Left Back

Should never have let that number of people assemble in the first place. They don’t all just decide to appear in the same place at the same time. There’s a level of organisation involved, usually on social media. I’d wager there’s more than one serving police officer in Scotland that’s a Rangers fan that had wind of this beforehand.

The problem is...you won’t. If you’re an easy target and flagrantly breaching the rules the police will quite happily fine you. I agree it’s totally wrong. Will the police even retrospectively attempt to identify any of these individuals? I suspect not unless they commit something other than a covid offence.

Should have been dealt with no differently to the various illegal raves that were in contradiction of the law and broken up. Not taking any action legitimises these actions and therefore makes it more likely they will re-occur. Do you think it’s fair that one section of society is allowed to break the law while another is huckled and fined? The police have shat it and taken the easy way out. Lauding zero arrests for blatant law breaking is a bizarre attitude.

It’s not really though is it? You have a load of people breaking the law. The police are supposed to uphold the law.

If lockdown was released in exactly the same way as it was last summer we wouldn’t be doing the same thing, and we would have a different outcome. Both because of the vaccine.

So basically she’s saying the government fucked it. Tbh I’ve been waiting for this to be raised ever since the publication of the new levels criteria. Surprised it’s taken as long as it has.

Fancy United to nick a goal here as Celtic get more desperate and push higher.

Matt Hancock?

Just seen the clip of what was being reported as the players rushing to greet the fans at the gates. They were nowhere near them. Load of hysterical nonsense.

Get the churches open so this clown has something else to do with his time.

Nah. The Italians stopped that.

Masonic handshake works wonders in these situations I’m led to believe.

No. Their wives or mothers are washing the kit.

Would have thought they’d be less disruptive in class. No-one can see you mouth “f**k off p***k” when you’re behind a madk.

Give band 5 nurses band 8 nurses wages then

Not sure how many games the Lowland League were scheduled to play but they can't be far off half a season. My own personal viewpoint is that if you get half a season in that should be enough to constitute a valid league. Even if they aren't quite there surely something can be arranged testing wise to get to that point.

big fucking dog chasing him hopefully.

I've got friends that are contractors and do the whole limited company thing (tax dodging to give it it's real name). Up in arms that the only support they can get is a bounceback loan (that they have to repay) rather than the "wages" other people are getting. As you say live by the sword, die by the sword. f**k 'em. If you don't pay into the membership of the club you shouldn't be able to use the clubs facilities.

don't doubt your claim but it's not as simple as that. Cost of living is higher in Ireland https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_result.jsp?country1=United+Kingdom&country2=Ireland

You're correct. They pay themselves in dividends to pay substantially less tax. It's a pretty widespread tactic among contractors.

So in principle there will be very few people that disagree nurses should get paid more. It's basic supply and demand stuff. We have a shortage of nurses and therefore they have to be paid more to retain/recruit more. Of course if we weren't wasting another £15bn on track and trace then a decent payrise could be put in for the NHS. That being said wild asks like this don't help. Every other public sector organisation would then think we'll have some of that as well and the whole thing spirals out of control.

In the grand scheme of £22bn last year and £15bn this year the cost of staff (even the alleged £1,000 per day consultants) is a fraction of the amount spent. To put that into perspective Tesco increased cost by between £650m and £900m last year which included amongst other things 45,000 new staff

I wholeheartedly agree the cost has been astronomical. There have been 90m tests carried out in the UK in total (https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/testing). I've no idea how much they actually cost the government per test. Even if you assigned the figure of what you can buy a test at the airport for £80. thats only £7.2bn (and it won't cost the government anything like that) I think there were about 18,000 tracers so it's fairly easy to put a reasonable guesswork number on that. With the above two we're less than £8bn even if we're being generous. £14bn on lab facilities and equipment and management? Not having that when you can build an entire hospital for circa 500m By no means an exhaustive analysis but It's not difficult to work out there is a lot of missing cash.

It's not quite that simple though is it. There will be actual testing kits and lab facilities to pay for. A necessity. Then you have the tracers themselves (which there have been a lot of stories about hoe effective or utilised they were). then there would be IT systems to set-up to support the whole thing. Does anyone know roughly what a test actually costs? I'd assume a lot less than the £100 or so you can buy a testing kit for.

A very quick search tells me the NHS England budget is something in the region of £140bn. I'm actually struggling to see how £22bn last year and £15bn this year will be spent on Test and Trace, especially when there's very little to show for it. Hancock at a briefing this week was wittering on about partnerships between public and private sector showing a future model for the how the government gets things done. I have to admit I was barely paying attention but I hope it wasn't this he was referring to.