18-OCT 2023 : LAB 44% / CON 28% / LDM 9% / REF 7%

[c-a-r-f-r-e-w]

Dec 15, 2023 16:52:26 GMT colin said:

Dec 15, 2023 11:20:22 GMT athena said:

Lab's claim about extraordinary growth is just handwaving, a fairytale the electorate is being told to avoid a difficult conversation. If Reeves (or Hunt or anyone else) does have a cunning plan then it should be open to scrutiny now, not kept secret until the election is won. After PFI and the global financial crisis I think we're entitled to be sceptical about cunning financial plans. It's no use saying that Lab can't afford to let the Tories pinch their ideas, part of the political job is winning attribution games.

"That is the irreversible direction of travel, and it is one Miliband is comfortable with. Come the election campaign, I doubt we will hear about an arbitrary £28 billion from Labour spokespeople — though Conservative Campaign HQ will be only too keen to step into that breach. There may yet be clarification about how much of whatever sum Reeves’s fiscal rules permit to come from borrowing — or, as I heard whispered this week, perhaps another windfall tax."



I'm inclined to think this is very near the truth and I also think that KS tries too hard to shoot perceived Tory Party foxes on borrowing & tax. He is manifestly not Corbyn , and Reeves-a former BoE employee- knows enough about the perils of unserviceable government debt in the post QE era *, when that paragon of government fiscal rectitude Germany is wrestling with it.


So I think you can assume that there is a plan-and like you I hope they spell it out with honesty-including the debt/tax sources of the stimulus , and fight the Tory Party on the merits of the package. 


*https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/13/developing-nations-spent-record-high-on-debt-in-2022-world-bank.html

How much choice do they have, given the risk in delaying, is one question Col.. According to some the pace of the energy transition is such that if we leave it too long there’s a possibility we could get seriously left behind. Another question is how soon can some of the investment pay off, to help fund the next phase? (A third, is that if they are going to raise some money via tax, what’s the best way to do it without harming growth or alienating too many voters?)

[leftieliberal]

Peter Kellner on why Reform's polling numbers are not what they seem: www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/64196/are-the-reform-partys-polling-numbers-as-good-as-they-seem He is making the point about the choice that pollsters offer when they ask people who they would vote for:

Here is what is happening. When pollsters ask about voting intention, they give a list of parties. Typically they split the list in two. For example, YouGov’s first list is:
Conservative
Labour
Liberal Democrat
SNP (in Scotland)/ Plaid Cymru (in Wales)
Reform UK
Green
Some other party
Would not vote
Don’t know
Refused

Respondents who tick “some other party” are then taken to a fresh list (this is the current list; it varies from time to time):
Ukip
Women’s Equality Party
Some other party
Don’t know
Refused

Here is Ipsos’s first list:
Conservative
Labour
Liberal Democrats
Scottish National Party (If in Scotland)
Plaid Cymru (If in Wales)
Another party
Undecided
Would not vote
Refused

Here is Ipsos’s follow-up list for those who say “another party”:
Green Party
UK Independence Party
BNP
Reform UK
Other (specify)
Undecided
Would not vote
Refused

While it doesn't seem to make much difference to the level of the Green Party vote, relegating Reform UK to the second list considerably reduces the number of people saying they will vote for them. Of course, we won't know for sure until we have a General Election which pollster is nearest to being right, but if Reform UK's support is as soft as Kellner thinks then they won't have much effect on Tory seat losses. Note that Ipsos' latest poll (1-7/12/23) has Reform UK on 7% so much closer to the other pollsters. Have they changed their methodology perhaps? It would be useful to know for all the pollsters what primary and secondary lists they use. 

[Danny]

Dec 15, 2023 10:10:17 GMT domjg said:

There's been depressing news of late on the stalemate in Ukraine after the failure of the counteroffensive to make progress and a softening of Western support, especially in the US with the EU still valiantly trying to hold the breach despite the blocking tactics of the wicked Orban (EU accession talks will now begin but aid has been delayed by the Hungarians).

There was a little clip today of some Ukrainians talking about being allowed to fire their gun (or whatever it was) only once every six hours due to ammunition shortages, and only at high quality targets. One wondered what might be the result if they had more ammunition and so could also strike at low quality targets.

I can't say what has been happening behind the scenes, but the public impression is we have done bugger all to increase weapons manufacture as we could have done in all the time this has been going on. The whole western reaction has always been too little too late. We started off sending our oldest and most obselete spare equipment, and slowly have moved to more modern weapons as the old stuff ran out. But we have tiny stocks, with the exception of the US. And they too have not been in a hurry to manufacture new.

Until Russia is militarily defeated this war will continue. There could be a ceasefire, but if so they will break it once they consider their military position has improved enough. The only way to prevent that would be guaranteed NATO or EU troops sitting in what remains of Ukraine so that a renewed attack would immediately be a declaration of war on the west. This would however also guarantee Ukraine had permanently lost whatever Russia was occupying.

Meanwhile of course, Russia will continue military campaigns in whatever countries are most vulnerable. The only way to prevent that in general is if they do not ultimately benefit from this adventure into Ukraine, and halting on the current borders would mean they have.

[Danny]

Dec 15, 2023 10:47:42 GMT mark61 said:

Agreed Lululemon, as a father of daughters I have found it extremely depressing to see misogyny and toxic masculinity on the rise,

Is it really? I mean, sure there are people shouting loudly, but isnt this really rather a good time to be a woman? (in the Uk anyway)

[jib]

Dec 15, 2023 21:52:22 GMT Danny said:

Dec 15, 2023 10:47:42 GMT mark61 said:

Agreed Lululemon, as a father of daughters I have found it extremely depressing to see misogyny and toxic masculinity on the rise,

Is it really? I mean, sure there are people shouting loudly, but isnt this really rather a good time to be a woman? (in the Uk anyway)

You speak from personal experience? 

[mercian]

Dec 15, 2023 21:52:22 GMT Danny said:

Dec 15, 2023 10:47:42 GMT mark61 said:

Agreed Lululemon, as a father of daughters I have found it extremely depressing to see misogyny and toxic masculinity on the rise,

Is it really? I mean, sure there are people shouting loudly, but isnt this really rather a good time to be a woman? (in the Uk anyway)

Tell that to the woman I saw in a burkha in Tesco yesterday.

Re your post about Ukraine, we should at least be manufacturing as much ammo as possible for the stuff we've given them. This might be happening behind the scenes but I've heard nothing.

[Danny]

Dec 15, 2023 14:07:33 GMT leftieliberal said:

They also asked respondents to name their top three issues:
Cost of Living 68%
Supporting the NHS 44%
Levels of immigration 25%
Climate Change and the environment 21%
Affordable housing 19%
Asylum seekers crossing the channel 19%
Crime 14%
Jobs and unemployment 13%
Mental health 11%
Social care for the elderly 10%
The remaining seven issues and don't know were all below 10%

Now thats interesting. Note they have separated out immigration and channel crossing refugees. The current government likes to conflate these two issues, but while it has a public policy of stopping boat people, it frankly welcomes record numbers of general immigrants. And it can only cut them by starving the NHS of workers, because half of those immigrants are going into care services.

Of course, it could be the 25% worried about immigration levels does not overlap the 68% worried about the NHS, whose two biggest problems are underfunding and staff shortages. But Im not sure that is intuitively correct, because its old con inclined voters who tend to be anti immigration but also most need the NHS.

Again, if we get a spring election, thats the best bet to have announced slashing immigration but before it takes effect to downgrade the NHS further.

[thylacine]

Dec 15, 2023 21:58:21 GMT mercian said:

Dec 15, 2023 21:52:22 GMT Danny said:

Is it really? I mean, sure there are people shouting loudly, but isnt this really rather a good time to be a woman? (in the Uk anyway)

Tell that to the woman I saw in a burkha in Tesco yesterday.

Re your post about Ukraine, we should at least be manufacturing as much ammo as possible for the stuff we've given them. This might be happening behind the scenes but I've heard nothing.

I wonder why you think the woman in a burkha in particular would not think that?

[Danny]

Dec 15, 2023 15:09:56 GMT robbiealive said:

Consider the Labour voters' response to Corbyn's left-wing agenda in 2019. The Tory vote hardly increased and Labour lost 2.6 mill votes in 2 years!

There was absolutely zero chance of a left wing government in 2019 had labour won. Nada. None. The mess we see now amongst con MPs would have been as nothing had he tried. This was never a real possibility, though obviously various people hyped it for their own purposes. I also thing whoever was leader was largely irrelevant except on how they campaigned on Brexit. The fall in labour support was due to lab no longer being the party offering a realistic prospect of remain. If they were no longer offering that, then there was no point anyone holding their nose and voting for them. Many possible con remain defectors would have thought that as it was going to happen anyway, better to have con running it.

All four of the last elections 10,15, 17, 19 were about Brexit. Less so perhaps in 2010, but even there con were trying hard to get onboard the eurosceptics.

The Tories held on to their supporters, including their Remainers, and made their gains in the Red Wall [whose voters ironically Corbyn understood better than most Labour people, tho he did think everything was about him].

The problem for both parties was their support split over Brexit. We have seen those red wall seats disproportionatley moving back to lab once brexit was out of the picture. Whereas, it seems likely brexit going badly accounts for more of the movement today away from con in its blue wall seats. But lab remain scared to declare for rejoin, for fear of unsettling those brexity labour again.

Labour could have won in 2019 on a united end brexit ticket. They didnt try.

[steve]

Them!
Attachment Deleted

[jib]

Dec 15, 2023 22:24:21 GMT steve said:

Them!
View Attachment

You!

[Danny]

Dec 15, 2023 20:37:17 GMT mercian said:

Dec 15, 2023 8:36:26 GMT Danny said:

Either address them or accept them. Covid has been a very minor epidemic. Far less loss of life years than HIV, flu, loads of others. It was massively over estimated and action taken which cannot now be justified by the true level of the risk it posed. 

It wasn't difficult to find this:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics_and_pandemics

According to that, Covid has around the fifth highest deaths of any pandemic ever and is of course still ongoing. There are big ranges of the total deaths from all these plagues but it's hardly 'very minor'.

I made a point of estimating life-years lost. Not simply how many died, but how much lifetime was lost. Take an extreme example, inagine some disease which only infected people within one weak of expected death anyway, and then bumped them off fast. We could get 600,000 deaths a year from that one, but actual life expectation changes would be negligible. Did you not read my posts explaining this?

The truth is that covid massivel did kill people near to death already. Whereas HIV mostly killed young adults. Flu is a mixed bag of older people, young children and eg in the 1918 version quite a few youngish adults. Though life expectancy then was maybe 20 years less anyway. With average age at death from covid about 82, and in 1918 life expectancy maybe 60, its a very interesting question just exactly what the impact of covid would have been at that time. It might have been similar, affecting those nearest death, which would then have led to an average death age around 60 again. But it might still have averaged even higher compared to life expectancy than it did now.

If you find whichever posts it was I analysed life years, my estimates were a billion or so for HIV and flu compared to ten million for covid.  This is of course before we adjust for changes in total population, so any epidemic today has many more available victims than in the past.  Maybe we should add some estimates of life years lost to the wiki page and see how it changes the relative severity? Problem would likely be in trying to find independent estimates.

[alec]

mercian - You're right to flag up the fact that covid is still ongoing, a point that poor old Danny struggles with. HIV kills around 800 a year in the UK, last year the covid death toll was around 30,000. Globally, covid killed as many as died from AIDs and malaria combined last year. And Danny struggles to comprehend that pandemic impacts can be well measured by life expectancy, which globally has fallen by two full years in 2020 - 22, the first time global life expectancy has fallen since the UN started measuring it in 1950. HIV/AIDS has never managed to put life expectancy into reverse, even for one year.

But I don't suppose the facts will stop his nonsense.

[mercian]

Dec 15, 2023 22:07:54 GMT thylacine said:

Dec 15, 2023 21:58:21 GMT mercian said:

Tell that to the woman I saw in a burkha in Tesco yesterday.

Re your post about Ukraine, we should at least be manufacturing as much ammo as possible for the stuff we've given them. This might be happening behind the scenes but I've heard nothing.

I wonder why you think the woman in a burkha in particular would not think that?

I know you're trying to bait me into saying something that's considered racist. I know that some women say they like the burkha, but I wonder how many wear it from choice? For instance

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/burqa-burkini-bans-as-debate-rages-in-europe-survey-muslimmajority-countries-rules-women-dress-saudi-arabia-a7229881.html

"When asked if they agreed with the statement that it was “up to a woman to dress whichever way she wants”, 56 per cent of Tunisians respondents replied with the affirmative, followed by 52 per cent of Turks and 49 per cent of Lebanese people questioned.

The figures were lower in the other Muslim-majority countries surveyed, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, a chart by Statista showed."

So less than half of people in most Muslim countries think it is not 'up to a woman to dress whichever way they want'. It's not unreasonable to assume that immigrants from those countries have brought their views with them.

I am surprised that feminists in this country seem to ignore the subject. I wonder what our lady posters think? Their views are more relevant than mine (or yours).

[mercian]

Dec 15, 2023 22:38:26 GMT Danny said:

Dec 15, 2023 20:37:17 GMT mercian said:

It wasn't difficult to find this:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics_and_pandemics

According to that, Covid has around the fifth highest deaths of any pandemic ever and is of course still ongoing. There are big ranges of the total deaths from all these plagues but it's hardly 'very minor'.

If you find whichever posts it was I analysed life years, my estimates were a billion or so for HIV and flu compared to ten million for covid.  This is of course before we adjust for changes in total population, so any epidemic today has many more available victims than in the past.  Maybe we should add some estimates of life years lost to the wiki page and see how it changes the relative severity? Problem would likely be in trying to find independent estimates.

Why don't you just provide them with your unevidenced guesses like you do here?

[Dave]

Dec 15, 2023 18:11:05 GMT c-a-r-f-r-e-w said:

Dec 15, 2023 17:41:05 GMT lululemonmustdobetter said:

Damn - I really should have got there first in terms of user name.

yes but if you hadn’t taken @lululemonmustdobetter while you had the chance, someone else might have taken it!

As a female Scottish singer with a pithy side-line in zinging I was gutted when she beat me to it.

[Deleted]

Dec 15, 2023 22:24:21 GMT steve said:

Them!
View Attachment

For the second time this week, steve, thanks again for reminding me of a favourite of mine, this very film "Them!" (1954). It's a terrific sci-fi movie from 1954, starring the wonderful Edmund Gwenn, perhaps best known for playing Kris Kringle in the original 1947 'Miracle on 34th Street'. Here he plays a Washington boffin dealing with pesky 20 ft tall radioactive ants on the rampage in New Mexico, LA etc.

The film has, (for the  time), excellent special effects and production values, and is highly recommended. It was shown regularly on telly when I was a nipper, but I've not seen it for years. Thankfully, I picked it up on DVD soon after they became a 'thing' and I will be revisiting it shortly thanks to you reminding me of it. 

Ta! 

[Dave]

Dec 15, 2023 18:54:39 GMT johntel said:

Dec 15, 2023 17:41:05 GMT lululemonmustdobetter said:

Damn - I really should have got there first in terms of user name.

Never mind Lulu, you probably know more about football than she does. 

She does. But only because of the knowledge of her male West Ham family. Discuss. (Slinks away).

[moby]

Dec 15, 2023 23:17:10 GMT mercian said:

Dec 15, 2023 22:38:26 GMT Danny said:

If you find whichever posts it was I analysed life years, my estimates were a billion or so for HIV and flu compared to ten million for covid.  This is of course before we adjust for changes in total population, so any epidemic today has many more available victims than in the past.  Maybe we should add some estimates of life years lost to the wiki page and see how it changes the relative severity? Problem would likely be in trying to find independent estimates.

Why don't you just provide them with your unevidenced guesses like you do here?

Now now......I'm sure Danny only posts stuff which has been rigorously fact checked. Surely we on this forum owe him a huge debt of gratitude for the hours of diligent research he does on our behalf ......day after day....on ever issue under the 🌞

[neilj]

Labour leads in the latest Westminster polling by pollster

23 PeoplePolling
22 YouGov
22 Techne
21 WeThink
18 Redfield & Wilton
17 Savanta
17 Ipsos
16 BMG
16 Opinium
14 More In Common
11 Deltapoll

[steve]

Traitor co-conspirator Rudi Giuliani found culpable in his liable case against two Georgia election workers mother and daughter Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, his lies have ruined and endangered their lives, Giuliani said they had some how manipulated election results and were passing thumb drives between them with changed results, it was of course total bollocks, the only thing they passed between them was a boiled sweet!

Giuliani has continued to lie about the couple even after his finding of culpability on fact had been reached and as the jury decided how much damages he should pay .

That went well as the jury awarded the couple $148 million in compensation.

Giuliani hasn't got that amount and his continuing lies about the couple could yet see the 80 year old ex New York mayor incarcerated in addition Giuliani is an indicted Coup co-conspirator in both state and federal cases.

youtu.be/doyFj6_eLW0?si=kZT6bhFus3oIE0rl

[steve]

* Just for the avoidance of doubt if anyone was concerned I am not actually a 20 ft long giant radioactive ant!
Agree about the film by the way along with the Thing from.another planet and the War of the worlds among my favourite 1950's science fiction movies.

You

[steve]

@isa
Indeed but my favourite 1950's sci-fi movie will always be Forbidden planet.
Inspired by Shakespeare's " the tempest" and with the wonderful Walter Pigeon , Anne Francis and Leslie Nielsen as heroic lead prior to his fame as a comic actor.

It's perfect.

[Danny]

Dec 15, 2023 22:53:32 GMT alec said:

mercian - You're right to flag up the fact that covid is still ongoing, a point that poor old Danny struggles with. HIV kills around 800 a year in the UK, last year the covid death toll was around 30,000. Globally, covid killed as many as died from AIDs and malaria combined last year. And Danny struggles to comprehend that pandemic impacts can be well measured by life expectancy, which globally has fallen by two full years in 2020 - 22, the first time global life expectancy has fallen since the UN started measuring it in 1950. HIV/AIDS has never managed to put life expectancy into reverse, even for one year.

But I don't suppose the facts will stop his nonsense.

So shall we take each of your points?


1)Covid is indeed still ongoing. But its slowing down, as you yourself point out. HIV hopefully has peaked, but is still running at 600,000 a year 40 years on from when it began. It will be interesting to see what happens about covid but deaths in the last full year about 300,000. So HIV is currently twice as deadly as covid, and the trend is HIV will far exceed covid in the future. www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-details/GHO/number-of-deaths-due-to-hiv-aids www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#total-deaths


2)Life expectancy is a very peculiar measure of harm from a disease. Obviously, in the year the epidemic is active it will kill people early and life expectancy will drop in that year. But as soon as it abates, life expectancy will spring back. A far better estimate is how many life years are lost, which is the measure the NHS and similar use to estimate the benefit from their treatments. It really is worse if a child dies than someone middle aged, or someone middle aged than some genuinely old. Average age at death from covid 82. Average age at death all other causes before covid, 81 (UK 2020). I found an ONS article from 2021, which said life expectancy for females was essentially unchanged in 2020 for females, because covid struck men more. There doesnt seem to be an up to date ONS estimate of life expectancy. King's fund estimated covid caused a 1.3 year drop for males and 1 year for females in 2022. Interestingly, Kings fund say females lived on average 3-4 years longer, but also spent 3-4 extra years in poor health at end of life, so male and female good health years were much the same.

You seem to prefer total deaths numbers, because as some hospital doctor was quoted as saying (approx), 'its an epidemic of old, fat men'. Total deaths makes this sound much worse than it really is. (nb, hospital doctors did not see most care home deaths, who died at home, so that would affect their experience. It seems likely they only saw the ones thought possible or worthwhile to save. More than half covid deaths were at home. And by worthwhile, I mean the usual metric that very old sick people are simply left to die in comfort rather than attempt treatment.)

[Danny]

Dec 15, 2023 23:17:10 GMT mercian said:

Why don't you just provide them with your unevidenced guesses like you do here?

I made an estimate showing the numbers I was using, anyone could offer alternative calculations explaining where they thought I was wrong. No one has. Not you, not alec. Instead Alec prefers to use a different measure, raw deaths.

[c-a-r-f-r-e-w]

Dec 15, 2023 23:17:10 GMT mercian said:

Dec 15, 2023 22:38:26 GMT Danny said:

If you find whichever posts it was I analysed life years, my estimates were a billion or so for HIV and flu compared to ten million for covid.  This is of course before we adjust for changes in total population, so any epidemic today has many more available victims than in the past.  Maybe we should add some estimates of life years lost to the wiki page and see how it changes the relative severity? Problem would likely be in trying to find independent estimates.

Why don't you just provide them with your unevidenced guesses like you do here?

Unevidenced guesses can have their utility. Recall the time early in the pandemic that he was discussing with others like @bedknobs the possibility of infection being concentrated in the tube, and that prompted me to find the New York subway data showing infection hotspots concentrated around subway stations. He worked through the idea of sterilising immunity too, which I hadn’t seen any experts talking about, and he didn’t call it that, but when I checked it turned out it really was a thing, and Whitty talked about it sometime later.

Although it may seem like he’s selling ideas, Danny in practice quite often tends to use the board at times as an idea-checking service, which can have its value and he’s not alone in that (I have done it quite a bit myself and have learned a lot as a result), though he does throw some curve balls in there, which might be a bit unfortunate but he’s not alone in that either! (It can be interesting to see how thinking evolves too, of not just Danny but others too, notably alec  - it may be his partner has played a role in that, as she is a researcher in quantum chemistry, and he has talked of them discussing Covid. An early example Alec offered was of her pointing out how the epidemiologists were suffering from difficulties in parameterizing the models)

[steve]

Less than half U.S.citizens polled now have faith in the United States supreme court, down from over 80% under Bill Clinton.

Not surprising as the maga appointed inadequate far right and christofascist court members appointed under the traitor have joined their corrupt far right colleagues and produced a far right majority for regressive partisan bad legal judgement.

The court is now faced with making a judgement on whether a former president can be held culpable for his criminal behaviour while President.

It's a no brainer nothing in the U.S. constitution gives immunity to a former president, he's not an absolute monarch and the US hasn't yet sunk into the depths of dictatorship of Russia.

Previous rulings before appointment to the supreme court by justice Kavannagh suggest that it's highly likely that the court will concede that a president isn't a king and can be held to criminal account,if not while in office other than by impeachment but after they have left.

It's such an obvious and irrefutable fact that it shouldn't take more than minutes to reach judgement.

However this is the traitor appointed majority supreme court all three of whom at their appointment hearings lied to congress so who knows.?
The implications of a judgment of total immunity would of course be catastrophic and would be another nail in the coffin of the rule of law and democracy.

[Danny]

Dec 16, 2023 7:35:41 GMT c-a-r-f-r-e-w said:

Dec 15, 2023 23:17:10 GMT mercian said:

Why don't you just provide them with your unevidenced guesses like you do here?

Recall the time early in the pandemic that he was discussing with others the possibility of infection being concentrated in the tube,

Isnt it funny how as passenger numbers dropped, London tube managers simply cut the number of trains to maintain high levels of crowding. Whereas local bus services here could regularly be seen with maybe 1 passenger on board. I guess thats because bus services in most of the Uk are already at minimum frequency to be an actually useful service. I imagine similar thinking would apply to such services in other big urban areas. Anyone know if London buses were overcrowded or empty?

[Danny]

Dec 16, 2023 8:02:33 GMT steve said:

Less than half U.S.citizens polled now have faith in the United States supreme court, down from over 80% under Bill Clinton.

The interesting question is whether this will be reflected in higher votes for the party not responsible for these changes in the supreme court, or whether it will simply be reflected in loss of support for all politicians.

There is an argument that an effective court supporting human rights benefitted the republicans, whereas getting rid of it will now push more voters to democrats to restore it.

I find it odd there seems to be a disconnect between polling suggesting discontent with government policies, and support for alternative parties. Sure labour is up 20% compared to con, but thats not as much as you might expect from eg 2/3 saying the economy and NHS are the most important issues of the day.

[thylacine]

Dec 15, 2023 23:10:56 GMT mercian said:

Dec 15, 2023 22:07:54 GMT thylacine said:

I wonder why you think the woman in a burkha in particular would not think that?

I know you're trying to bait me into saying something that's considered racist. I know that some women say they like the burkha, but I wonder how many wear it from choice? For instance

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/burqa-burkini-bans-as-debate-rages-in-europe-survey-muslimmajority-countries-rules-women-dress-saudi-arabia-a7229881.html

"When asked if they agreed with the statement that it was “up to a woman to dress whichever way she wants”, 56 per cent of Tunisians respondents replied with the affirmative, followed by 52 per cent of Turks and 49 per cent of Lebanese people questioned.

The figures were lower in the other Muslim-majority countries surveyed, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, a chart by Statista showed."

So less than half of people in most Muslim countries think it is not 'up to a woman to dress whichever way they want'. It's not unreasonable to assume that immigrants from those countries have brought their views with them.

I am surprised that feminists in this country seem to ignore the subject. I wonder what our lady posters think? Their views are more relevant than mine (or yours).

The woman in question was in Tesco's in this country I think. I used to think like you that most who wore the the burka or hijab were forced in some way to do so. On working with and getting to know the Bangladeshi community in the East End of London I came to realise this is not so. The vast majority of women I spoke to were adamant that it was their choice. The face covering is less common. These were educated ,confident young women who were making amongst other reasons a rejection of mainstream ideas of beauty and sexualisation.
I found it interesting that where their mother's and grandmothers would have emigrated to the UK wearing brightly coloured sarees , some midriff exposing this more formal covering has become the norm in the UK in the Bangladeshi community.
Many of these young women will go on to become lawyers,educators,politicians and doctors. They were in no way radicalised and while I can accept just like our own children in traditional uk communities they will be influenced by peers and community their choice of dress was their own and they could not be described as oppressed or unhappy about it.