Month: September 2020

From Tragedy to Farce: Boris Forgets His Own Rules Boris wonders what happened to his hammer as he's spotted another nut he needs to crack Several million people in the North-East had yet more Byzantine regulations inflicted on them yesterday by a Government that seems never to see a nut that doesn't put it in mind of a hammer. Yet hours later, the Prime Minister himself was unable accurately to explain the new rules. Ross Clark in the Telegraph has more. The Prime Minister has never exactly been a details man, but even so his failure accurately to recall the rules he had imposed on several million people in the North-East only hours before marks a new low in the Government’s handling of COVID-19. To come up with this myriad of rules, change them every few days, and to impose massive fines for failing to remember them, is a form of arbitrary rule which would have shamed one of the Tsars, let alone a democratically-elected UK Government.The PM's gaffe comes on the same day that 'Skills Minister' Gillian Keegan was asked on the Today programme whether the new restrictions announced for the North-East would allow two households to meet outdoors, and she said she had no idea.Such embarrassments expose the mess which the Government has created in its fondness for local lockdowns. If members of the ...

Tory Rebellion Grows https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=102&v=mz-iiHZEA64&feature=emb_logo It still isn't clear whether the Speaker of the House of Commons will select Sir Graham Brady's amendment to the Coronavirus Act, which is due to be renewed on Wednesday. But if he does, and Boris refuses to back down, it looks like the Government is facing defeat. Not only has the number of Conservative MPs prepared to vote for it grown from the 43 who originally signed the amendment to 81, according to Katy Balls in the Spectator, but the BBC reports that Labour MPs may join forces with the rebels. If the amendment passes it will mean that no additional Covid restrictions can be imposed by the Government without being approved by Parliament. The House of Commons debated the coronavirus crisis yesterday and Conservative MPs lined up to urge the Government to allow Parliament to scrutinise and debate any further measures, including ex-Chief Whip Mark Harper and former Cabinet Minister Chris Grayling. But the stand out contribution to the debate was from Sir Desmond Swayne, a long-standing lockdown sceptic. The Daily Record has the details: Speaking in the Commons, Sir Desmond said: “The purpose of politicians is to impose a measure of proportion, a sense of proportion on science, and not to be enthralled to it.“Now I will make myself very unpopular, but I ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcxDffEVbO4 We students have sacrificed and surrendered much of our university experience. Freshers’ Week, despite the stories of debauchery we may or may not have heard, is intended to ease the student into university life, giving us an opportunity to meet new people, join clubs and societies, and explore new places. That opportunity has been stolen from us. Life on campus is drastically different, too. I cannot enter a building without one of those dreadful ‘face coverings’ and must wear them during any in-person seminars. I am lucky enough to have one a week; many of my peers have had their entire timetables moved online. There is no chance to connect with lecturers and fellow students, to ask questions after class or socialise. Zoom lectures, for all their worth, can never replace a face-to-face learning experience – let no-one tell you otherwise. At my university, Estate Patrol are everywhere, ready to remorselessly disperse large groups, hand out hefty fines and other penalties in ways that make the Stasi look like friendly neighbourhood support officers. I have heard numerous horrific stories from my Russian family about life in the Soviet Union. How can we call ourselves an advanced free society when the same authoritarian measures are being forced upon us? While our freedoms have been snatched away from us, we are ...

Laurence Fox Has Raised £5 Million From Tory Donors According to a piece in the Mail yesterday, Laurence Fox hasn't raised £1 million to support his new political party, as reported in the Sunday Telegraph. He's raised £5 million! Laurence Fox is launching a new political party to fight the culture wars named Reclaim, and he has already raised more than £5million.The actor, 42, has received substantial sums from former Tory donors and hopes to stand dozens of candidates across the UK.The Lewis star says he wants to provide a movement for people who are "tired of being told that we represent the very thing we have, in history, stood together against".It comes as Nigel Farage has also threatened to launch an anti-lockdown party after criticising Boris Johnson's draconian measures to curb the rise in coronavirus cases. For anyone interested in joining Reclaim, there's an expression of interest form here. Stop Press: Patrick O'Flynn, a former UKIP MEP, has some cautionary words for Laurence in the Telegraph. His advice: sign up Nigel ASAP. National Union of Students Ignores Imprisonment of Students, Launches Campaign to "Decolonise Education" The President and Chief Executive of the NUS strategise about how best to spend students' money You couldn't make it up. At the very moment that tens of thousands of students across the United ...

Laurence Fox Launches Political Party to Fight the Culture War The Sunday Telegraph has quite the scoop this morning: Laurence Fox is launching a new political party. The actor Laurence Fox is launching a political party to fight the culture wars after raising over £1 million, including substantial sums from former Tory donors, the Telegraph can disclose.Fox hopes to stand dozens of candidates for his new party at the next General Election to provide a political movement for people who are "tired of being told that we represent the very thing we have, in history, stood together against".His aims include reforming publicly-funded institutions, likely to include the BBC, and celebrating Britain's history and global contribution.The new party (provisionally called "Reclaim") could launch as soon as next month. The party's name is subject to approval by the Electoral Commission. Papers are due to be submitted to the electoral regulator in the middle of this week.In a statement to the Telegraph, Fox said: "Over many years it has become clear that our politicians have lost touch with the people they represent and govern."Moreover, our public institutions now work to an agenda beyond their main purpose. Our modern United Kingdom was borne out of the respectful inclusion of so many individual voices."It is steeped in the innate values of families and communities, diverse ...

by JP Floru Many struggle with the apparent contradiction between pursuing one’s quality of life, and saving lives. It is said that we need to stop the world, and stop the pursuance of our own selfish pursuits, for the sole purpose of health. This is wrong. Health is just one of the many considerations of living individuals. Only individuals know what the costs and benefits of their actions are, and are therefore best placed to choose what to do. Risk is just one such cost; health is just one benefit. Free individual choice is therefore most likely to produce a net benefit.  This is why a free society leaves choice to individuals themselves: it increases the quality of life. Society is the sum of the lives of all those individuals: leaving people free leads to the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people in society. Governments do not have all that knowledge of individuals’ costs and benefits (the philosopher Hayek’s famous Knowledge Problem), and when they supplant individual choice, the outcome is likely to be less beneficial to the population.  Government saying that all other considerations must be shoved aside for the sole and centrally decided pursuance of health is in fact the nationalisation of individual choice. The outcome of this nationalisation is a dramatic decline in the quality ...

by Guy de la Bédoyère Disembarking our Ryanair flight from Stansted at Rome Ciampino on September 21st began with us not disembarking. We were told that we had to stay seated and only leave the aircraft by rows. It reminded me of being a teacher at kicking-out time. This of course was completely ignored by some of the passengers whose infractions were also ignored by the cabin crew. This was our first Italian experience of the schizophrenia of Covid-Land where the rules are mere wraiths that float in the background. Several times before we flew to Rome emails arrived from Ryanair to remind us of the vital Italian documentation that would need to be filled in and submitted on arrival. For some reason there seemed to be two versions of the laboriously arcane declaration we’d have to make about where we’d been, our reason for being in Italy, our health and so on. I printed them both out and filled them in, adding some blank spares, and dutifully carried them with us. On arrival at Ciampino Airport the most conspicuous feature was the total lack of anyone interested in any such piece of paper or any mention of it. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say if that there is a competition in Italy for the airport with the ...

75,000 – Government's Official Projection of Lockdown Deaths But does it even save lives? The Mail has discovered the figure the Government has put on the number of collateral deaths caused by the lockdown buried in a SAGE report. Nearly 75,000 people could die from non-Covid causes as a result of lockdown, according to a devastating official figures buried in a 188-page document.The startling research, presented to the Government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), will further increase pressure on Boris Johnson to hold back on introducing further coronavirus restrictions.The document reveals 16,000 people died as a result of the chaos in hospitals and care homes in March and April alone.It estimates a further 26,000 will lose their lives within a year if people continue to stay away from A&E and the problems in social care persist.And an additional 31,900 could die over the next five years as a result of missed cancer diagnoses, cancelled operations and the health impacts of a recession.The toll of deaths directly linked to the virus last night stood at 41,936.The estimates, drawn up by civil servants at the Department of Health, the Office for National Statistics and the Home Office, were presented to Sage at a meeting on July 15th. The documents stressed that had nothing been done to stop the spread of the virus in March, 400,000 people ...

by Gordon Hughes In BBC Radio 4’s More or Less programme broadcast on September 23rd Sir David Spiegelhalter tried to row back from some of his previous explanations of the potential scale of false positives in testing for COVID-19. At the same time, the Huffington Post published an article making essentially the same arguments, though in a somewhat muddled fashion. In both cases, the logic is what I would term accurate nonsense – i.e., an argument that is formally correct but which misses the point of the debate by focusing on a small part of a much broader issue. In doing this, the presentations illustrate the dangers of attempting to communicate complicated issues by breaking them into small portions judged suitable for journalistic discourse. Spiegelhalter’s reasoning was that: (a) the false positive rate for PCR tests was much lower than 1% because ONS tests found much lower rates of infection during the summer; and(b) the current infection rate in those being tested now was much higher than the prevalence of virus infection in the general population because many of those being tested had COVID-19 symptoms – i.e., the population being tested is not a random sample of the whole population. He produced no evidence to support either assertion and there are strong reasons to believe that both are wrong. In ...

Molly Kingsley Four months ago I saw a photo which changed me. That photo, now infamous, showed nursery age children sitting alone, looking lost, in two metre squares against the dark concrete backdrop of a playground. It was a photo taken in France but it was a portrait of a future coming our way. A future of regimented children, spilt from their friends; where play – childhood, in fact – was restricted. As a mother of a then three and six year-old, it was a future which I knew I must reject. Before that moment I had been an activist-in-waiting. I’d had many activist-in-waiting thoughts, had even committed one or two of them to paper. I’d a half-built website ready and waiting, biding time for the right moment, or the right people, to come along, and a half-baked vision to go with it all. Something about families, and making the UK a more hospitable environment for them. For, as anyone who is raising a child in this country will know, raising a child in this country is tough. Even before COVID-19 hit our shores, we’re a country with a ruling class apparently unable to make policy for a term spanning their children’s lifetimes as well as their own – a country whose cities and infrastructure cater to young professionals ahead ...