Category Archive 'Great Britain'

15 Sep 2021

Is There Anything She Can’t Do?

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Mary Harrington observes that it is very possible that none other than Ayn Rand recently saved Britain from a system of vaccine passports.

Health secretary Sajid Javid announced [9/12] that the much-debated plan to introduce vaccine passports for nightclubs and other venues at the end of September was not going ahead.

Appearing on the Andrew Marr Show, Javid insisted that while the government ‘was right to look at it’ and the plan would be kept ‘in reserve’ he was pleased to say the passports would not be implemented as previously announced, adding that it was ‘a huge intrusion into people’s lives’ and ‘most people instinctively don’t like the idea’.

Javid is widely known as a fan of Ayn Rand’s brand of radical individualism, reportedly once telling Parliament’s Crossbench Film Society that he wooed his future wife by reading her passages from The Fountainhead. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find him resistant to implementing as national policy a requirement to show medical paperwork in order to do something as everyday as going clubbing.

This is all the more so when growing evidence indicates that vaccination doesn’t in fact put a stop to infection, or even transmission of the virus — it mainly reduces the severity of symptoms. If the aim is not eliminating Covid but simply ensuring healthcare systems aren’t overloaded, then provided vaccine uptake is good (as is the case in England, where 89% of over-16s have now had at least one dose) there’s no need to constrain anyone’s movement.

So this announcement feels like a breakthrough of common sense amid a slew of countries announcing vaccine passport policies.

RTWT

20 Sep 2020

How to Address a Letter to One of Her Majesty’s Heralds

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A British wag, who is himself an armiger and an enthusiast of Heraldry, found himself with occasion to write to one of the United Kingdom’s Officers of Arms, so he decided to address his envelope as above.

Translation:

Robert Noel, Lancaster Herald
• HM College of Arms
• City of London

I think there was probably a decent chance that someone in the British postal service would figure it out.

28 Oct 2018

UK’s Oddest Placenames

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click on image for larger version

P.G. Wodehouse did excellent take-offs on these.

26 Jun 2016

Tom Whyman Does Not Like His Fellow Britons

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TomWhyman
Dr.Tom Whyman, (part-time) Philosophy teacher, University of Essex

Part-time red-brick academic Tom Whyman inveighs against his native English village in the American Sunday Times:

Alresford is my personal hell.

We are not used to thinking that a place like this — a pleasant town with a pretty center — might actually be hell. There is almost no poverty and only the occasional act of violence. There are good schools, a range of shops, a heritage railway. In fact, it’s somewhere that a lot of people, apparently, actively want to live: Houses in the center easily sell for upward of a million pounds. (What they will cost once the vote to leave the European Union makes the economy crater remains to be seen.)

But dig below the surface, and you will find the demons crawling. You can see them in the looks that residents give you when they pass; sneering snobs glaring down their noses with entitlement; small-minded townies, bullying you with eyes that you recognize from the primary school lunchroom; the old people, 80 and above, wearing blank stares. You can hear it in their bothered tutting at the bus stop (especially if they ever hear a visitor mispronouncing the name of the town), the shots that constantly ring out from across the countryside as they set about murdering as many of the local pheasants as they can. …

[I]t is impossible to leave Alresford, because Alresford is not just a place: It is an ideology that infects your very soul. Let’s call it “Alresfordism.” It is an ideology of smallness, of contraction, of wanting to curl up in our own personal, financially secure hole and will everything amusing or interesting or exciting in the world away.

Since my late teens, every effort I have ever exerted has been with the intention of escaping Alresford. And yet, I am an early-career academic and so I am forced to move back, every summer, to live with my parents because I cannot afford to pay rent elsewhere after my temporary teaching contract ends. Then, sometimes, I think: What if I’m actually secretly comfortable here? What if I have chosen the security of death in Alresford over the risks of life elsewhere? What if I am in fact fully in the clutches of Alresfordism?

23 Jun 2016

Don’t Be Taken in: Vote Yes!

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Brexit


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