There may also be an element of the way they are counted. The UK counts anyone who has died within 28 days of a positive test no matter what they actually die of. Previously, during the first months of the pandemic the numbers included those with Covid on the death certificate even if they had not been tested. I imagine the “real” numbers may be different but not sure which way!
What is the French criteria for counting Covid deaths? Would be interesting to know.
Izzy x
It is probably a combination of:
- Differences in counting Covid deaths.
- Larger occurrence of ethnic minorities and obese in the UK (who are more vulnerable).
- Again, in the UK, a greater number of Covid deaths arising earlier in the pandemic when the medical profession were still to some extent unsure how to effectively treat against the virus.
However, I’ve no proof of the above!
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Good point Tim but is that difference measurable? The NHS, for all the damage Hunt did to it, was still providing excellent care. I think the delayed lockdown, Cheltenham being a headline example, cost thousands, probably tens of thousands, of lives. Compounded by the transfer of untested, asymptomatic patients into care homes. Once the genie was out of the bottle…
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He’s at it again! Obviously learnt nothing from the ‘eat out to help out’ fiasco.
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Plus the PPE fiasco and all his mates making millions out of supplying totally suitable garments and testing equipment to the NHS.
This is good news
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It is @Mat_Davies but once again, it will be water off a duck’s back to Doris 
Some more interesting perspectives on the UK citizenship process…
(Having lived most of his life in the UK but born outside it, he is of course, in no different a position to many - notably those caught in the Windrush scandal.)
And an older article on the historical illiteracy of the ‘life in the UK’ test I’ve just discovered:
A typical DUP member one might say, it’s all everybody else!s fault. If he was so mad about being abritish whey the hell didn’t get a passport thirty years ago!
On the plus side, his whinging has once again highlighted the HO citizen prevention exam where factually incorrect answers are required to pass.
BTW, it seems it’s not the only silly exam around…
I needed a Johnny Marcheur avec du l’eau furiouse after reading that.
“Citizen prevention exam” - Good one John - yes this is indeed their real purpose.
The language test in France is perhaps defensible on the grounds that a basic level of French is required to participate in national and community life - I believe it’s at what would be about GCSE level in the UK - but a test that native speakers can’t pass is something different. At the very least, it is an attempt to select citizens on the basis of intelligence.
But the UK test has another dimension - it’s not just too hard, nor does it just make factual mistakes - it distorts history on purpose for ideological ends. As one of the historians says: “This is… a version of our history that whitewashes the difficult parts."
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Too many stories about where bears defecate and the religious leanings of the Pope, I think.
So you find such matters acceptable @plod
Corruption in high places doesn’t concern you so I guess Bent Coppers series is also just fantasy?
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He was "gifted shares”. Why would he have been gifted shares? A quid pro quo from his sister?
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Where these bears are defecating is on the people who voted for them Ron.
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The whole UK citizenship process is designed to make you fail or give up/put you off from applying IMO.
It is a very onerous process. Getting s.o from with the Home Office to communicate and engage with you is a Herculean task, of course the HO doesn’t run Préfecture-type offices - they should, esp. for the price we pay for our immigration paperwork - so you can’t visit the aptly-named Home Office Lunar House at Croydon (applying for UK citizenship is indeed a “démarche bien lunaire”!), they don’t reply to emails, getting a HO staff on the blower is a small feat in itself etc. A teacher American friend of mine even had to involve her MP - it was for a spouse visa - and it still took them 3 months to reply to the MP’s emails!
It’s long (about 30 months at the mo), but that’s kind of fine in the main, most immigrants accept that, it’s the same in France of course and probably in many other countries, staff cuts, sometimes poorly-trained or poorly-informed staff who were working for Argos the month before etc. (high annual staff turnover at the HO, about 20%). It can of course be a serious problem when it drags on though in some cases, when you’re not in the country for instance. The Chinese wife of a university lecturer friend of mine recently had to wait for 28 months for her spouse visa, he is on a good wage etc. (They had to live apart the whole time of course.)
And it’s ridiculously expensive: £2,000 - and the £1,400 Home Office isn’t reimbursed if your citizenship application is rejected, about 1/3 of all applications.
15-20 years ago it was too easy to get UK citizenship, far too easy IMO and practically free or you just had to pay a nominal sum (as Mauritian friend of mine, who married one of my wife’s colleagues in the early 2000s, got her UK citizenship within 3 years of arriving in the UK if memory serves - through the now-abolished fast-track “marriage route” -, for only about £100 and the procedure was much less onerous than today). It deffo needed tightening, eg the addition of a language test was necessary, but the pendulum has swung far too much the other way now, as the Tories in particular have sought to monetise immigration, not just that test but ALL titres de séjours, short-term visas, spouse visas, residency visas etc.
The fees really are excruciatingly high and unjustified, it’s run as a ruthless business and it shouldn’t as we’re talking about people’s lives and livelihood here. The ILR status for instance (Indefinite Leave to Remain, roughly the equivalent of the Carte de Séjour but you can only apply once you’ve lived continuously in the UK for 5 years), costs nearly £2,400, per applicant of course, so for a couple and kids (£1,000 for an U-18) you’re talking a minimum of 7 grand. It’s cheap for the HO to process of course (from the Net): A migrant applying for Indefinite Leave to Remain in the UK has to pay £2,389. The cost to the Home Office of processing an ILR application is £243 — so the fee is set at ten times higher than the actual administrative cost.
The problem is that it’s become a business for the gvt. This monetisation of immigration started under New Labour (at the fag end of the 2000s, so more under Brown) but the Tories ran with it of course as they’re wont to do. It also dovetailed nicely with their official policy of the “Home Office hostile environmment”, originally aimed at illegals but which quickly got out of hands (and affected all immigrants, in various guises, I have some tales about that! even EU immigrants who’ve been here for donkeys) when the Tories saw that they could get lots of mileage on reviving nationalism (they can certainly count on the media for that!, particularly the rightwing press, and not just the Tabloids, only last weekend for instance Rod Liddle in the Sunday Time, 11.402021:
I read a story last week in a newspaper […] that English was the only language with a word for “fair”. Indeed, foreigners in general and the French in particular have no real understanding of the concept, which is why we are right to hate them.. He is “coutumier du fait”, he’s written such things and made a number of such violently anti-French comments over the years, not just the French of course but like swathes of the rightwing press in England he predictably saves his most venomous ire for them! As the TV host Nick Hewer says (he has a second home in the Périgord), “I can never understand why the British are so bloody about the French”.
Six years ago, the magazine The Economist called this turning immigration into a business “paytriotism” in this article (Paytriotism - Becoming British is a costly business). The many foreigners I’ve talked to about this online or IRL wouldn’t mind too much paying through the roof if you could actually communicate easily with the Home Office and/or, God forbid, see a real immigration person but it’s all done online and communication is dire (they don’t reply email or by phone, staff cuts etc.).
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Looks like it was another “hit and run, Ron” post from Plod John 
Question is, are these “gifted” shares declared in the Parliamentary Interests register 
I didn’t open the linked BBC article as it (interestingly) lies behind a personal data and avertising request wall.
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This Life in the UK test that you’re mentioning is particularly ridiculous. I’ve been into British culture for 40 years now (I studied English at university and have lived in the UK for 30 yrs and I’ve always been very interested in British history, institutions etc.) so I didn’t mind taking it but I still spent time swotting up on the 250 page Life in the UK Test Handbook just to hedge my bets!
It certainly is testing. Prior to reading the book, I’d done about 20 practice tests online (on this site for instance) and passed 18 of them, which isn’t bad without revising (the pass mark is 18/24, 75%; my British university-educated wife passed 3 out the 8 online practice tests she took) but I wanted to ensure a Pass so I swotted up on the book (taking it is a bit of a bugger, and £50 a pop so I was taking no chance). A face-to-face interview like they do in France is better IMO.
There are some seriously obscure questions in it! There have been a few articles on that in the press, well, The Indie and The Guardian mostly. It’s not just a test designed to make a lot of people fail and it’s also pretty counter-intuitive. Yes, there is the odd practical question about what the DVLA is or somesuch but most of the questions have zero relevance to “Life in the UK”. I mean, do you really need to know the exact size of a jury in a Scottish Crown Court or that such obscure castle is located in Northern Ireland or that it was Marlowe who wrote Doctor Faustus? Still, I had fun reading the Life in the UK Test Handbook, and so did my wife.
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Great post Frédéric - a lot of detail I didn’t know (and I am I guess relatively well informed, compared with the average Brit).
A good example of posts I would like to ‘recommend’, but not ‘like’ - because its message is so depressing.
Has anybody else noticed an increasing tendency on SF recently for some users (not specifically Ronald), instead of engaging in (or indeed ignoring) the debate, to post only in order to deprecate the whole discussion?
Is ‘cancel culture’ creeping in?
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