Day: 21 June 2020

Teachers Urged to Give Up Part of Six-Week Summer Holiday Boris Johnson (pictured visiting a school in Hemel Hempstead on Friday) has solemnly promised that schools will return fully in September and hinted at an imminent shift on the two-metre rule A cross-party group of former education ministers is urging teachers to give up some of their six-week summer holiday so schools can reopen in September, according to Sian Griffiths in the Sunday Times. Five former education secretaries have backed a plan to get all children back to class in September, including a demand that teachers curtail their six-week summer holiday to deal with the “national emergency”.Under the plan, put together by Lord Adonis, a former Labour minister for schools, the Government must confirm the social-distancing rules, appoint a national director of school operations to oversee safe reopening, and bring back teachers in August to get schools ready. Hang on, I thought, when I read that. Haven't we already got a "national director of school operations" in the form of Education Secretary Gavin Williamson? But as the Mail reports, he may be for the chop. Mr Williamson's soft approach with the teachers' unions had damaged his reputation."Gavin played nicely with the unions in the hope that they would sign up, and they didn't. People in there know how you take ...

Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional: week ending June 5th 2020 You can see ONS date of death statistics here (Figure 9). These data are complete up to June 5th for date of death. Delays in registration were excessive back in March and April, but they seem to have got their act together according to other ONS reports. Now most or all deaths are supposedly being registered within seven days (hence the reference to registrations up to June 13th for this Fig 9). In the graphic below I have taken seven-day averages of these same data, and plotted alongside the total deaths reported by the media according to registration date in the DHSC releases. I am not sure why the DHSC seem to be reporting fewer deaths overall (area under curve), but critically the delay in registration of deaths (especially from care homes) means that the daily briefings fail to convey just how much the daily death rate has actually fallen. And since June 5th these rates will have fallen even further. It is peculiar and disappointing that around the start of June the Government stopped releasing the number of daily COVID-19 deaths in hospitals. If that is now approaching a few tens per day, we can assume (by extrapolation) the same is true for daily COVID-19 deaths ...

by Phil Shannon The Durham Miners' Gala Preamble The contemporary left’s support for an economically devastating, authoritarian lockdown, which doesn’t even achieve its limited public health aims, is one of the more remarkable developments in current politics. With its support for extreme ‘social distancing’, the left has reached a new nadir in the ‘political distancing’ between it and its traditional working class constituency, a relationship that has been fraying badly since the democratic, national, working class populist upsurge of recent years as symbolised by the Brexit referendum, the thumping Get-Brexit-Done electoral victory of Boris Johnson, and the surprising Trump miracle. The left’s lockdown betrayal of the working class further accelerates its decline into political irrelevance. This is not a cause for celebration, especially for someone like myself, a four-decade Australian veteran of working class socialism including as a trade union activist, and member of the Communist Party of Australia and more Trotskyist grouplets than you could shake a Program of the Fourth International at, who still cooks on the left burner (see author's page here). What follows is an attempt to understand how and why the left has got into such a pickle over lockdown and how it can begin to resurrect its political integrity. Why the left (and not just the left) should oppose lockdown Science The virus is ...