cellar

Even if the vote wouldn't have had any impact, the rebellion of Labour MPs is a big blow for Starmer. He should have just allowed a free vote.

I'm into my 30s and probably will buy my first place late next year or sometime in 2025. Probably a few things that have contributed to not being in a position to buy sooner, but it is what it is.

There's definitely a bit of nastiness in there I think - he's made some sly comments about renters before.

Sticking again, those recession fears are mounting

Typical Ozanne post saying a lot of nothing, backed up by nothing.

Really well said - and especially that this inquiry does very little to further our robustness in responding to a future pandemic event.

I think it would take a virus like SARS to get people complying - and a virus like that would kill itself off fairly quickly naturally anyway, so it might not reach that level of transmission.

I think you have more faith in people than I do! But in seriousness - people react to what they can see. I'm surprised as many people complied as did during lockdown. I think the... "media fallout" (?) since Covid means people feel like they trust governments and media less, so I think if another pandemic happened, people would be less likely to believe and less likely to comply. Which could be incredibly catastrophic. And the Tories have a big portion of the blame there.

Think this is a bit of a stretch. I actually think it would be harder to get people to comply if a similar virus came about in the next 10 years or so.

Hopefully we get a bit of a financial market reset before the next pandemic. The global financial system really needs to take a look at itself. But again, it's all so interlinked, and no one wants to be the first to budge.

It's a really interesting thing to be thinking about. I think our gov handled it terribly, but the element of how interconnected our society is these days is a big factor. Isn't London one of the top 5 hubs for international travel? So an effective response would require global commitment in some way that I'm not smart enough to be able to think of.

That's fine, I would trust them within a margin of error, which I'm happy to do.

I imagine I have more to back it up than you have that the numbers are just being randomly reported by Hamas 😉 Obviously no one can know for sure, and it's an ongoing situation where the numbers are being counted by hospitals that are already under crazy pressure, so there are likely to be issues with accuracy in that regard. And there is no specification (as far as I know), as to who is civilian and who is military. But you are claiming that the numbers are entirely fabricated because of Hamas corruption, right? I just think the numbers are actually pretty close to what is being reported. Numbers reported by GHA in previous conflicts broadly agreed with other reports of figures (like the UN) - do you dispute those too? If not, you're specifically claiming that only the figures for this conflict are the ones being hugely misrepresented. Saying "500 dead" and then revising the figure the next day sounds less like propaganda and more like an attempt to be accurate. Why not just stick with 500?

It's the Gaza Health Authority reporting those figures, which Hamas does exert some influence over, but not to same degree as other services. Their figures have been broadly accurate in previous conflicts in terms of numbers (disagreements over civillian vs military), so there's nothing to suggest at the moment that the numbers we're seeing now are wildly incorrect.

Yeah I used to have a little bit of respect for him, but he's let himself down these last few weeks

I don't think that's what I said. I think I said you supported an apartheid state because you supported Israel. Which was probably still an overreaction. But you've flip flopped so much since then anyway, who knows what you actually believe. But you can't see this, so...

The indefensible position is trying to justify an apartheid state, delivered by Israel, under the guise of being against a terrorist organisation. Discuss the points at hand. How do you feel about the calorie control that Israel imposed on Palestine?

Ahh okay. Can you answer my question, please?

Insinuating that people are racists is, though

Not sure if I follow how this is a response to my post. Do you think that Palestine is an equal contender in this crisis? Do you have any evidence to back up that position?

It seems like deflection to me. Let's talk about the issues at hand, rather than focusing on the ex-Leader of the opposition. No? Easier to fall back to criticising Corbyn when struggling to defend an indefensible position I guess.

People on the left have criticised him in this thread, no?

Don't know if celebrating is the right term. I think it gets lost that this isn't an equal situation. Palestine has been the victim for a long, long time. Yes we can talk about how it is wrong to not call out the specific atrocities that Hamas has committed this time around, but its not hard to understand why support for Israel is (and should be) thin.

Of course there is political point scoring. It's happening here in this thread.