James105

For the funeral I can understand as this will attract a lot of high profile visitors from around the world and will need a significant police presence, but that is in 10 days time. It's the suggestion that the games would need to be cancelled (as opposed to minute's silence) this weekend that has me a little riled. Normal folks plan (and shell out cash) in advance to travel to games, and the passing of a major celebrity figure (yes, even the Queen) should not be reason enough to cancel them.

Not really. People (who have a lot less money than the royal family) buy tickets/accommodation in advance to travel to sporting events at the weekend and I do not see why they should lose money/lose out because a celebrity figure has passed. The traditional way that respect is paid is a minutes silence (or applause) at the start of games and the wearing of black armbands. I do not see why this should be any different.

Very sad the Queen has died. She was extremely dedicated to the public service role she was born into, and regardless of whether or not she was the best person for the job she did it admirably nonetheless, and even garnered respect and warmth from even those who do not believe that such a monarchy should exist in modern times. Now, I'm hearing some nonsense about the weekends football matches being cancelled over this and this is the part where I start to get a tad irritated. Sporting occasions are a great way for people to come together and celebrate a life well lived (as well as show their respects) and I very much doubt someone who loved a sporting occasion like the Queen would want these events to stop on her behalf so hopefully that will not be the case.

Lot's of double standards in this thread, which I expected to see. Plenty of girls do the groping in this town as well. It's nigh on impossible to walk down certain streets without being sexually assaulted on the way through. It's kind of funny how those that suggest that a women should be able to walk down any street she likes, wearing whatever she wants and should not receive unwanted attention (which she should of course), but if a guy gets unwanted attention then he should know better than to come to pattaya and walk down certain streets. I just hope we are not witnessing the birth of a new scam as collecting 200k from whatever the grope was sounds a lot easier and more profitable than selling sex at 1k a go. I doubt it would be too difficult to engineer an unwanted grope from the average drunken farang, especially if the police are onside (which they will be) by taking a significant chunk of that 200k as well.

It was probably more like a 50 baht bill. If that was me and even if I was 1000% convinced I was in the right, I would have just given her the cash regardless to avoid the inevitable conflict. Some battles might be worth fighting, but a 50 baht bill is definitely not one of them.

Yes, people did vote to control the borders but clearly the Tories have no appetite to do so. Since Labour would encourage even more to come (and have zero solutions for this) who do you recommend people vote for if they want to prevent these illegal immigrants from coming over and potentially dying on this treacherous crossing, whilst allowing organised crime to profit from this at the expense of taxpayers. Or do you believe that anyone who makes it into the UK should simply be allowed to stay there, and when the boats overturn and people die attempting the crossing thats just a bit of collateral damage not worth bothering about?

Reminds me of the time one of my friends got stuck in a public toilet on holiday somewhere. The silly sausage forgot that when she entered the toilet it was a slide door rather than on a hinge and was screaming the building down after 30 minutes of failing to open the door. She was in floods of tears when we "rescued" her by sliding the door open very easily. It took her quite some time to get over the incident, her agitation about the whole thing being prolonged by our mockery of her stupidity which we engaged in for probably a bit longer than we should have.

So you disagree with the lockdown approach and paying people to sit at home doing nothing now? Or would your approach be the labour one which was harder poverty inducing lockdowns for longer which inflict even more long term harm? Thailand has now removed pretty much all lockdown measures. All the alarmists and fear propagandists on here were predicting doom. So what happened? Those that salivated over the covid stats daily have been very quiet lately. Could it be that any human measure to control something like a virus is completely pointless (as most sensible people said) and is really just about authoritarianism and control? And what a cost these measures will have! This is just the beginning. Unfortunately this hubris will cost the kids of today their entire lifetimes to pay back.

Who have proven without doubt their approach was the correct one, as we can see from the financial repercussions being felt from taking the wrong one i.e locking up healthy people who were at next to zero risk from serious illness. Of course if your goal was to put as many people into abject poverty as possible then you would of course think that Sweden took the wrong approach.

Good grief, you people and your labels. It's common sense that paying people to sit at home doing nothing would have massive financial consequences. If "alt-right" means common sensical then yes, they are to blame for not recognising the obvious repercussions. The government could have done with a little more balance in their choice of scientific advisors with some more dissenting voices but they could not introduce lockdowns without overwhelming public support.

Not really. Listening to and believing fear propaganda was a choice. Over 70% of the public supported lockdowns and being paid to do nothing, as well as wasting 1/2 trillion pounds making big pharma et all incredibly rich. If the opinion polls were against lockdowns then there would not have been lockdowns and a more sensible, Sweden style approach would have been adopted. The politicians would not have been brave enough to go against public will, especially so when it became very, very clear that only a small, well defined group of people would have been at risk from severe illness. The only people who I would say do not deserve this are the sensible ones who were against lockdowns and the associated madness of healthy people being masked and isolated from other healthy people.

Every single one of those "workers" who sat at home getting furlough money for the best part of 2 years and producing nothing should not be overly surprised about this.

They did so based on a lie that Blair told parliament. Would the Tories have invaded Iraq if they were in power and had access to the (lack of) intelligence the government had? We will never know but I would say it is unlikely.

Not that many people from the UK actually... https://theconversation.com/how-many-people-work-for-the-eu-59702 "A 2013 report by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee noted that UK nationals working for the EU institutions is one source of British influence in the EU. Worryingly for the UK government, the number of British EU staff appears to be on a downward trend. The latest figures from the European Commission show only 3.8% of its staff are British, compared to 17.8% from Belgium, 12.5% from Italy, 10.2% from France and even 4.3% from Romania."

I suspect (another) one of the reasons people voted to leave is due to the language of people who desperately wanted the UK to remain such as the language used in this lovely little sentence. I have always been bemused by those who think they can bring others to their way of thinking by calling them bigots or some other derogatory term. I have yet to see this tactic succeed to persuade anyone to do anything (it seems - not surprisingly - to have the opposite effect), and yet those who consider themselves intellectually superior to those who think differently to them continue to use this strategy.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/12/nhs-hospital-trusts-to-pay-out-further-55bn-under-pfi-scheme "An initial £13bn of private sector-funded investment in new hospitals will end up costing the NHS in England a staggering £80bn by the time all contracts come to an end, the IPPR thinktank has found."

I never said the EU was to blame for this, I said specifically Tony Blair was to blame. He never asked the people if they were okay with increasing immigration from ~40,000 per year to ~350,000 per year, nor was this a commitment in a manifesto. If the people were asked about this in a referendum they would have said a resounding no for all the obvious practical, social and cultural reasons you can imagine. To put it simply, if the UK hadn't been adding the equivalent of a city the size of Birmingham through inwards migration for over a decade prior to the referendum then the people of the UK would not have voted to leave the EU. Tony Blair does not get enough blame for this in my opinion.

The people in the UK never agreed to increase immigration from the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands per year. Tony Blair was responsible for that and if he had made a manifesto promise to increase immigration so drastically then he would not have been voted into power. It is not accurate to say the UK people agreed to this, and the first chance the people of the UK were given to correct it (EU referendum) they took it.

From the article: "Mr Clarke's statement says the increase is "primarily due to the most recent valuation of the UK's obligation under Article 142 for EU pensions" UK taxpayers money going into the EU pension trough. Quite why the people of the UK voted to leave the EU remains one of life's little mysteries.

I don't think she has a chance of making it through to the final 2. I was kicking myself the other day for not having a wager as she was 100/1 outsider with the bookies, but I now suspect the bookies knew what they were doing by having her at that price.

Yes, but when the leadership election is over and the new leader is democratically elected, all the candidates who participated will accept the result and move on giving the new leader their full support for the good of the nation. They will not spend the next several years having temper tantrums as the result did not go their way, unlike most Labour and Remain voters.

Our beloved NHS has far more important things to focus on in these progressive times than providing luxury services like ambulances, such as filling essential roles such as this one. Although I am shocked that such an essential position is only worth the equivalent starting salary of 4 full time paramedics so there is still a long way to go.

The results of mask wearing and their effectiveness speak really do speak for themselves. Just imagine what would have happened if Thailand didn't implement mask mandates previously - they could have had an explosion of covid cases and experienced tens of thousands of cases a day! Praise be to the mask overlords who insisted I wore my mask on the beach, on my motorbike and in the park, but allowed me to remove it as soon as I got into an indoor crowded bar or restaurant. Who knows how many deaths I could have caused if not for this kind of sensible policy making. It's just basic common sense and anyone who thinks I was not saving lives by wearing a mask on a beach is clearly a mask-denier and should be labelled as such.

What is the link for that report and how were they able to ascertain that the person responsible for spreading it had no symptoms or infection?

Dear troll. Since I cannot magically make a Labour leadership election happen today and view the results of this election it is silly to ask me to try and prove that isn't it? For that kind of thing we need to look at past performance to see what might happen in the future (which is something that Bookies do when working out odds of something that might happen).