Boris Johnson believes that he handled the response to Covid poorly in the early days… in that the first lockdown did not come soon – or hard – enough. Supporters of the Prime Minister claim that he was let down by his scientific advisers. The Telegraph has the story.
Boris Johnson accepts it was a mistake to delay the start of the first national lockdown, close allies have said, while insisting the Prime Minister was let down by scientific advisers.
Mr Johnson would act “harder, earlier and faster” if he had his time again, supporters say, raising the possibility of a mea culpa moment in a future inquiry into the handling of the pandemic.
As the first anniversary of lockdown approaches, Mr Johnson has rightly won plaudits for the runaway success of Britain’s vaccine rollout, but knows he will eventually have to confront the question of why the UK has suffered the highest death toll in Europe and the fifth-highest in the world.
The Telegraph has learnt that the pivotal moment in imposing lockdown came on March 14th last year – nine days before lockdown started – when Mr Johnson was shown evidence that ministers and scientific advisers had badly miscalculated how quickly the NHS would be overwhelmed.
The Prime Minister was “stunned” to be told by a Number 10 data analyst at a hurriedly-convened Saturday meeting that his “squash the sombrero” policy was not working and that hospitals were as little as three weeks away from being past capacity.
Mr Johnson had, until then, been making decisions based on out-of-date projections provided by Government departments.
But he waited until March 23rd to issue his “stay at home” order, a decision which scientists have claimed doubled the death toll in the first wave.
Ministers and officials involved in the Covid response have said it should not be viewed through the prism of “20-20 hindsight”, but admitted the Prime Minister’s instinct for delaying decisions as long as possible was the “worst” approach in the midst of a pandemic.
In December, Professor Neil Ferguson admitted that the implementation of lockdowns in the West was viewed as being unviable until Italy acted (hard, early and fast).
[China is] a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.
The Prime Minister’s confession lays the groundwork for future pandemic responses – that of imposing an even harder lockdown even sooner. Has he learnt nothing?
Worth reading in full.
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Only 44 hop farms left in the country???!!!
This news is just heartbreaking, when I think of all the beautiful old hops growing in the summer sunshine of Kent, “The Garden of England”, years and years ago, and the old oast houses there.
“While Dad worked at the docks in London, mum would take us kids up to Kent over the summer. We’d be up at 7am, and mum would make us sandwiches for the three-mile walk to the hop fields. I was only a babe in arms but as soon as I could walk properly, I would scrape hops off the floor and collect them in an umbrella. We all had to pick, it didn’t matter about our age.”
“Sixty-seven year old Colin Felton’s memories of journeying from the East End for his hop picking “holiday” in the Kent countryside are not unique. Until the 1960s, some 10,000 people – often, whole streets of families – would leave the stench of the city for the sweet aroma of Kent’s ‘hop gardens’ each September.”
“Kent became the focus of the hop industry thanks to Protestant refugees from Flanders who came to the area and began growing hops. “Having the right field structure – rich soils and a microclimate with cold winds from the North Sea – it was perfect for hops, so they stayed,” says hop breeder and researcher Dr Peter Darby.”
from British hop growing in Kent and fond memories | Local Food Britain
“When these migratory families reached the hop farms, conditions were far from what you’d expect from a “holiday”.”
“The huts were 9ft square, and we had two beds, one for the three girls and mum and then one for me and my three brothers,” says Colin, whose family would pick for up to five weeks at a stretch. “At 5pm we’d come back from the fields and have a cold wash. It was harder to get warm water because you’d have to light a fire.”
“Indeed, despite the stories of primitive conditions, and the hard work involved, many pickers look back on this time with fondness.”
“Dad would come up at weekends and mum and him would go to the pub, while us kids would go fishing, scrumping or walking,” says Colin. “We didn’t get up to mischief because we didn’t want the farmer to ban us from coming again – it was our holiday after all. Sometimes we’d miss school, but no one said much about it because we were earning money and people understood.”
[***Dear Third World, what was that you were saying about “White Privilege”?]
Starmer is like an incubus sucking the lifeblood and all that is good out of the country. There’s just never any good news where he’s concerned, is there?
Meanwhile, does this sound like a reasonable forecast for what lies in store for British farming, do you think?
”Watch out British Farmers, This is how @Keir_Starmer ‘s new best buddies at BlackRock are going to screw you over in 7 steps …
1. They will start buying up small plots of agricultural land at double the normal price. They will issue a directive to all of their energy companies simultaneously to aggressively acquire plots for carbon capture. These third parties will start bidding against each other and force the value of agricultural land up.
2. Initially farmers won’t believe their luck – “these city folks are mad! if they want to buy an acre for £50K, who am I to say no to these fools” is what you’ll hear down the pub.
3. These crazy prices will set record high comparisons for agricultural land. When a farmer dies, their farm will be valued using these new metrics and the next generation will discover the farm they thought was worth £3M is worth £9M and they don’t have anything close to the money needed to cover the tax.
4. In swoops a BlackRock subsidiary with a “Agri Debt Finance Tax Relief” product to lend them 20% the “value” of their farm so they can pay the taxes.
5. The debt will come with conditions (a covenant) that the farm has to adopt and maintain certain practices. It has to use certain BlackRock owned fertilisers, software, machinery and labour solutions that get the farm ready to interface with a larger conglomerate.
6. When a farm cannot make its debt payments, it is sold at auction. BlackRock subsidiaries are instructed NOT to buy these farms at auction. They have a special arrangement to buy the unsold farms at a rate that covers the unpaid debt plus outstanding fees and taxes to government… basically what the farm was originally worth.
7. A BlackRock subsidiary then takes over the farm, consolidates it with a massive group of farms and uses illegal immigrant labour to staff the farm (which will be another government program they institute to deal with the immigration crisis). The government will literally pay for the labour costs as part of this plan making the farms wildly profitable and making small family farms unable to compete.”
https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/blackrock.418740/
Plus, once the farms are all consolidated in to mega farms there will be hundreds of unused farm buildings dotted all over the country’s Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. All in prime locations and just waiting to be converted into £million second homes for the filthy rich. They will be salivating about that prospect right now, just got to get the peasants out first.
Or given to the Millions of Fake Asylum Seekers as free housing, to make the British countryside “less racist”.
Then this will get even worse:
Moment huge brawl erupts at Dovedale stepping stones beauty spot as people hurl large sticks at each other | Daily Mail Online
That seems like a plan to me. The likelihood of silly prices for farmland was a given as soon as the IHT hit was announced.
This country and all its productive components like farming, manufacturing are rapidly being destroyed so that the likes of Blackrock can pick over the carcasses. Farming in particular is all about ‘whomever controls the food controls the people.’ Of course the intention is to destroy traditional farming because the people are the backbone of the country, a society within society who represent independence, graft and honesty. No wonder this class has to be destroyed.
To quote Chris Rea…
“We’re on the road to hell.”
Or Talking Heads…
“Road to nowhere.”
I was actually wondering about how the value of the land of a farm will be determined. Without actually selling it, this must necessarily be someone’s estimate and that’s wide open to gaming by interested parties.
Agree. And if it becomes a fire sale… that could then maybe be used to lower the value of the farm…going in circles here😂
Why is it commentators suggest these disfunctional policies are a mistake. Commentators used to say much the same throiughoiut the 14 years of Tory mess-ups.
Instead we should assume the outcomes are just what the government wants. This government hates SMEbusinesses. The previous one like Labour preferred globalist businesses to native British ones.
Closing down small hop growers and small brwewers would be exactly in line with their joint globalist hopes.
“Closing down small hop growers and small brwewers would be exactly in line with their joint globalist hopes.”
Furthermore, there is something quintessentially English about our hops. Again an industry with hundreds of years of history.
English / British history ? It has to be destroyed just like farming, manufacturing and so on.
Acting on the orders they have been given – destroy Great Britain – I would suggest that Kneel’s mob will be considered moderately successful. We are being extremely naïve in thinking that the economic destruction being heaped upon this country is down to piss poor management. It’s not. It’s deliberate and everything is co-ordinated and timetabled.
And the economic climate will become so desperate that eventually and to all intents and purposes we will be sold lock, stock and barrel to the likes of Blackrock or derivatives thereof.
Don’t worry. Starmer will outsource our hop growing to Mauritius
Good point! Or Rwanda…funded by British Taxpayers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cje050wz22qo
Billingsgate and Smithfields to close after 850 years.
As I keep posting, it’s all about destroying the country and taking our history with it.
Umm, interesting, shame the frost has been and the Liberty caps are gone.. Maybe next year..
https://youtu.be/0hS3eT5fhTM?si=jyeBF74mIUadAZPU
Partly caused by our young people not drinking beer and instead drinking European larger. Traitors. MEGA – Make England Great Again!
Some brewers actually use hops from across the pond, e.g. Oregon, or Washington states. I’ve come across those on various brewery visits recently.
Yes. Citra hop is particularly common. Horrible stuff.
Will anyone make a bet with me? Ms reeves and her crew will back down from the inheritance tax on farmers plan. We are witnessing, the backtracking on every single net zero goal. The same will happen with the newest gov’ts other “initiatives”. That is my bet.