Large events with no face masks and no social distancing are just as safe as dining at a restaurant or going shopping, new data shows – so long as measures such as pre-entry Covid tests are in place. The bad news is that these findings could, according to some reports, persuade the Government to introduce vaccine passports for such events. The Times has the story.
Preliminary data from the events research programme is understood to have found that with screening, improved ventilation and other mitigating factors the risk of virus transmission can be significantly reduced, reducing fears that sports matches and concerts could cause big outbreaks.
The results will boost hopes that the end of restrictions can go ahead as planned on June 21st despite the spread of the Indian variant.
They are likely to strengthen the case for requiring “Covid-status certification” for such events to prove that those attending are at lower risk of being infectious.
The results will be forwarded to ministers in the coming days before a decision on further easing of lockdown measures due next month.
While the research programme took place before concerns over the spread of the Indian variant, it is likely to form a key plank of the Government’s plans for the reopening of society.
A Government source said the results from the trials had been encouraging and further test events were planned for the coming weeks. “We are still waiting for the final bits of data but the results so far have been very encouraging,” the source said.
“It will help make the case that these large events are not inherently more risky than other parts of the hospitality sector. It shows that there are things that you can do to make these settings as safe as other daily activities.
“It is true that they are not going to be 100% safe but you can lower the risk to a reasonable level.”
It doesn’t appear, however, that this study had any control – at least, there have been no reports of events going ahead with no mitigating measures including pre-entry testing against which to compare the results. So how can they know that the measures have “reduced transmission”? A study without a control group can’t tell us anything about how effective and necessary the intervention is. There were no outbreaks with the testing. But maybe there wouldn’t be any without as well. And even if there are, why is that a problem if hospitals can cope? These questions don’t seem to be being answered.
The Government is said to have already told football’s UEFA that crowd sizes at upcoming events will be limited to 45,000. A review is expected to report on the settings in which domestic vaccine passports will be required later this month.
The Times report is worth reading in full.
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The cradle-to-the-grave welfare-state 1948 onward began the slow transfer of self-reliance, self-responsibility, self-discipline, self-sustainability, self-respect, self-confidence, autonomy, and individual sovereignty to the State.
We are now an infantilise nation of people, the majority of whom cannot look after themselves or think for themselves.
Satan said, all the World I shall give you if you will bow down and worship me. The British in 1945 gave their souls, spirit, integrity (as you wish) for the welfare State.
Not all the British, but certainly all the Influencers, those on the Left in Politics and in the Media: but then, I am repeating myself. And you can add the State Sector, especially Education.
It is the assumption that there’s no need to think of the consequences, because the NHS and the Welfare State are there, and the Labour candidate! There’s no need to think. Ironically, it can be outsourced.
It’s not what that Party has in its manifesto, it’s that you don’t have to think, beforehand, of the consequences of any action, except when it’s planned by the experts, those in control, and where anything missed can be put down to lessons to be learnt: but they aren’t.
Institutionalising human nature has never worked, and never will.
As well detailed here – essential reading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom
“The Road to Serfdom is a book by the Austrian-British economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek. In the book, Hayek “[warns] of the danger of tyranny that inevitably results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning.”[1] He further argues that the abandonment of individualism and classical liberalism inevitably leads to a loss of freedom, the creation of an oppressive society, the tyranny of a dictator, and the serfdom of the individual. Hayek challenged the view, popular among British Marxists, that fascism (including Nazism) was a capitalist reaction against socialism. He argued that fascism, Nazism, and state-socialism had common roots in central economic planning and empowering the state over the individual.”
But no matter how often this lie is being repeated because all people playing US domestic politics games really want is label their opponents as Nazis whatever their political goals and opinions are, it won’t become truer because of this.
So-called socialists and so-called neoliberals or “objectivists” share a common political dream: Overcoming the state as obsolete obstacle of former times in order to reach a state of ‘blissful’ communal anarchy. Both so-called socialists and so-called objectivists have found that putting this into practice wasn’t as easy as they had hoped.
So-called socialists were practically hampered by the fact that they staged an artificial revolution, ie, not a true uprising of the impoverished masses of industry workers, in a country which was really a huge rural backwater at that time. Hence, they were forced to construct the kind of industrial society their future should arise from from scratch first which necessitated a strong state forcing societal change (“industrialization”) which wouldn’t have happened without it.
So-called “objectivists” never got (and probably, never meant to get) past the point of plundering whatever communal assets they could get their grubby hands on for their private gain. Thus, they begat the state whose purpose is to funnel taxpayer money into their pseudo-enterprises to guarantee the profits they expected to make from them and obviously, they not only didn’t manage to get rid of the state but ended up greatly expanding it’s reach because evermore human activities needed to be taxed¹ to subsidize evermore privatization.
In contrast to this, fascists (whoever ends up being labelled as that) stood in the ‘classical’ European tradition of considering the state a net-positive way of organzing human society and of means to reach some set of ideal goals which existed outside of it.
¹ Typical example of this: Buying a litre of petrol is sadded with an energy or CO₂ tax, purportedly because of “chlimage cange” or something like that, and the combined price is then again subject to VAT, ie, the neoliberal state ends up taxing (poor, not rich²) people for paying taxes.
² Due to the fact that the bulk of taxation is evermore ever-increasing indirect taxes which are paid on (taxed) income needed to pay for everyday needs. This means the higher the percentage of one’s income which has to be consumed is, ie, the lower one’s income is in absolute terms, the more aggressively this income is double- and triple-taxed.
Setting the stage for corporatism (Fascism)
I think McGrogan is suffering from a sense of loss of place and is mistaking nostalgia for real loss of cultural cohesion.
He , as an academic is at the heart of the problem , which is , collapse of debate and imposition by sanction surrounding academic ideas , cultural standards and belief systems.
Trained in Science , I have had my understanding of principles of developing and then proving a theory , demolished by practises in educational institutions across the world . The practise is that a dogma is taken on and then all who disagree are either intimidated into agreeing or dismissed if they continue to object . This is exemplified by the statement that 95% of academics in atmospheric science believe that AGW is responsible for Global Warming . There has never been a practical demonstration of this claim and yet any attempt to disagree is met with stonewalling and cancellation .
Dr McGrogan has clearly spent too much of his professional life not being challenged !
Nonsense. Peremptory judgement on one article. Sub to his Substack and you will find a learned man dissecting the mortal peril we are in.
I disagree. I think Dr McGrogan has hit the nail on the head. It is not nostalgia that drives his comments but a sense of real loss which is exemplified by the loss of Christian teachings and values which underpinned society whether you were a believer or not. I was born in the 1940s and recognise to a much greater degree than the author, what has been lost.
His point, I would suggest, is that there is hope that we will overcome the Devil and all that he offers in the so called comfortable and richer society but which is not, as we fight that Devil and love for one’s neighbour triumphs as that underpins the society that he described from his youth.
Really enjoyed reading this as so much of what David writes about and remembers resonates with me. I’m a few years older than him and so perhaps remember a bit more as I was in first school in 1981, and that free milk that had been stood for hours in a crate getting warmer, with the cream forming on the top was ruddy disgusting! lol I always said though, if I could hitch a ride in a time machine I’d go back to my favourite decade, the ’80s. The music was far superior, fashion was fun, society and culture was so different back then, and there certainly was more of a sense of community. Holidays for us were Blackpool, Scarborough, Whitby, and I’m pretty sure seagulls weren’t so aggressive then, whereas now they’ll dive bomb you whatever you’re eating, even ice cream.
Yes, barely any screen time pre-internet and only one telly in the house ( until I got one in my room as a teenager and thought all my Christmases had come at once ) so kids used to easily fill hours playing outdoors with friends or at each other’s houses with toys if it was rainy. We had landlines but kids used to just go round knocking on each other, ”Is so-and-so coming out?” and there were a million different games you’d play in the street or in the playground at school. We’d go ‘Halloweening’ with carved turnips as we’d only ever seen pumpkins on American TV.
I remember mothers used to park those big, bouncy prams outside shops if they were only popping in and out, because nobody worried about strangers abducting your baby back then. There seemed to be a lot more trust and the owner of the corner shop, where we’d get our Sunday papers, my mam’s ‘American Tan’ tights and 10p mix-ups, knew all the kids by name. I think nostalgia makes us filter out the less pleasant memories and realities of that decade, ( or whichever decade you remember fondly when you were growing up ) but I think that’s only natural. I get what David is saying though. It’s the end of an era and it’s never returning, no matter how wistfully we look back at these times. ”Time and tide…” and all that. So when grandparents used to say, ”Kids don’t know they’re born these days”, I now get what they mean. Now they want you to put the heating on in early October, rather than go and stick a cardie on, or they have a mental breakdown if the internet goes off briefly.
Of course we are all prone to nostalgia (30 years ago I wasn’t an old codger, to start with) but it’s definitely true that, in general people were happier.
I remember my teenage and student years. Nobody I knew suffered from mental health problems. Nobody I knew cherished some life-defining grievance just to give them an illusion of “identity”. It was possible to disagree with someone and still get on with them, rather than thinking they were deplorable. You had real, flesh-and-bone friends who you met up with in person, rather than virtual ones that live in their own bubble. You could complement a girl on their looks without them screaming at you. Most of us managed to form relationships and get married and have a normal life.
So yes, something went wrong and something got lost and yes, I think the current system is a pack of cards, sustained by lies, deception and delusions that will eventually collapse under the weight of its contractions. And of course, a house built on sand… well, you know the rest.
I remember that real a lot of people (at least in Germany, where the Anglo-Amercian bombing campaigns against civilian targets possibly still reverbated) were intensely afraid of the imminent nuclear armageddon and that regular peace demonstrations would draw immensely huge crowds. This extended to any nuclear technology, with mass protests erupting into civil-war-style street violence at the sites of the planned breeder reactor in Kalkar and the nuclear fuel recycling plant in Wackersdorf being a regular feature in the news. Even benign sounding development projects like building an additional runway for Frankfurt/Main airport (“Startbahn West”) attracted droves of anti-system protestors violently clashing with the police for years on end.
Society was also still intensely militarized, with all combatants of WWII maintaining huge standing armies on readiness for the final showdown whose members, facilities and exercises were literally everywhere — even in a rural backwater area like the Hunsrück, one couldn’t travel ten kilometers in any direction without encountering a large (usually American) military installation of some sort. This obviously added to the omnipresent “final days of mankind” war paranoia.
Lucky times these were not.
‘It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine’
P.G. Wodehouse
‘Every Englishman is born a double Scotch below par’
Jeremy Paxman
This article must therefore be considered quintessentially British.
In fact, at least in England and Wales:
‘Suicide rates increased in all age groups in the 1930s, coinciding with the Great Depression. The highest male rates (30.3 per 100 000) were recorded in 1905 and 1934 and have since been declining. Female rates peaked in the 1960s (11.8 per 100 000), declining afterwards.
In both sexes the lowest recorded rates were in the 21st century.’
Nevertheless there is a slight rise in suicides over the last 10-15 years.
This coincides with an increase in recreational cannabis use.
‘levels were higher compared with ten years ago (year ending March 2013) for any drug (8.1%), cannabis (6.3%).’
ONS Drug misuse in England and Wales: year ending March 2023
‘…fourteen million people have used cannabis in the UK, making it the most popular illicit drug. While not everyone who uses cannabis will become addicted, 11% of users will develop a cannabis addiction, with that figure rising to 16% if you used cannabis as a teen.’
https://www.ukat.co.uk/addiction/drug/cannabis/
‘If you start smoking cannabis—especially the strong stuff, and most of it now is strong—regularly, say once a week from your mid-teens, your risk of developing a psychotic illness is five times higher than usual……’
https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p407.full
In short, the climate of northerly latitudes predisposes the natives of this country to gloom, despite evidence of major increases in prosperity and longevity over the last eighty years.
Added to which, increased ingestion of harmful chemicals may very well have made significant numbers of Britons totally batshit crazy.
Personal observation seems to bear that out.
I have to say it’s somewhat amusing that the author of these lengthy tomes of somewhat aimless learnedness is a full nine years younger than me. Cheer up, my lad, if you have fond memories of the 1980s, that’s because you were lucky to be young enough back then that you mostly missed them.
You sort-of have a point about homophobic bullying – there were two guys rumoured to be a gay couple at my school and they were abused so hard that one of them eventually jumped from a church tower during school trip – but, to be brutally honest, that was another guy who jumped to his death, and I’d gladly exchange that for today’s unholy duopoly of being alternatingly groped by “Wanna have some fun?” gays and framed as exemplary representant of the evil patriarchate by Lesbian hysterics and the violence which usually results from that, all of which having been socially sainted to point of being incapapable of doing any wrong regardless of what they do.
It’s quite possible, likely even, that the near-universal tendency to over-idealize the past, is simply that if we’re talking about an era like the 1980s, many of us were children then. I’m saying that there is an equivalence between a period that one grew up in (as a child or adolescent), and the time in recent history one is nostalgic for as the “good old days”.
But as we grow up we see the world through different lenses, and since a person is perhaps less carefree, energetic and adventurous in their forties than they were as an invincible teenager with no responsibilities, the perception of the world having deteriorated may be exaggerated as it is (in part) a projection onto the external world of a person’s psychological maturing over the years. The world we “see” is no longer the giant playground it used to be.
Of course there are aspects of bygone eras that were much better and it could be argued people were generally freer and more autonomous. But it is also coloured by the memories of our childhood, specifically.
I think it is true the warrior has to see the beauty in all things even in everything he loved being lost. So many beautiful words for nostalgia and similar states in so many languages. sehnsucht and saudade. The feeling is so deep now in our time. I wonder if we can be held responsible. Can anyone be blamed for going with the flow I’m sure we think so sometimes. I don’t think the realms of the spirit and the will can be talked about sensibly without care and understanding. You could poi to many milestones along the way to the wasteland. I remember a hurricane in 1987 which I felt to be portent of something malign. Peter Hitchens said that some time around 1990 we decided that the past didn’t matter anymore. Up until that point there was still quite a lot of respect for the classics and a feeling of fondness for our past.
If you still have the capacity for beauty and joy and serenity then consider yourself lucky because many have had it chemically or culturally erased. They live in a world of shades and have never known any different or have long given up hope of colour returning to life. Be happy that you still have the capacity.
“…the country…”
– I know something of France, where the expression “notre pays” – our country – is widely used. Why do we not hear this in Britain? Perhaps this is a symptom of the malaise described?
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
It’s the internet and mobile phones. One of the saddest modern sights is a parent pushing a pushchair whilst looking at their mobile phone, which they find more interesting than their child. No society can function in the presence of such a malignant and widespread addiction.
Or someone walking a dog talking into her mobile.
Anyone on a mobile phone is not present.
Very real observations making for an extremely interesting read. Thank you.
McGrogan is on the nail all the time. I HIGHLY recommend his Substack, “News from Uncibal”, as well, Daniel Jupp’s “Jupplandia” who covers similar matters form his viewpoint.
Jupp recently published “The Gates of Hell”, his deep dive into the appalling Gates. Recommended.
My family traveled from Leeds to have their summer one week holiday in New Brighton passing under the Mersey Tunnel to get there. This was in the very early 1960s. We saw the last of the great ocean liners coming to dock across the water in Liverpool. There used to be two ferries that crossed the Mersey Riyal Iris and Royal Daffodil back at that time (Ferry crossed the Mersey aka Beatles record)
What a refreshing read from someone I imagined to be about my age (73!). The bit that was missing from the essay was the emergence of brand loyalty, Brands became an identity in the 1980s and a tribe you belonged to – this was a shock to us parents who had always managed with plimsolls for our kids but were now being pestered for expensive branded trainers
Products like video games and places like shiny shopping malls were all the rage, Shopping became much more of an experience because of branding. Fast Forward and we are now so much more merged with brands. In the 1990s I went back to university and wrote a dissertation on Starbucks brand; specifically the ingenious and absurd ritual of the baristas asking for customers’ names at point of purchase to be scribbled on their customised paper cups and then making them wait for their names to be called out. To me this epitomised the passivity of consumers and I saw this herd mentality so strongly during lockdown. In a way I can understand this need for self expression as growing up in the 1950s I had all the outdoor freedom people have described but absolutely no personal freedom, as a child I was ‘ seen and not heard’ and brought up in the school of hard knocks.
I agree it was an interesting read. I’m a child of the 80’s, and I think you are onto something with the brands, specifically imported from the US with their corporate consumerism model. Two additional differences stand out for me between then and now:
1) short termism – no one wants to concern themselves, or invest in, the future more than a year or two out. Look at places like China or Dubai or Norway – they have 30-50 years strategic plans, and they stick to them to achieve a goal. We flit all over the shop, wasting time and energy.
2) identity / pride – this one perhaps impacted by the one above. Look back at old newsreels, talking up British achievements etc… of course corporate bs was a thing then as well with some exaggeration, however now it’s pervasive everywhere. Everything is marketing fluff, skin deep at best but pride is nowhere – perhaps that’s right who knows?
Definitely agree with your two points which are so interconnected. We are not proud of our nation’s incredible past achievements in so many fields from science to the arts. The elites indulge in what Roger Scruton termed “ oikophobia” or dislike of one’s own culture. If a society doesn’t t believe in itself then this leads to short termism, because there’s no belief in our abilities to build a great future. I read stuff from so many social commentators and they’re all saying this and put it down to a deep spiritual malaise. Another point is that in the 80s there was so much less choice of what to watch and so we shared national popular cultural references like lines from from Only Fools and Horses on TV which everyone watched. Now it seems almost quaint to talk of intergenerational activities.
The innocent pictures of two naked boys today would generate two responses: You must be a pedophile to show them, or how dare you describe them as boys, they may self-identify as something else in a few years time.