The new Health Secretary Sajid Javid’s claim that he would like to see a return to normal “as quickly as possible” has been responded to by a leading member of SAGE who warns that we shouldn’t “rush” into unlocking on July 5th. But with such a high proportion of the adult population (including those who are most vulnerable to Covid) already fully vaccinated, and daily deaths after 28 days of a positive Covid test rarely topping 15, there is no legitimate reason to hold off until July 19th. WalesOnline has more.
An announcement is expected tomorrow from the Prime Minister about when all Covid restrictions can be lifted in England.
The rules were originally planned to lift this month but were put back to July 19th because of the spread of the Delta variant of the virus, will the caveat that could be brought forward by two weeks if all was going well.
Professor Sir Peter Horby, Chairman of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, says “encouraging” Covid data suggested restrictions in England could indeed be eased by July 19th – but not any sooner.
The member of SAGE told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show: “We always have to be driven by the data, not the dates.
“So we’re watching it very carefully and there will be a lot of analysis of the data coming up to that date, to make sure we’re comfortable with that release.
“At the moment, the data is encouraging that we can do that. But we have to make sure that we follow the data.”
He said he would not bring the restrictions easing date forward, adding that it had been “very sensible” to delay the previous June 21st target date by four weeks.
“I don’t think we should rush into anything, we really want to make sure that we can release all restrictions and not have to backtrack at all,” he added.
Sir Peter said the route out of the pandemic would be “a bumpy road” with “twists and turns”.
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You only have to look at which companies benefited hugely from the lockdowns/restrictions and which ones were negatively affected to see the corruption:
Big Pharma; Big Tech; Amazon; other on-line retailers and delivery companies all accumulated vast profits
Small private businesses; hospitality; high street sole traders and the self-employed were absolutely hammered.
And taxpayers have now been handed the bill. In German, the word is “rechnung” and goodness knows, we need a reckoning with the people who did this. But we’re powerless and they know it.
To be fair to Amazon, they were a lifeline for many of the locked down who were unable to go out shopping due to lockdown.
Where else could I have ordered all manner of items that were required, including over-the-counter medication, necessary kitchen utensils, hygiene supplies and all kinds of other necessities, sometimes ordered Saturday evening and delivered by Sunday lunchtime, all at highly competitive prices?
The Davos people call it public-private partnership.
The solution is simple but hard: massively shrink the state.
The reason big business “partners” with the state is because the state has massive amount of of power and resources.
The role of the state needs to be reduced. It has no business telling us what we can and cannot say online, what medical treatments we must follow, what form of money we must use, what type of car we must drive or how we must heat our houses.
As long as we as a population insist on looking to the state to solve what some of us think are problems, the state will take the power and corporations will exploit that power.
And we need to cut off its money supply, or severely restrict it (i.e.our taxes) and force the state to operate under the rules of financial discipline that every family in Britain is subject to. It can’t spend more than it earns or the consequences will be serious.
To put it very crudely, the state is like an authoritarian, violent head of family who is incompetent, screws everything up, is badly in debt and lets its friends abuse his children. I don’t know about anyone else but I’m sick of having to put up with it.
“force the state to operate under the rules of financial discipline that every family in Britain is subject to. It can’t spend more than it earns or the consequences will be serious.”
I have spouted this logic all my adult life and faced the nonsense that ‘national finances’ fall under different financial rules, yabba, yabba, yabba. NO, they do not.
Surplus national cash does not come from a few extra shifts on the printing presses. I know this, many on here know this, but somehow our “elites” know better than us although their attempts at explanation fall to the oft repeated nonsense of some Carney style logic. This is the essence of the public-private partnership.
The state i.e the public side of the nation requires ever more tax payers money to feed the insatiable appetite of the private sector. The biggest private sector companies, feeding as they do off a nation’s public companies are in reality just third party agents of taxation hiding behind government contracts written allegedly for the public’s benefit.
The revolving door between government and “private business” laid bare.
A very cosy, very profitable arrangement for a few but now hurtling to its inevitable demise as its unsustainability is confirmed.
‘But who would build the roads?!’
I agree with you; except that you forgot to add that the head of the family was off their heads on cocaine as well.
The author equates subsidies to rents and paints rents in a negative way. I think this is misguided.
Every person who aspires to not have to work until the day they drop will need to rely on rents. Rents is what will keeps us going after retirement.
Now it needn’t be that way. If there was zero inflation and we knew that one thousand pounds we put away today would be worth one thousand pounds in twenty or thirty years then we could just work out how much we felt we needed and save for it.
But because the value of money is highly unstable (mostly thanks to the profligacy of the state which is incompetent and so needs to cheat and print too much money all the time), we are all forced to become rent seeking investors. Either ourselves directly and/or handing the job over to the state who needs to run a state pension fund, typically very badly, with no guarantees or commitments beyond the certainty that it will be worse than you hope, never better.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity….
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific/ technological elite.
Eisenhower, Farewell Speech as President 1961
See? There’s nothing new under the sun.
The author spoils his case by over stating it. If the state is to provide security it must provide it for all of the country’s interests which is a reason companies pay tax as well as individuals. The armed forces need equipment and it is not a subsidy to buy them from a manufacturer.
The relationship between arms producers and the state shows just how completely corrupt the public-private “partnership” is.
The state is the single buyer and the producers are several. That should in theory give the state enormous buying power. And that should translate into suppliers margins being squeezed very low and the single buyer getting an amazing deal.
In fact, in this case, for reasons that can only really be explained by massive corruption, the opposite is the case. Arms manufacturers make phenomenal profits and all you hear are instances of absurd overpayment by the state.
Society seems to have accepted that government arms contracts are licences for the companies winning the contracts to mint money.
It’s all for our protection…
Tax breaks and subsidies are not the same! The former is taking less of what has been earned, the latter is giving (public money) to that which is not earned, usually to bolster a political narrative regardless of the recipient’s value to the economy.
Corporatism is alive, prospering and nutured by the Not-the-Conservative Party.
Like the thirty-seven billion pounds – more than the quarterly turnover of Microsoft, enough to build three nuclear power stations, more than the cost of the Channel Tunnel and Crossrail put together or build a dozen aircraft carriers, donated to Dido Harding to commission a bugridden smartphone app that any GCSE IT student could have knocked up over the weekend, coupled to a back end database that could be bought off the shelf for a few hundred thousand and is now admitted not to have sold a single life, do you mean?
When is someone going to look into that ultra-rip off?