Day: 15 July 2020

by Boris Johnson Ah the U.K., what a country. If any society breathes the spirit of liberty, this is it. It was only a few weeks ago that I was in Manchester for some conference, and as ever I rose early and went for a run. As I passed through some yuppie zone of warehouse conversions and posh restaurants I saw to my amazement that the Brits had also got up early for exercise – and they were diving stark naked into the bracing waters of Salford Quays. And I thought to myself – that’s the Brits for you; that’s the Battle of Britain spirit. If you wanted to visit a country that seemed on the face of it to embody the principles of J.S. Mill – that you should be able to do what you want provided you do no harm to others – I would advise you to head for wonderful, wonderful diverse U.K. Many still smoke; they still eat their Eccles Cakes; they still use the Pound rather than the Euro; they still refuse to let foreigners buy holiday homes in Wales; and of course it was the heroic population of UK that on that magnificent day in June 2016 stuck two fingers up to the elites of Europe and voted to leave Europe – and even ...

Face Mask Hell I'm still not over yesterday's announcement that face coverings will become mandatory in shops from July 24th. Apart from everything else, the only coverings the Government is insisting on are cloth ones, which every man and his dog knows are COMPLETELY USELESS. As Allison Pearson says in her excellent comment piece in today's Telegraph, "anything other than tight-fitting, surgical-grade masks are utterly pointless – like trying to stop a bullet with a chain-link fence". I mean, the evidence that the gold-standard N95 masks are effective in non-healthcare settings is threadbare at best – and they have to be disposed of after a single use. There is literally no evidence that re-usable cloth masks are effective in community settings. None. It's like wearing a tin foil hat in case you get struck by lightening – an ineffective way to protect yourself from an almost non-existent risk. What has become of us? I was busy trying to debunk this nonsense yesterday, doing an interview on TalkRadio with Mark Dolan and Iain Dale on LBC, and writing a piece for the Telegraph entitled "Mandatory masks are a matter of politics, not public health". Face nappies were not the main focus of my ire in that article, but the absurd report by the Academy of Medical Sciences that just happened to ...