"The EU has allowed the UK’s clearing houses to continue operating in the EU past the end of the Brexit transition date on 31 December, however this access is due to end in June 2022 without a further extension.
The move to allow American competitors to operate in the EU will be seen as a move by Brussels to clear the way to locking out the UK’s clearing houses next year."
I’d love to read the ruling. Obviously this is a legacy of empire but the whole thing is rather curious.
The Chagos Islands are thousands of miles away from Mauritius and, so the UK say, Mauritius has never held sovereignty over those islands with the UK being in continuous control since 1814. When Mauritius gained independence from the UK in 1960, the UK apparently paid Mauritius £4m for the Chagos Islands.
Those two things do not appear to be compatible. If Mauritius never had a claim to the Chagos Islands why did the UK feel the need to pay Mauritius for them?
If the UK paid Mauritius for the islands, why is that arrangement now irrelevant?
How did Mauritius exert control and maintain sovereignty over islands thousands of miles away before 1814?
Why is it that Mauritius is pursuing this claim and not the Chagos Islanders themselves asserting their right to return and exercise self-determination and self-governance?
So many questions!
It’s also bullshit I suspect. After weeks of setting up and sending home laptops, every child in every school in which I work has now attended a remote lesson and has tech / broadband at home. That’s across schools at both ends of the spectrum from Bolton to Northwich.
How much of the school network do you estimate you have coverage over? Because I suspect what you’re doing here is making another sweeping judgement based on your own limited experience.
Well, schools in Liverpool and Manchester and Bolton and Bury and Warrington and Cheshire and and and.
Just because I have a very wide area of experience doesn’t give you the right to discredit my opinion based on your (presumably zero) experience.
In this instance I am the expert. 30% my arse.
I don’t discredit your experience. I just think your experience in some bits of the northwest doesn’t necessarily negate the national picture.
You do have a track record of taking complex national/international situations and dismissing them based on your personal life experiences.
All global political problems can be boiled down to simplistic terms. Thanos, easy.
And given that the national opinion of the Northwest is that it’s underfunded and downtrodden, pretty safe to say the rest of the country is doing better.
Unless the Tories are giving more money to us up here? That would be a first…
I’ve been trying to find where Starmer got that figure from, but I can’t. I can’t really believe it a completely unreferenced claim though.
Unless I’m wrong, you know one person who supports multiple schools for IT? In very deprived areas?
As I said, I was trying to find the reference for the Starmer comment, but it’s late and I’ve given up.
More details about a third of kids not having laptops:
Key quotes are from Greenwood Academies Trust who run 37 schools, they say a third of third kids dont have laptops.
Ofcom figures suggest between 1.14 million and 1.78 million children in the UK (9%) do not have home access to a laptop, desktop or tablet…
So the truth is somewhat grey. But both could be true.
Lots of families today have tablets, which I would guess are probably OK for most primary school teaching (but not most secondary school). Laptop/desktop sales in last 10 years have been in significant decline I would not be surprised if a third of kids do not have access to a laptop/desktop.
The problem is always that the parents have tablets/phones and the teaching requires MS products. That’s not the government’s fault, that’s just life.
Why can’t tablets or phones be used?Are the most important things not a screen,the ability to interact and a way to receive and submit work.I’m thick as fuck.MS products are,microsoft?
It has been a theme on social media from several labour MPs over the last week or two (questioning whether Conservative MP constituencies have been favourably treated). There has also been stories on Breakfast TV showing kids being given laptops during the same period. I think you and your area have done a good job in getting things set up but that doesn’t appear to be the case across all of the country.
From conversations I have had, I have been told there are still gaps amongst some groups that were supposed to receive laptops but I don’t know if that group overlaps those in schools.
Schools systems presumably are windows based and use Microsoft (MS) products. Phones are going to be impractical for many of the tasks that would probably be needed.
oh…
My teens are due to do their junior cert(gcse equiv) this summer are are using chromebooks for remote schooling as are most students.Much cheaper than laptops and a similar price to most phones.They also have samsung j3 phones and have told me if they had to then they could do their work from them.Not ideal but possible.
Their school also offered all children who didn’t have access to chromebooks at home to borrow the ones from school.Maybe all schools don’t have the resources to do this but if one does shouldn’t they all.
We actually tried to use tablets for a little while, and it was a disaster. In extremis, sure, it can be made to work, particularly newer tablets with better processing power. But it makes a difficult situation that much more problematic. We ended up getting two a workstation for each kid.
I could probably do most of my work on a tablet, but I would be fairly frustrated too