…and yet you occasionally hear CAT pilots on airways who are barely capable of understanding or speaking English.
You do, and same with ATC is many places, but they need Level 4 only. Many would not qualify for Level 4, too, not by a long way.
Some people I know having reported problems getting Level 6 is just mind boggling. There are many non UK people here on EuroGA who could easily get Level 6, on conversational and idiomatic English, not to mention grammatical competence which far exceeds the majority of the UK.
I can only conclude there is something dodgy going on in the ELP exam scene, both with people not getting it and with people getting ELP4 when they should get ELP0.1.
This one is always worth bringing out from time to time.
From here
Timothy wrote:
My hope rests in Grant Shapps. Someone who actually knows his onions.
He didn’t arrive at a good time as he may well be out of office soon.
If you read the Guardian, then sure 
Others are more hopeful.
Peter wrote:
If you read the Guardian, then sure
You mean that it is a foregone conclusion that the Tories will win the election? I don’t think that the outcomes of elections in democratic countries can be determined in advance. Certainly the last UK election didn’t give that impression!
Peter,
I don’t know how good these polls are or who is behind them, but they may well swing the election in the other direction, first by making more opponents of the tories going to vote and 2nd by many tori voters staying home as it’s a sure thing. Political influencing these days is beyond the pale and I would not be surprised if those polls are in fact spiked to achieve exactly that. There have been cases in Switzerland where polls were so totally wrong that the question sprang up wheather they were not simply invented in order to incense the predicted loosers of that vote to mount a huge effort… in the end the result had nothing to do with the poll.
Indeed, but if the polls are wrong, we will have far more problems in the UK to worry about a lack of practice approaches
First-past-the-post can throw up some surprises, it’s not a very good system. For instance, in Blair’s landslide win in 1997 (with a majority in parliament of 197 seats) he had 43.2% of the popular vote.
Teresa May’s disasterous election in 2017? She had 42.4% of the popular vote!
Less than 1% between them based on the actual votes counted in the election, but the first won with a massive landslide, and the next didn’t even have a majority in parliament and needed to be propped up by the DUP!
So right now – who knows what could happen. Johnson could have a landslide or he could end up with a minority government again (the latter based on the other numbers more likely than the former – but FPTP can still throw up some weird results). If Johnson does win, given that he’s sacked so many of his own party, there are very few possible candidates suitable for Transport Secretary so I suspect Grant Shapps will stay in his job.
alioth wrote:
First-past-the-post can throw up some surprises, it’s not a very good system. For instance, in Blair’s landslide win in 1997 (with a majority in parliament of 197 seats) he had 43.2% of the popular vote.Teresa May’s disasterous election in 2017? She had 42.4% of the popular vote!
Same thing with the last presidential election in the US. Trump got 46.1% of the votes while Clinton got 48.2%.
First past the post is really not a good system. It could be if some seats in parliament were not assigned to fixed constituencies but were assigned dynamically so that the proportion of MPs from different parties reflected the proportion of total votes.
