Lockdown is over as far as the British public is concerned. At least, it is when it’s the hottest day of the year with temperatures peaking at 33.3C, as they did today. Half a million people descended on the Dorset coastline, according to the Times, creating a “major incident”.
The council said it had issued 558 parking fines in 24 hours and dealt with congested roads into the early hours this morning. With campsites still closed, large numbers of people pitched camp illegally.
In the area between Bournemouth’s piers eight tonnes of waste were collected yesterday on the second collection run of the day. This morning, a further 33 tonnes of waste were removed along the full stretch of coastline.
The Daily Mail has more.
A major incident was declared in Bournemouth today after thousands of people flocked to Britain’s beaches, leaving the emergency services “stretched to the absolute hilt” on the second hottest day of the year in a row.
Furious council bosses said they were “appalled” at the scenes on the Dorset coast, blasting the “irresponsible behaviour and actions of so many people” as temperatures hit 91.9F (33.3C) in southern England this afternoon.
Police desperately urged people to “stay away” and “think twice before heading to the area”, while Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council said 558 parking enforcement fines had been issued – the highest on record.
There’s an easy solution to this chaos, Boris.
Abandon the ridiculous, completely pointless policy of forcing people who return from holidays abroad to quarantine themselves for two weeks.
Victory for Stu Peters
The Free Speech Union has scored a significant victory. At the beginning of the month, Stu Peters, a Manx Radio presenter, got into a heated discussion with a caller on a late-night phone-in show about the BLM protests in which he challenged the idea that he’d received special treatment because of the colour of his skin. The following day, the Isle of Man Creamery withdrew its sponsorship of his show and Manx Radio suspended him and referred the matter to the Communications Commission, the IOM equivalent of Ofcom.
Stu is a member of the Free Speech Union and we wrote to the Commission, pointing out that he was simply exercising his right to free speech, as enshrined in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and nothing he said could be construed as remotely racist. (You can read that letter here.) We concluded by asking the Commission to exonerate him.
Well, yesterday the Commission did precisely that. You can read the full decision notice here, but the gist of it is that Stu didn’t breach the IOM’s Programme Code. After examining all the evidence, the regulator said: “Whilst issues surrounding race can be an emotive matter, the debate in question was conducted in a fair and measured way, and for the most part, in a calm and open manner.”
The Commission noted that some of the language in the show – such as a caller using the word “coloured”, which Stu didn’t correct – was “insensitive”. But this wasn’t a reason to reprimand the presenter.
This must also be balanced against the provisions for freedom of expression in both the Code and the relevant Human Rights legislation which is clear that people are free to hold and express opinion without interference by public authority regardless of frontiers.
Ofcom, take note.
Chalk this one up to common sense. But there are many more battles to be fought in the War against Cancel Culture so please do contribute to the Free Speech Union’s Litigation Fund so we can stand up for people’s speech rights in the court.
Unlocked
A new organisation has been launched this week called Unlocked. It’s a group of people from all walks of life – some of them ex-Brexit Party MEPs, but it’s a broad church – who want life to return to normal as soon as possible.
Here’s what it says on the website:
It’s year zero. Not since the second world war have we faced a crisis like Covid-19 and the lockdown. From businesses that can’t open, to farmers who can’t bring in the harvest, from care-workers on zero hours contracts, to doctors who can’t get PPE. Share your big problem with us, so we can reach out to the country for pioneering solutions that unlock the UK’s potential.
I’ve a feeling we’re going to be hearing a lot more from this group. Sign-up here to get on board early.
It’s Vanished Into Air. Into Thin Air
I’ve got a piece in the Telegraph today predicting there will be no “second wave”. To be honest, I’m doubtful there’s been a “first wave” – all-cause mortality was only 7.3% above the five-year average in the w/e June 5th and it remains to be seen whether total deaths in 2020 will be above the five-year average. But, as Michael Levitt has pointed out, no one’s reputation suffers if they overestimate the death toll from a new virus (just look at Neil Ferguson); they only get pilloried if they underestimate it. So if even one person dies from COVID-19 in October, I expect George Monbiot will link to this article and demand that I be kicked out of the Honourable Company of Journalists. (Not that there is such a thing – but if there was I would surely have been kicked out already).
Here are the first four paragraphs:
Across the United Kingdom, epidemiologists, public health officials and local bureaucrats are stamping their feet and gnashing their teeth. They’re furious about the fact that daily deaths from COVID-19 are continuing to decline at a precipitous rate. Contrary to their dire warnings, the easing of lockdown restrictions hasn’t led to an uptick in the rate of infection. The much ballyhooed ‘second spike’ has refused to materialise. The virus has all but disappeared.
The extent to which COVID-19 has vanished isn’t immediately apparent from the figures. The death tolls announced each day refer to all those deaths involving coronavirus that have been ‘registered’ in the last 24 hours. That includes people who died weeks ago – sometimes months ago – but whose paperwork has only just been completed. If you look instead at the number of actual deaths in English hospitals in the last 24 hours, that gives a clearer picture. The number on June 23 was four – all in the north west. Fewer than 20 died in London hospitals in the past week. No one died on Tuesday.
The number of deaths involving coronavirus is a better yardstick than the number of infections, partly because more and more people are being tested each day, and partly because the test itself isn’t very reliable. There is a gold-plated antibody test you can have done by a company called Pyser that employs ex-Army medics and operates out of the Honourable Artillery Company in the City of London. I took one last week and tested positive.
But the PCR test – which tells you whether you’ve got it, not whether you’ve had it – throws up a lot of false positives. To give you an idea of how unreliable it is, take this announcement by Norway’s Institute of Public health last month. “Given today’s contagion situation in Norway, health professionals must test around 12,000 random people to find one positive case of Covid-19,” it said. “In such a selection, there will be about 15 positive test responses, but 14 of these will be false positives.”
Worth reading in full, obviously.
More Evidence That There’s no ‘Second Wave’
In case there’s any doubt about the easing of lockdown restrictions not leading to a second wave, I’m publishing an update today by Dr Rudolph Kalveks, the theoretical physicist who crunched the Covid data for us last week. He’s looked at the data for the last couple of weeks and reached the same conclusion as me: no second wave.
In conclusion, although the epidemics are obviously further progressed, over the last two weeks there has been no signal for any material change in the shape of the epidemic SIR model curves in Europe, the USA and Australia. Thus, the relaxation of lockdowns (well documented elsewhere) has so far had no discernible impact on the recovery from the epidemic in these countries.
This undermines the analysis by Flaxman et al (published June 8th in Nature) that continues to predict a tenfold increase in the population at risk from the relaxation of lockdown restrictions.
Worth reading in full.
Two Critiques of the Flaxman et al Paper in Nature
I’m able to bring you not one but two critiques of the Flaxman et al in Nature – the June 8th paper by Imperial College’s modelling team claiming the lockdowns in 11 Europe countries (including, weirdly, Sweden) had saved three million lives. This is the paper I blogged about here and here a couple of weeks ago.
First off is this critique by the independent researcher Nic Lewis. It’s quite dense and not readily accessible to non-specialists, but it looks pretty devastating to my layman’s eye. Here is his conclusion:
First and foremost, the failure of Flaxman et al.’s model to consider other possible causes apart from NPI of the large reductions in COVID-19 transmission that have occurred makes it conclusions as to the overall effect of NPI unscientific and unsupportable. That is because the model is bound to find that NPI together account for the entire reduction in transmission that has evidently occurred.
Secondly, their finding that almost all the large reductions in transmission that the model infers occurred were due to lockdowns, with other interventions having almost no effect, has been shown to be unsupportable, for two reasons:
* the prior distribution that they used for the strength of NPI effects is hugely biased towards finding that most interventions had essentially zero effect on transmission, with almost the entire reduction being caused by just one or two NPI.
* the relative strength of different interventions inferred by the model is extremely sensitive to the assumptions made regarding the average delay from infection to death, and to a lesser extent to whether self isolation and social distancing are taken to exert their full strength immediately upon implementation or are phased in over a few days.
It seems likely that the inferred relative strengths of the various NPIs are also highly sensitive to other assumptions made by Flaxman et al., and to structural features of their model. For instance, their assumption that the effect of different interventions on transmission is multiplicative rather than additive will have affected the estimated relative strengths of different types of NPI, maybe substantially so. The basic problem is that simply knowing the dates of implementation of the various NPI in each country does not provide sufficient information to enable robust estimation of their relative effects on transmission, given the many sources of uncertainty and the differences in multiple regards between the various countries.
Critique number two is by two German academics, Stefan Homburg and Christof Kuhbandner – “Comment on Flaxman et al. (2020, Nature: The illusory effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe“.
This one is a bit more accessible. Here’s the introductory paragraph:
Flaxman et al. infer that non-pharmaceutical interventions conducted by several European countries considerably reduced effective reproduction numbers and saved millions of lives. We show that their method is ill-conceived and that the alleged effects are artefacts. Moreover, we demonstrate that the United Kingdom’s lockdown was both superfluous and ineffective.
Here’s what they have to say about Sweden (which is more or less what I said in my second critique of the paper):
Our final remark regards Sweden, the only country in the dataset that refrained from strong measures, but has lower corona deaths per capita than Belgium, Italy, Spain, or the United Kingdom. In the absence of a lockdown, but with an effective reproduction number that declined in the usual fashion, Flaxman et al. attribute the sudden decline in Sweden’s R(t) on March 27th almost entirely to banning of public events, i.e., to a NPI that they found ineffective in all other countries. This inconsistency underlines our contention that the results of Flaxman et al. are artefacts of an inappropriate model.
Both Lewis’s critique and the Homburgl/Kuhbandner comment are worth reading in full.
Searing, Merciless Critique of Lockdowns
A reader has flagged up a brilliant paper by Carlo Caduff, an academic at King’s College London, in a journal called Medical Anthropology Quarterly. It’s entitled “What Went Wrong: Corona and the World After the Full Stop“. It’s a searing, merciless critique of the global lockdowns. Here’s a taster from Part III: Towards Another Politics of Life.
The story of how the Chinese approach became a model for generic lockdowns in the Global North and then exported to countries in the Global South is important to note, particularly considering the dramatic consequences for millions of people struggling to survive without any source of income. Ironically, these extremely restrictive lockdowns were sometimes demanded by people eager to criticize the authoritarianism of the Chinese state. Across the world, the pandemic unleashed authoritarian longings in democratic societies allowing governments to seize the opportunity, create states of exception and push political agendas. Commentators have presented the pandemic as a chance for the West to learn authoritarianism from the East. This pandemic risks teaching people to love power and call for its meticulous application.
As a result of the unforeseeable social, political and economic consequences of today’s sweeping measures, governments across the world have launched record “stimulus” bills costing trillions of dollars, pounds, pesos, rand and rupees. Earmarked predominantly for individuals and businesses, these historic emergency relief bills are pumping staggering amounts of money into the economy, but ironically they are not intended to strengthen the public health infrastructure or improve medical care. The trillions that governments are spending now as “stimulus” packages surpass even those of the 2008 financial crisis and will need to be paid for somehow. Today there is a massive global recession in the making. If austerity policies of the past are at the root of the current crisis with overwhelmed healthcare systems in some countries, the rapidly rising public debt is creating the perfect conditions for more austerity in the future. The pandemic response will have major implications for the public funding of education, welfare, social security, environment and health in the future.
If you think something good will come out of this crisis, you should think again.
New Essay by by Guy de la Bédoyère
Our old friend Guy de la Bédoyère has written a new essay for Lockdown Sceptics. Entitled “The False Choice“, it nails the lie that we have to choose between saving lives and saving the economy, between people and profits. As Guy points out, the two are completely co-dependent and not in any sense in opposition to each other.
Most people in Britain seem to have forgotten that the NHS only exists because we have, or had, one of the largest economies in the world. Without a thriving economy the future can only be one of unemployment, destitution, deprivation and want. And we all know what catastrophic health consequences of all those would be.
The reality is that if we tell ourselves to prevent the so-called second wave at all costs, by extending the destructive effects of the lockdown further and for longer, then the health and economic crisis that will follow and echo down for generations, not just here but across the world, will be one we will be far less able to do anything about. Most people in Britain seem to have forgotten that the NHS only exists because we have, or had, one of the largest economies in the world. Without a thriving economy the future can only be one of unemployment, destitution, deprivation and want. And we all know what catastrophic health consequences of all those would be.
That economy has enabled us not only to spare huge numbers of productive young people to work in that health service, rather than in making or generating wealth, but also to appropriate or entice others from around the world to work here with them. The result is that around 1.5 million people work in the NHS which is around three percent of the working population. To those we can add many more involved in healthcare. They spend much of their time dealing with an economically unproductive part of the population, primarily the elderly and vulnerable. Being able to do so and living in a society which values that is part of being civilized.
The same applies to education. Since 1944 there has been universal state education available in this country. It’s far from perfect but it means the vast majority of children emerge from school literate and able to take part in the social, cultural and economic life of this country. Yet, as a result of the disastrously blinkered scientific advice that has driven this crisis we have apparently been prepared to condemn a whole generation of children to compromised education and all the social, health and economic risks we know that will entail. No wonder then that in the Mirror of June 24th Polly Hudson wrote about the shameful betrayal of a generation.
Like mass education, the NHS is a fabulous luxury, a superb and enviable benefit of living in an economically powerful nation. It’s also a privilege. We are extremely fortunate to have it. But the price is massive and it means there is no point in ‘protecting the NHS’ if the result is that we end up being unable to afford it thanks to the economic Armageddon of lockdown. In the end the only way any disease is controlled is through herd immunity, gained either by letting the disease run its course or by developing a vaccine.
The choice we face is not a simplistic one between ‘health’ on one hand and ‘the economy’ on the other. By believing that it was or still is, the result has been to take this country and many others to the point where the very health crisis the lockdown was supposed to prevent is now facing us on a far larger scale. It’s time to get real and stop playing games.
Watching the Watchdog
In my Spectator column today, I’ve written about the Free Speech Union’s legal action against Ofcom. If you want chapter and verse on this, you should read Tuesday’s update on Lockdown Sceptics, but this piece summarises all the issues at stake. Here are the opening three paragraphs:
At the beginning of April, I became so frustrated by the supine coverage of the Government’s response to the coronavirus crisis, particularly on radio and television, that I decided to start a blog called Lockdown Sceptics. The idea was to create a platform for people who wanted to challenge the official narrative. In addition to publishing original material by Covid dissidents, many of them eminent scientists, I include links to critical papers and articles, and write daily updates commenting on the news. One of the things that puzzles the contributors is why the coverage on broadcast media has been so hopelessly one-sided.
The BBC, in particular, seems to have become a propaganda arm of the state. Normal journalistic standards have been abandoned and it just regurgitates the views of the public authorities, transmits nightly ‘death porn’ to terrify people into compliance and regularly warns its viewers and listeners about the ‘fake news’ circulating on social media. Often, something condemned as ‘misinformation’ one week — that face masks protect against infection, for instance — becomes Government policy the next, and the BBC’s phalanx of reporters all swivel by 180 degrees like a well-drilled marching band.
Much of this is down to group-think. But there’s another factor at play, which is the behaviour of Ofcom, the broadcast watchdog. It published some official guidance on March 23rd, the same day the government suspended our civil rights, and then further ‘confidential’ guidance on March 27th, advising its licensees to exercise extreme caution when broadcasting “statements that seek to question or undermine the advice of public health bodies on the corona-virus, or otherwise undermine people’s trust in the advice of mainstream sources of information”. No wonder there are so few dissenting voices!
Worth reading in full.
If you want to contribute to the legal costs of this action, please donate to the Free Speech Union’s Litigation Fund.
And if you’d like to join the FSU, please click here.
Vindication at Last
Back in March, I was pilloried on Twitter and elsewhere for a piece I wrote in The Critic in which I attempted a back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis of the lockdown. I tried to put a financial value on the years of life that Neil Ferguson claimed the lockdown would save, using the Qaly metric employed by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, and compare that to the financial cost of the lockdown. Not surprisingly, given that the average age of those who’ve been “saved” by the lockdown is 80, I concluded that, no, it wasn’t worth it. I was then almost universally condemned for being “heartless”, “monstrous”, “inhuman”, etc.
Well, it turns out I was right – at least, according to David Miles, Mike Stedman and Adrian Heald, three economists who’ve written a paper doing exactly what I did, but in much more granular detail.
Let’s suppose that Neil Ferguson is right and the lockdown has saved 440,000 lives (the 500,000 that would have died if we’d done nothing, minus the 60,000 that have died or will die). Of course, people would have voluntarily engaged in voluntary social distancing behaviour in the “do nothing” scenario, and Ferguson et al made a string of dubious assumptions: that we are all equally susceptible, that 81% of the population would get it and 0.9% of us would die – all complete balls, obviously. But nonetheless, even if you give Professor Lockdown the benefit of the doubt, assume that each of those 440,000 people will live for a further 10 years and value those years at £30,000 each – the upper band of the Qaly estimate – that still gives a total value of the lives saved of £132 billion.
What about the other side of the equation? Even on the most conservative estimate, the UK economy will shrink 9% this year, which equals about £200 billion. So a net loss of £68 billion. And, of course, if you plug in a more realistic estimate of the number of life years saved, the net loss increases, as we can see in the table above.
Where did Ferguson get the figure of 500,000 from? Forget all the fancy modelling. If you assume 81% of the UK population (67 billion) would have got Covid absent the lockdown, that’s 54,270,000 people. And if we assume 0.9% of them will die, that gets you to 488,430. Close enough. So what happens if you take just one of Ferguson’s dodgy assumptions – that COVID-19 has an infection fatality rate of 0.9% – and replace it with a more scientifically accurate one, i.e. 0.26%, which is the CDC estimate? That brings the number of people who would have got it in Ferguson’s “do nothing” scenario to 141,102. Subtract the 60,000 who’ll die even with the lockdown and that leaves 81,102 lives “saved”. If we value each of those lives at £300,000 (£30,000 x 10), that gives a total value of £24,330,600,000. So a net loss of more than £175 billion.
And, of course, that’s without factoring in the cost of all the additional collateral damage caused by the lockdown, such as children losing six months of schooling, the cancer operations postponed, the people not being diagnosed with diabetes and heart disease, the rise in suicide and domestic violence, etc., etc.
Not surprisingly, the three economists conclude that the lockdown has been an absolutely catastrophic policy. Although, being academics, they put it more politely than that:
We find that the costs of lockdown in the UK are so high relative to likely benefits that a continuation of severe restrictions is very unlikely to be warranted. There is a need to normalise how we view COVID-19 because its costs and risks are comparable to other health problems (such as cancer, heart problems, diabetes) where governments have made resource decisions for decades. Treating possible future COVID-19 deaths as if nothing else matters is going to lead to bad outcomes. Good decision making does not mean paying little attention to the collateral damage that comes from responding to a worst case COVID-19 scenario.
The lockdown is a public health policy and we have valued its impact using the tools that guide health care decisions in the UK public health system. On that basis, and taking a wide range of scenarios of costs and benefits of severe restrictions, we find the lockdown consistently generates costs that are greater – and often dramatically greater – than likely benefits.
Worth reading in full.
Alistair Haimes’s Must-Read Cover Story for The Critic
Love this cover of the latest issue of the Critic. The Critic is one of the few British publications to get the lockdown right, along with the Spectator and, to a lesser extent, the Telegraph. Alistair Haimes, a contributor to Lockdown Sceptics, has written the cover story in the July issue and it is as caustic and withering as you’d expect. Here are his opening two paragraphs:
I am writing these words at the beginning of June, but you should by now be looking back on the worst of the UK’s COVID-19 epidemic. History books will dissect every aspect of the disease and governments’ response to it, but it is already clear that there has been an unexampled disregard for the foundational pillars of the scientific method even as governments trumpet that they are “following the science”.
The Royal Society’s motto is nullius in verba — “take nobody’s word for it” — but at every stage we have failed to apply scrutiny where it is due, or even to stop and check we are on the right ladder before we carry on climbing. For the country that is the birth-place of scientific inquiry and epidemiology it is astonishing. My godfather, professor of physics at Oxford, told me that the three most scientific things you can say are, “I don’t know”, “prove it” and “I’ve changed my mind”. Let us do each in turn.
Worth reading in full.
New Poem From Bent Knee
A new poem from an anonymous reader who calls himself “Bent Knee”.
Wave helicopter arms
Minimise playground harms
Nine poor kids to a room
Private schools do it better by zoom
Guests forbidden in the home
Never let your love roam
Best not dream of skin on skin
Sharing breath’s a dangerous sin
Save Lives, Stay alert!
More sanctions will only hurt
Authority is your new friend
Rules creep, they do not end
Jobs lost exponentially
Forget bodily sovereignty
Habeas Corpus struck though in black ink
Feel your hearts and hopes sink
Obey the governmental say so
Trust in GAVI, the new NATO
Viruses are deadly trouble
Relax in your mandated bubble
Round-up
And on to the round-up of all the stories I’ve noticed, or which have been been brought to my attention, in the last 24 hours:
- ‘Women denied abortions because of the pandemic‘ – I wonder if all those progressives enthusiastically supporting the lockdowns thought of this?
- ‘The limits of Covid death statistics‘ – Ross Clark in the Spectator on his usual fine form
- ‘Exclusive: Destinations for first set of “air bridges” from UK revealed‘ – The Telegraph has the scoop on the first countries we can return from without being quarantined. All in the Med, disappointingly
- ‘It’s all over for the Government if schools fail to reopen in September‘ – Allister Heath predicts political armageddon if schools don’t reopen
- ‘It’s our patriotic duty to go to the pub, and save one of Britain’s last great institutions‘ – Madeline Grant tries to rally the troops in the Telegraph. Mine’s a pint of Guinness
- ‘The Doctor Is In: Scott Atlas and the Efficacy of Lockdowns, Social Distancing, and Closings‘ – Good interview with lockdown sceptic Dr Scott Atlas by Peter Robinson at the Hoover Institute
- ‘Coronavirus Lockdowns Were a Mistake. The Media is Continuing to Mislead‘ – New interview with rogue epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski
- ‘Reducing UK emissions: 2020 Progress Report to Parliament‘ – Contains the words: “We must seize the opportunity to make the COVID-19 recovery a defining moment in tackling the climate crisis”. Bring on the Yellow Vests
- ‘Rail union warns of national strike unless the government keeps the two-metre social distancing rule on public transport‘ – It’s clear that militant trade unions are hoping to use the crisis to bring the country to a standstill and inflict maximum political damage on the Government. Britain’s next Winter of Discontent approaches…
- ‘I’m a viral immunologist. Here’s what antibody tests for COVID-19 tell us‘ – Zania Stamataki says six out of eight family members who caught the virus at home had T cell responses but no detectable antibodies
- ‘America’s Jacobin Moment‘ – Brilliant editorial in the Wall St Journal about the failure of liberal custodians of American artistic, educational, business and entertainment institutions to stand up to the Jacobite mob
- ‘The thin blue line‘ – Timely cover story by Rod Liddle for the Spectator
- PJ O’Rourke’s New Magazine – Called American Consequences. Worth a look.
- ‘A Hat Trick of Failures: How “the Blob” Led the Government Down the Wrong Path‘ – Up the garden path, surely? Powerful report by Jim McConalogue and Tim Knox for Civitas
- ‘The BBC is already diverse‘ – Fraser Myers in Spiked points out that The BBC is already very diverse without any need to ratchet up its diversity hiring quotas
- ‘Final sortie in the battle for charts and minds‘ – Quentin Letts in the Times on the swansong of Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance. And it’s goodnight from him…
- ‘Was the two-metre rule one big lie?‘ – Hard-hitting piece by Timandra Harkness in UnHerd
- ‘If you think America is unrecognisable under Trump, wait till Biden wins‘ – Scary piece by Daniel Johnson in the Article
Small Businesses That Have Reopened
A few weeks ago, Lockdown Sceptics launched a searchable directory of open businesses across the UK. The idea is to celebrate those retail and hospitality businesses that have reopened, as well as help people find out what has opened in their area. But we need your help to build it, so we’ve created a form you can fill out to tell us about those businesses that have opened near you. Now that non-essential shops have reopened – or most of them, anyway – we’re now focusing on pubs, bars, clubs and restaurants, as well as other social venues. Please visit the page and let us know about those brave folk who are doing their bit to get our country back on its feet. Don’t worry if your entries don’t show up immediately – we need to approve them once you’ve entered the data.
Note to the Good Folks Below the Line
I enjoy reading all your comments and I’m glad I’ve created a “safe space” for lockdown sceptics to share their frustrations and keep each other’s spirits up. But please don’t copy and paste whole articles from papers that are behind paywalls in the comments. I work for some of those publications and if they don’t charge for premium content they won’t survive.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. It usually takes me several hours to do these updates, along with everything else, which doesn’t leave much time for other work. If you feel like donating, however small the amount, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in future updates, email me here. (Please don’t email me at any other address.)
This is only the second daily update this week and I don’t expect to do one tomorrow. Will try and do one over the weekend. Apologies for winding down, but Free Speech Union business is becoming all-consuming, thanks to the fact that we’re in the midst of a Maoist Cultural Revolution. (And incidentally, if you want to understand what’s happened in the last four weeks in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, I highly recommend this essay by Professor Eric Kaufmann in Quillette. It’s astonishingly good.)
I asked my webmaster on Monday how many total page views Lockdown Sceptics had had so far and the answer is 1,652,739. Not too shabby. Peak traffic was 148,188 page views on 7th May, thanks to “Sue Denim”‘s first code review.
I feel the mood beginning to shift as it dawns on more and more people that the Government has bungled its management of the pandemic. The fourth estate, which has largely slept through the crisis, is beginning to stir. It’s going to get ugly – very ugly – and I cannot see how Boris can hope to win the next General Election, assuming he lasts that long. I need a new political home, as I suspect do many readers of this site, right and left. More on that soon…
And Finally…
Click here to listen to the latest episode of London Calling in which James Delingpole and I almost succumb to Boris Derangement Syndrome, so unhappy are we with his excessively cautious approach to ending the lockdown. The virus is gone, pfffft, kaput. Forget about the one-metre-plus rule. Just admit you made a terrible mistake and say everything can go back to normal. We also discuss the Cultural Revolution and… well, it all gets a bit ranty. Not many jokes in this episode. Incidentally, the brilliant Sherelle Jacobs column in the Telegraph praised by James at the beginning of the podcast is here.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to the Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
[…] from the state!) When half a million people flocked to the Dorset coastline last June, a “major incident” was declared. Brits won’t quite be able to enjoy the 33.3C temperatures that were […]
I am at a loss to understand the British public when the general consensus is that the government have no idea what they’re doing and ‘the scientists’ have not agreed at any point on anything…(they shouldn’t be determining policy anyway! :() So why is everyone waiting to be told what to do and then doing it like a load of sheep, unquestioning, (masks…) arbitrary dates set for 14 day quarantine. Public in general show zero concern for their loss of liberty which is going to be so hard to regain. Beggars belief. Wake up you lot!
My wife and I are both very angry about the attitude of the teaching unions, local authority and head of my son’s school about their collective attitude to school re-opening. Is anyone aware of any national campainging organisation body that is fighting for the re-opening of schools?
Slightly off topic, but you did mention “free” education and “free” health services. Can I just remind people that when you insist on the state providing you with freebies that it inevitably means an increase in the size of the state, which in my view is something to be very wary of and not something to be applauded either by way of clapping seal-like or suggesting that it is a mark of an advanced and civilised country as you did.
Other than that, good website. Thank you.
Just read the transcript of the Knut Wittkowski interview – it’s excellent. For those who haven’t had a look/listen… do
Well this Conservative councillor isn’t believing the official narrative and is questioning!
I’ve e-mailed him and pointed him to this website!
https://youtu.be/2825PeH0-4E
What have we been saying here for weeks? Is the Telegraph going through old posts on here to find their new headlines?! 😂
“Lockdown and ocial distancing could make our immune systems weaker”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/27/lockdown-social-distancing-could-make-immune-system-weaker-says/
Yes often read stories in the news that were flipping obvious from the begining of this.
Like the stories about how children will miss out on education, and that unemployment will rise.
The oldsters are scared, but at least they have some reason, looking at the demographics of deaths. I’m clearly in a minority when talking to them.
As long as life is tolerable (always the case for someone who can manage a round of golf 😊), the nearer you get to the exit door, the less you want it to open soon!
It’s the under-70s I can’t understand, who have negligible risk yet blindly accept the media scare hype.
This is a bit off-topic and I will say straight from the start that I am no supporter of the Queen or Royal family and if we could do away with them tomorrow I would as looking at the legal arguments we have not had a “royal family” or “monarch” since the 1972 European Communities Act was signed and enacted into law but I was going to write to HM Queen Elizabeth the Second and ask her to sort our her Government.
I got onto her website and saw the following:
“Correspondence which will not receive a responseAs a constitutional Monarch, Her Majesty does not intervene in any political or personal disputes, and letters asking her to do so will receive a standard reply to this effect.”
Tradition be damned, tradition can be broken, new traditions made – she either stands up for this country that she claims she is monarch of or she goes.
Why did she sign the ascent for all they legislation about coronavirus recently? Oh, maybe because it is mostly Statutory Instruments and supplementary legislation so needs no royal ascent nor and Parliamentary oversight which is why it is in force but with our supine… Read more »
Probably on the shielded list and at home troffing food parcels
https://www.fortnumandmason.com/t/categories/hampers?channel=ppc&gclsrc=aw.ds&&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI9JCJjdii6gIVCLrtCh044g1VEAAYASAAEgI0tfD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
Have a read of her coronation oath… there may be a line about not letting a government act against her subjects or something or other.
Her oath is the key.
The only thing she would have had to give Royal Assent to is the Coronavirus Act itself, which was passed through Parliament so quickly it never really got a proper reading. The Queen does not involve herself in politics generally, although I agree this could be a special case, but she does talk to her Prime Minister once a week and offer advice. The PM does not have to take that advice. However legally he is “her” Prime Minister so he should listen to her. She’s a grand old lady now and has a lifetime of experience to offer. I believe she did very nearly ask Churchill to resign as PM when his handling of the London Smog was so bad. – that’s if you believe The Crown tv series! Anything else that has been imposed on us, ministerial guidelines, statutory instruments etc, do not cross her desk. You may remember she was put in a very embarrassing position last time she put a toe in the water of politics, when she agreed that Johnson could suspend Parliament over Brexit. The Queen and Prince Philip are still shielding at Windsor I believe.
Royal acsent.. to bills that run contrary to her oath.
Thanks Carrie!
As far as I know, the Queen has never refused to grant Royal Assent. I think it’s one of those things that legally she could do, but institutionally she never would. I wish she had though for this one!
Does anyone know when the Coronavirus Act expires? Somebody said September but I thought it had a life of two years.
Many extremely frightened voters, no doubt by a significant majority, albeit as a consequence of a politically motivated (in a U.S. Presidential election year) broadcasting media, have been right behind this government and its actions throughout this debacle.
Our constitutionally constrained Head of State, an international legend (of which we have vanishingly few), has acted accordingly..
I haven’t looked up the law but I believe she at least morally broke her coronation oath by not speaking out against Scottish independence. She swore to protect the United Kingdom but raised not a finger in its defence when its existence was threatened.
I do not agree with that conclusion:
‘Archbishop: ‘Will you solemnly promise and swear to govern the Peoples of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon, and of your Possessions and the other Territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, according to their respective laws and customs?’
Queen. ‘I solemnly promise so to do.’
‘…according to their respective laws and customs..’
Scotland has always had a separate system of law to England. If the people of Scotland decided to alter their relationship with the rest of Britain and become independent, that would become the law in Scotland. The Queen’s coronation oath would then oblige her to accede to becoming a separate Head of State of an independent Scotland.
Well said. It’s like some of my colleagues and even my family (save for my husband). Trying to reason with them is like trying to draw blood out of a stone.
Sky News cuts off ex-Met Police chief after he says officers have ‘given up’ trying to stop young black men carrying weapons and accuses BLM aiming to destabilise society
The reality is that after a half century and more of dogmatic antiracist indoctrination, menacing suppression of dissent, and the construction of a vast antiracism industry and vested interest, we are largely incapable of having any meaningful discussion of these kinds of issues, because generalised observations about racial minorities simply are not allowed unless they are favourable, or they support identity lobby objectives and a victimisation and resentment agenda.
BLM-inspired violence is bringing the issue to a head, but it remains to be seen how it will all shake out.
Here’s Patricia Yates, director of strategy and communications at VisitBritain (as reported in The Guardian):
“I love hotel buffet breakfasts [but] they are a thing of the past. And hotels will have to have social distancing so they won’t be opening at full occupancy and businesses will have to look at the sort of services they provide and really pruning those down to make sure that the infection control, that the cleansing regime, is right and that they can have social distancing.”
The deplorable stupidity just reaches greater and greater heights. How long will people tolerate holidays under those conditions before the leisure and tourism industry collapses altogether?
Will just boycott any B&B, hotel and restaurant that does any of this madness and won’t shed a tear if they go bust.
Agreed. Some of them are just begging for their own destruction. Sod them.
I’m hoping B&Bs, hotels and other businesses will unite against this toxic rubbish. If all of this bollocks is technically “guidance” rather than law -and, let’s face it, unjust laws can also be overturned- they could do it if there is the collective will. And perhaps form a new body based on decency, common sense and economic viability. A welcoming alternative.
VisitBritain can go to hell.
Its been disappointing how the hospitality sector not to mention the cultural, heritage and retail sectors have all been silent at this assault on their ability to operate. You would have thought they would be shouting from the rooftops warning the government that antisocial distancing would accelerate their demise but no they’ve not said anything and yet some choose to virtue signal over BLM.
Cowards the lot of them.
It’s already happening. Spare a thought for the small pubs, cafes and shops who cannot possibly comply with these sadistic, tyrannical and inhumane rules but daren’t open for fear of getting done by the local council & police or losing their insurance cover.
The virus has all-but gone. The danger is from the war being waged on the British public.
There is a place in hell for jobsworths like Mrs Stuff Britain, above.
To that I would add: the war is being waged not only on, but by, the British public. All those sanctimonious quislings.
Sadly true. There are a few of left in the trench!
Hell with no buffets.
My local council has just issued prohibition notices on two hairdressers that have been open,and they are very proud of themselves,they have been bragging how much they have done to keep us all ‘safe’,this mainly is shutting as many council services down as possible,not answering calls or emails,making life very difficult (and expensive) for small businesses and generally being a bigger bunch of arseholes than they usually are.
Every organisation that supposedly exists for the good of the country and the people is hell bent on destroying it and us and bizarrely a lot of them are determined to ruin the things that justify their overpaid jobs.
Mind saying which council that is, and which businesses? Victims like those businesses need support.
That sounds exactly like local councils. Extorting huge amounts of protection money in the form of council tax, being utterly incompetent at doing the jobs they’re supposed to (using Covid as an excuse to be even more rubbish than normal)- and loving every moment of their new Stasi role.
So sorry about the two hairdressers. I’m hoping there’s a local campaign to support them … ?
She will be on a nice fat wedge ,bet she doesent give a stuff about the hotels really as long as she toes the pc line she will get her nice fast pension.
She can pistol!
My hero!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8465287/amp/Boss-pub-chain-Marstons-declares-war-coronavirus-red-tape.html?__twitter_impression=true
Excellent! We need more like him.
Thank goodness for that!!!!
Right every other pub chain needs to drop all their insane “covid safe measures” now!.
As for Weatherspoons, just no….not now….not EVER!
In fact, pubs should seriously be signed as “COVID SAFE” for the zombies and “NON COVID SAFE” for people who don’t care. Let us decide. Sod these mental rules. Not that we need any signs at all anyway…
Perhaps we need to sign disclaimers now against suing an establishment or an event organiser if we do get the sniffles while in their premiss or event.
Even considering this as a way out of this nightmare is insanity but we almost have to do this. How anybody could actually make an claim stick that you got COVIDS in THAT particular place or event is beyond me anyway.
Do bed wetters go to the pub?
Gives ’em more to wet the bed with.
Rather than “COVID SAFE” those pubs should be labelled “COVID RESTRICTED” – its more negative. The other pubs are just “normal” and dont need a label.
Given there’s an incubation period, suing would be irrelevant as there could be no conclusive proof you caught it in a particular establishment.
About time! Far too few business owners have fought back, even just in terms of their own businesses and industries.
There should have been massively funded campaigns against lockdown from the beginning.
That is something that has bemused me all through this,I can understand small businesses being worried about rocking the boat,but why have most of the massive companies in the UK made barely a whimper ?,they usually always get their own way with the government so what is different now ?,are there some secret financial deals over and above the things we already know about ?.
I’ve assumed it’s basically cowardice, as with most acquiescence to or support for the coronapanic. The men and women making the decisions are either victims of the propaganda and actually scared of the disease, or they are frightened of being portrayed as selfish etc and losing business as a result.
Can’t join them now, in Gulag Wales, but first chance I get, I’m in. And I’ll stand any lockdown sceptic a drink. or two. Or more. If it’s Biker, probably several more?
Give us the nod and we’ll come and visit for a drink or two 👍
i’ll pop over the bridge from bristol and join you for a pint of two (not keen on brains beer though!! 🙂
Meanwhile, here’s Peter Borg-Neal, ‘founder and CEO of a 28-strong pub group in the home counties’
That’s 28 venues to avoid as he’s all about ‘supervision’, ‘control’ and decorative glass screens. No singing, no football, no fun. He doesn’t like people gathering round duck ponds either. Watch it if you’re feeling strong:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tzn-WnUw3E
Borg – the clue’s in the name, for Star Trek watchers….
Rival Wetherspoon’s – which is opening its 750 pubs in England from next week – has spent £11million on PPE and measures such as hand sanitiser machines and distancing signs to keep staff and customers safe.
But, like Marston’s, it also will not force staff to wear it. The group has set up screens at the bar and between tables that are less than two metres apart.
Well I know which chain I’d rather visit!
This is a good news story… but no comment on any media.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-do-we-so-rarely-hear-the-good-news-about-the-economy
These are some hard questions I would like to ask about lockdown policy
* To justify a lockdown a disease must be highly dangerous. There is an article from the BBC dated the 14th of March saying the majority of people only suffer mild symptoms and some people may never develop symptoms. If coronavirus was so deadly, why did even the BBC who like most of the mainstream media have been pushing the doom porn narrative admit the disease is harmless. This article was published 9 days before lockdown which indicates knowledge was available early on coronavirus was not dangerous. In view of this how could a lockdown be justified?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51214864
* If coronavirus is so dangerous, why are so many scientific experts arguing coronavirus is not dangerous and if these experts are wrong, why is youtube censoring them?
* If we are in the middle of a deadly pandemic why is it that if you look at the comments on videos by people like Carl Vernon many people think the idea we are in a pandemic BS?
* What was the logic of closing businesses. In my experience shops such as bookshops, clothes and electric shops… Read more »
Especially when the Govt downgraded Covid-19 to an none highly infectious disease on 19th March.
I doubt we’ll ever truly get to the bottom of it all. I just wish if people can see the truth that they come out of the woods a bit more. I still feel in the minority camp.
This is a U.S. election year.
Broadcasters, most of the most prominent including the bbc (bbc America) global entities now, are determined to get rid of the U.S. President who is openly contemptuous of them.
AMC Networks operate bbc America.
https://variety.com/2014/tv/news/amc-networks-to-operate-bbc-america-after-200m-investment-1201337652/
This is how AMC Networks allocates its political funding:
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs//totals?id=D000041981&cycle=2016
A shameful look for Britain’s state broadcaster……
Sky is now owned by Comcast Corporation.
Comcast U.S. political contributions (to Biden, Sanders, Warren) here:
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary?id=d000000461
And the Covid 19 crisis has sunk Trump’s poll ratings
‘The latest Reuters Ipsos poll, released Wednesday, found that only 37 percent of Americans approve of the way Trump has responded to the health crisis, the lowest percentage since the poll began asking the question in early March.
Of those surveyed, 58 percent of Americans responded that they disapproved of how Trump has reacted to the pandemic.’
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/504254-trump-approval-rating-on-coronavirus-response-at-new-low-poll
‘…. the findings confirm that the president’s political standing has deteriorated sharply since October.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/upshot/poll-2020-biden-battlegrounds.html
Do you recall the polls back in 2016? They said Trump and no chance and Killary was a foregone conclusion.
Spot on.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MMSZj2Bujfk
Trump Approval Largely Unchanged, Despite Claims to the Contrary
We won’t know which is true until November.
Handling of the corona virus has been mainly down to the individual states, as the U.S. is a republic. They’d criticise him if he interfered in state issues, and criticise him if he doesn’t.
The U.S. President is a good campaigner.
Against foot in mouth Biden, he should get re-elected.
I think it was a perfect storm of these things:
Plus: total f…..g stupidity all round.
Didn’t the Chinese lock down Wuhan because it was coming up to their new year celebration and, like thanksgiving in the US, people travel miles across the country to join their families.
Seems a sensible precaution under those circumstances.
I always thought the older generation would be more resilient as they been through the aftermath of WW2, food shortages, economic issues in the 70s etc.
My (almost) 88-year-old mother is furious and horrified about the whole Corona psychosis. Wish I could say the same for certain other members of my family.
Make you wonder if those who have been brainwashed by the MSM have lost the will to live hence the fear.
That’s the mentality that stands by while Jews are hounded on to trains for Auschwitz. Sounds extreme, but where do you draw the line?
Hi – this may have been posted before – apologies if so. On Facebook there is a site called “Un-locked” which looks interesting, actually i think i learnt of it from a post on this site.
Anyway tonight at 7pm they are having a live discussion with a number of guests which sounds interesting and the Lockdown Sceptics is listed so maybe Toby is attending too.
Anyway here is the blurb from facebook
“Here at Unlocked Towers, we are gearing up for our first live Unlocked LockDown Lockin, starting tonight at 7pm, your host is none other than Martin Daubney with special guests Emma McClarkin (Beer & Pub Assocation), Christine Brett from Us4Them, comedian Simon Evans, writer, stand-up and creator of Titania McGrath, Andrew Doyle, activist Inaya Folerin, The Free Speech Union, Lockdown Sceptics, Michael Kill CEO of Night Time Industries Assocation on clubbing and the impact of not being able to open, businessman Ben Habib talking about the reverse furlough scheme, Scottish Comedian of the Year Leo Kearse, PLUS MORE TO BE ANNOUNCED.
Watch this space, please tell all your friends – we want to create a place to be able to discuss all the challenges and opportunities that lockdown has… Read more »
Toby mentioned them in his article so he presumably is one of the guests. Will have to watch it later on replay. Could be interesting.
Bit of a rant on the new flippin “normal” … earlier went to Curries at out of town shopping complex so it’s a huge warehouse type store. Queues of course outside and not moving so a lonnnnnng wait. Got inside and there were about 10 customers in the whole big store, i couldn’t believe it! There were more staff than customers that were allowed in.
I had a rant at some poor fella that they’d overdone the social distancing to the excessive degree – is this really the prospect for our future??
I can’t see retail shops surviving like this as it’s an utterly depressing experience being herded like sheep and treated like lepers.
It’s the same at Matalan,a store big enough to park two small airliners in yet they let about twenty people in at a time,plus when my niece went they were operating with the bare minimum of staff so long queue outside and queue for the two open tills inside.
At least when they’ve made you queue to get in, there should be enough checkouts so that you can clear the store quickly to let in the next customer.
Their management clearly have as much idea about retail as the government!
Get the manger and complain, write to Currys and complain, write the the retail park owners and complain, write to your local BID and complain…Don’t comply as best you can and keep complaining.
Or just take it…..
I got told off for having the audacity to try and leave via the entrance in the new normal one-way WH Smiths by a face nappy wearing apparatchik, before I knew what I was saying “fuck off with that, sorry” popped out my face and I walked out the in door.
I had a similar meltdown at B&Q a few weeks ago. Haven’t been back since.
Does anyone go back to B&Q, having visited it under “new normal” regs?
I would write a letter or email of complaint if I were you.
That’s why I’ve been boycotting the high street – shopping can be stressful enough as it is and they’re making it worse by their insistence that we reenact the Soviet Union. All of this antisocial distancing nonsense is overkill.
However looks like the high street are really in trouble as I came across several news reports that landords were barely able to collect rent last 24 June and out of 10 shops 9 were unable to pay.
Give it another few weeks we might see more stores including big names go under.
I was in my local high street this morning and I wanted to see how busy it was. Saturday should be the busiest day for high streets and the the high street was barely different from during lockdown. I wonder if people have seen the same in their high streets.
I came across an ex-colleague’s post on social media where she went to Central London and mentioned that it was pretty dead there as well – shops are open but hardly anyone going in.
It is bad when central London is quiet.
Agree. And if central London is a ghost town, it does reflect badly on the UK as a whole.
yes i agree – i think the high streets are really suffering – around me it’s fairly bleak but the bakeries and greengrocers are doing well. Maybe in July will improve maybe when pubs open. Personally i just feel stressed going into any shop, not because of the virus, but all the queues, and the jobsworth camp commandants bossing around to follow one way systems, the other people who have the look of fear above the masks etc. It’s not a pleasant experience, and i hate shopping at the best of times, so will only go if absolutely necessary.
Although not a big shopper myself i’d hate the shops to close, not just because of jobs but is part of the fabric of society and empty shops make the area look desolate
I don’t think the pubs opening either will help. I don’t want the high street to die, if you want to see what an area looks like without one, you should see mine – the high street was decimated years ago and its now just identikit new housing all round.
However since the government won’t listen to us boycotting is the only way. I’d like to think that more closures might shake shops, pubs and restaurants out of their torpor and demand the end to antisocial distancing to enable them to earn a decent living.
I expect the empty shops will be interpreted by government and media as due to our fear of encountering the dreaded virus, rather than an aversion to the social distancing measures being put in place.
I’m wondering about the possibility of organising a *formal* boycott with clearly stated aims, so that our message and our demands are heard and understood. Unambiguously.
I hate it when shops close and I only shop on the internet as a last resort when something is not available in the shops. Shops have a multiplier effect as they give business to cafes, pubs, taxis and buses. When shops close there is a knock on effect on suppliers. As more shops go bust, there are fewer outlets for suppliers to sell to. I read an article how the publishing industry was badly hit when Borders closed as a big outlet to sell books was lost. Browsing is something I enjoy when shopping. People say the internet is cheaper but what will happen to prices if internet sellers have no competition from shops.
The only statistics that matter. Covid-19 deaths almost at zero now.
Source: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/COVID-19-total-announced-deaths-27-June-2020.xlsx
yes but – what about THE SECOND WAVEEEEEEE????
No deaths is one too many according to the extremist wing of the Epidemiology movement, (the People’s Incarceration Front). They demand negative figures before the lockdown is eased.
What is epidemiology? Is it the ‘media studdies’ of the science degrees?
I.e. dead people coming back to life?
Isn’t that where politicians come from?
Apparently according to NHS England two of the people who died had no known underlying medical conditions …of the two one was 97 years old !
Extreme old age obviously doesn’t count as a medical condition, unless you live in the real world.
And the other was his great-grandfather.
We can only open up fully when we have eliminated death from ALL causes. We must guarantee all humans can live to 100. It must be safe!
Quite often when people say “oh no another two people died how awful” I always want to ask them if they’d just like people to live forever.
Dying is just part of living but the majority have forgotten this inconvenient truth!
I am 50 and I have lost lots of friends already, I have stopped counting. Alot of them died very young from a variety of reasons: Congenital heart defect(1), motorbike crash(1), congenital liver disease, cancer (6), heroin overdose (3), heart attack(2, almost 3), something strange(1), the others were not so close friends and older but cancer took them and a suicide. The youngest was, 19 the heart defect guy. A really good pal. He died very suddenly.
So yeah dying is something I am very aware of. Living and not living is a lucky dip. Really.
My dearest friend died aged 56 from a brain haemorrhage. A tragedy. He was wise, gentle, fabulously learned, modest, honourable, fearless and faithful. But I do know that he lived more in a short time than all the zombies in the world put together would live if they all lived to be 100.
I have literally no family left in the U.K. My mother was my last relative to die here and that was 3 years ago. My sister died 20 years ago of cancer. I have lost 12 relatives in 20 years, none of them from – or even with – Covid. Death happens. It’s a part of life. Sadly some folk seem to have forgotten that!
I think the only future we have now going forward is to live in a glass tank from birth, breathing filtered air and only eating totally sterile laboratory formulated nutritional supplements. All work and social interaction to be done via the internet and all bodily waste dealt with via a special tube.
The poor 97 year-old had his best years stolen from him!
Those figures make incredible reading, in round figures, up to yesterday (26th) 28,000 people have died with (not from) covid 19 and 26000 of those are in the age group 60-80. And we have destroyed society for that!! And yesterday 10 people died, again all in the older age group.
In case you think I am being ageist, I am in that age group too and I am really not worth destroying society for. This is not a pandemic this is a woke revolution.
I am off out now to buy a couple of cans of Marstons Pedigree.
Well said. May you live long and prosper!
Thank you.
If I knew how to draw a Vulcan salute in a text based forum I would draw one.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1301736/coronavirus-latest-news-second-wave-lockdown-uk-deaths-update largest Saturday spike in WEEKS. Meanwhile noone in the UK died from anything else and in particular from an untreated illness.
I think it’s best to look at a rolling average over a week or so.
I am not sure what you mean by “Meanwhile noone in the UK died from anything else and in particular from an untreated illness.”
I was being sarcastic -only coronavirus deaths matter.
Ah, sorry about that! Yes, good point. One of the more distasteful aspects of this whole thing is the desperate striving to appear virtuous while ignoring the huge damage being done on many other fronts.
It’s all about eradication now for some. Mission creep at it’s finest.
Our media simply cannot handle the truth anymore…they won’t admit the huge holes in the lockdown ideology and they won’t tell the truth about BLM in the USA – it seems it is virulently anti-semitic (meaning progroms, not misjudged retweets):
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2020/06/0626-links-pt2-caroline-glick-silent.html
Given that the government, and its partners in the corporate media, have engaged in an organised campaign to make the public feel afraid in order to ensure compliance, are they not guilty of coercive control?
Sky ‘news’ was showing a sensationalised docudrama about the ‘armageddon’ in north Italys hospitals well before 23rd March, even playing violin music in the background for extra effect. It was stuff like this that drove the mass hysteria and caused our wishy washy leadership to panic and hit the self destruct lockdown button. They therefore cannot blame OFCOMs diktat (good luck Toby – fighting the good fight) – they are equally culpable – as are all the rest of the sensationalist MSM
The government define coercive control as:
The Government definition also outlines the following:
They are guilty as you say but who is going to hold them accountable, and when.
Given that they are all complicit (the Coronavirus Act 2020 was passed without scrutiny or division), the chances of them being held accountable are virtually non-existent.
I dont know much about it, but looks like there are only; Simon Dolan’s judicial review on legality of lockdown and rules and Toby’s judicial review of ofcom sensoring the free press – in the running
The lockdown measures are blatantly illegal. They violate our rights to a completely unprecedented degree. The Coronavirus Act, and the associated regulations, is clearly incompatible with the Human Rights Act 1998 and contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights. The government and other organisations are also open to many other legal challenges. For example all the people who died as a result of the NHS refusing to provide medical attention or the people in care homes who died as a result of the decanting of older people from hospitals to make space in the NHS.
As for Ofcom – its position is not only censorship, but also blatantly absurd. Its position means that one day it is unacceptable to say that wearing masks provides the general population with protection, and the next day it is unacceptable to say that wearing masks does not provide the general population with protection. This makes Stalinist media control look lax.
Hopefully the results of the current judicial reviews will open the door for many many more legal challenges
Won’t be surprised if this will open the floodgates for more court cases. Matt Hancock and Gavin Williamson should be afraid, very afraid…..
Dolan review, Royal Commission, Coronaberg trials, or a good old-fashioned lynching.
Could there be a better description of the great Incarceration?
Is Sweden not included in the airbridge list because they are doing more testing?
Middle England doesn’t holiday in Sweden so they are off the menu
Sweden has been cancelled!
Well Sweden are in the naughty corner as they didn’t follow the majority of the world into lockdown. They’re probably considered to be too dangerous for the UK.
Yes, orrible free thinking types. I’v got family over just north of stockholm – they are happy with Tegnells dealing with the disease, and his honesty. There is a strange phenomenon over there – apparently, when people get very old, they die.
My personal trainer is Swedish and she moved back home just prior to the UK lockdown. Seeing her Instagram posts of going to the beach and a lakeside holiday is a bit like torture.
They’re very lucky to have a sensible scientific person in charge.
Funny that very old people die? Would never have occurred to me, thought we lived forever lol 😂
Yes but if people didn’t die they could have lived a bit longer. Until they die. but if they didn’t die of that they could have lived a bit longer…
The Telegraph: Travel latest: British families ‘ignoring quarantine’, says Ryanair.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/27/travel-latest-british-families-ignoring-quarantine-says-ryanair/
Really? Who could have predicted that would happen.
O’Leary sowing the seed…
The media are propagating hysteria on the back of localised spikes which seem mostly caused by imported cases form the Indian subcontinent to the countries of the west. The pandemic is following a different course in countries such as Brazil, India and Pakistan where they are slowly reaching their peak.
From the Telegraph ; half of Britain’s imported cases are from Pakistan .
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/26/exclusive-half-uks-imported-covid-19-infections-pakistan/
From the Guardian, Australia’s spike in Melbourne is from Eid celebrations.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/25/reports-melbourne-coronavirus-cluster-originated-at-eid-party-could-stoke-islamophobia-say-muslim-leaders
From New Zealand; origin of their new corona cases .
https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-19-current-situation/covid-19-current-cases/covid-19-current-cases-details
Lets go back to disease control basic rule 1 . Quarantine the sick . Stop flights from these countries for 4 months until the pandemic is over in these countries . Boris won’t do it because it would be a political hot potato.
I don’t think there’s any point quarantining anyone coming into the UK from anywhere. But this is worth a try in NZ.
Scotland want to be like NZ though. I’m sure we’re going to see quite a divergence between Scotland and England moving forward, or at least the pretence of one.
Yep my family are the same, totally brainwashed. It kills me.
For lockdown sceptics Peru is an interesting example. Despite one of the earliest and strictest lockdowns in the world it has one of the highest number of excess deaths (apologies linking to the BBC but at least they’re covering it….)
“Peru imposed one of the earliest and strictest lockdowns in Latin America to stop the spread of coronavirus – but it now has the sixth highest number of confirmed cases in the world.
Peru’s President, Martín Vizcarra, says things are improving but has previously said results of the lockdown “haven’t been exactly what we expected”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-53150808
In other words, lockdowns don’t work and the progression and impact of the virus depends on the demographics of your country, amongst many other factors. Lockdowns, masks etc etc don’t make a material difference. Deprivation, low standard of health, crowded mass accommodation do.
I know exactly how you feel. It’s worse than talking to a brick wall, because a brick wall doesn’t give you stupid answers.
Ignore the bastards.
Thank you Steven! We get the Covid shuffle as well. You put your right foot in, they put their left foot back …..
Ending The “Corona-Panic”: 5 Facts Proving We’re Going To Be Just Fine (Part 1)
https://theemfguy.com/covid-part1/
Parts 2 & 3 available within. A hefty read but some excellent information and stats.
Sent my request for an internal review to the Government Legal Department about there answer to my FOI saying it was too expensive to process:
“Thank you for your reply but I think it is inadequate and requires an internal review.
It is not exactly an onerous nor complicated request.
How contacting one person for one document that should be in the public domain as it is a crucial piece of evidence can take over 24 hours of research and cost over £600 at £25 per hour to find and supply? Please justify.
The request was for one document from one department that should be available from one person, The Secretary of State for Health, and that it should be in the public domain as an addendum to the serious and imminent threat declaration issued on the 10th February 2020 by The Secretary of State for Health.
This document should also be freely available with yourselves as the Government Legal Department as you are currently facing a judicial review challenge on the whole coronavirus legislation and associated actions and as this document is what underpins the whole of Government’s response it is a crucial document and should be readily to hand… Read more »
Well done!
You’re brill!
Fantastic!
Good morning everyone. I just came across this passionate speech against lockdown and muzzle wearing in the United States. Fantastic:
https://twitter.com/21WIRE/status/1276784933093158917
Brilliant, a new addition to the LS Hall of Fane for sure.
Outstanding! We should not be letting the powers that be get away with this. Why arent the good guys in Parliament speaking up for us mortals? Is it because there aren’t any?
Oh boy, he proper nails it! Good for him. Where are the people like this in the uk?
Great stuff.
He nailed it!