in the borders, but on the other hand I would because with the SNP out of the way Labour will have to be much more open to an electoral pact with the minor progressive parties in exchange for voting reform.

[Ifreann]

The ravens are straying from the Tower of London, which portents the fall of the crown and UK.

[Nuroblav]

The ravens are straying from the Tower of London, which portents the fall of the crown and UK.

Oh yeah, it's all coming together...

I had forgotten about the ravens - and what a time to reminded