The Prime Minister has taken a political beating from Sir Graham Brady, the Chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs, who says that lockdown rules will look “silly” if Covid cases continue to fall. The Evening Standard has the story.
Boris Johnson was warned today by the leader of Tory backbench MPs that lockdown rules will look “silly” if Covid cases continue to tumble.
Sir Graham Brady… also criticised the five-week gaps between each stage of the Prime Minister’s roadmap out of lockdown.
He spoke out just days after England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty warned that speeding up the easing of the restrictions would significantly increase the risk of a large surge in coronavirus and more deaths.
Ministers are insisting that the Government is sticking to its timetable for lifting lockdown, with the restrictions due to be largely gone by June 21st.
But a growing number of Tory MPs are publicly challenging it as Covid cases fall, as do hospitalisations and coronavirus deaths.
Sir Graham told talkRadio: “The danger is that the rules start to look silly.
“People can see what is happening with the figures… [for] most people it’s a very long time since they knew anybody in their own circle who had been ill with Covid.
“These things start to become more and more apparent.”
Will the pressure to lift lockdown early become too much for the Prime Minister to resist?
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: It turns out that the Government is not even intending to end social distancing rules on June 21st, and that there is currently no end date envisaged for social distancing. John Stevens, the leader of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, has met with Government officials to discuss lockdown rules for churches. He has written the following:
At present, the 2m social distancing guidance and requirement to wear masks in church will remain in place after June 21st. Whether these restrictions can be removed will depend upon the progress of infection rates and whether new variants of the virus emerge that require the measures to remain in place.
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It looked silly from about April last year. 3 weeks to flatten the curve and protect the NHS? Sweden has done better than us by every measure. I could (just) have forgiven the trouser moistening panic back in March. But the peak came down quickly – and as we remember – had nothing to do with lockdown as the graph below from the Royal Society shows.
Happily this will never happen.
1554080 tests today and 6753 ‘cases’.
Even being very generous with a 0.2% false positive rate, half of those ‘cases’ don’t exist.
Need to keep the fear going.
Interesting they are now including lateral flow tests in this data, I don’t believe they were previously.
Somebody should tell Boris he already looks silly.
… and has never looked anything other than that …
But it’s not just a ‘look’. He really is obnoxiously and self-seekingly stupid.
The trick here is to make the population so heartily sick of lockdown that they are prepared to face down the fanatics.
Nearly all the problem has been the modern trend to backing away from the hysterical.
The issue will be the balance between the public’s bowel and urinary activity versus that of the brain (crapping and wetting themselves as opposed to thinking realistically).
Basically – it’s up to organisations – such as the churches – mustering their supporters to wave two fingers at the government.
Why am I not feeling optimistic?
Perhaps because you are looking in the wrong place.
It is reported tonight that Conneticut, a vetry blue State, is going to follow the lead of Florida , Texas etc in calling an end to restrictions. If its true and they follow through, this will be an entirely unexpected and potentially momentous event. If the US stop following federal mandates and open up their societies the rest of the anglosphere world will follow.
If there was ever a time to pray, its now.
I’m off to bed now but I’ll be praying before I blow out the candle.
As a former TY Loyalist it pains me to say that if he had wanted to destroy BTL contributions he has succeeded only too well unless I am missing something.
I suspect the change is down to the vaccine issue. The BTL critique of the so called vaccines was unanswerable.
I don’t think you are missing anything. Just content yourself that (with all due respect to Mabel Cow) reddit is even worse.
Reddit is to the internet what Bojo is to civil rights.