The Times has published an undercover investigation into DVLA, where backlogs mean people are having to wait months to get driving tests, and discovered that hundreds of employees have done no work on full pay for significant periods during the past two years as managers boast of watching Netflix at the public’s expense.
Most of the Government agency’s 6,200 staff were sent home during the first lockdown but 3,400 of them were put on paid special leave without having to work at all, figures show.
There were still almost 2,000 staff on paid special leave months later, with no expectation that they would do any work even from home. In nine of the past 24 months there have been more than 500 staff officially not working, either on paid special leave or on strike.
An undercover Times reporter worked at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency last month as millions of drivers have been affected by record backlogs in licence applications and renewals.
Managers told of spending working days in bed watching TV box sets. Staff said they were demoralised as colleagues on paid special leave who claimed to be too vulnerable to come to the office were “not doing any work yet they are out and about mingling with others and going on holiday”.
The DVLA has been in crisis as it receives 60,000 pieces of post a day but there have not been enough civil servants on site to open and process drivers’ documents quickly enough.
Amid pressure from hardline trade unionists, limits on numbers of staff at the agency’s offices have remained in place throughout the pandemic, despite them being stricter than government and public health guidance.
Special paid leave has been granted to DVLA staff who reported health conditions that classed them as being too vulnerable to be on site, said they were isolating because of Covid contacts or had caring responsibilities, while also being unable to work from home.
Many DVLA staff have not been able to work properly, or at all, from home throughout the pandemic as they are not allowed remote access to work systems holding licence holders’ personal data.
Even those civil servants on site have had periods of only having to work either a four-day week or on a week-on, week-off rota to prevent them from “burning out”.
The backlogs at the agency have meant some people who rely on their cars for work have been unable to drive for more than a year. Lorry drivers have also been prevented from helping to deliver food and petrol during critical periods of driver shortages.
Worth reading in full.
If you can’t get past the Times‘ paywall, you can read a version of this story on MailOnline here.
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I suggest the ‘epidemiologist’ is overdue a bullet.
This is not helpful. If ‘the bullet’ meaning fired – then sure.
Is the epidemiologist helpful?
They have to lockdown when cases go up, otherwise when cases fall naturally (shortly after they go up) the fraud would be plain for all to see.
Stop complying. Stop moaning. Start fighting. Don’t ever wear masks. “Exempt”. I always insist (politely) on others removing their masks for me (Hard of hearing) – they have to by law. See what’s happening in Australia. It’s coming here soon if we don’t stop it now. Don’t ever stop using problematic stores, services or businesses. Use them more often! Any problems – Complain directly to the manager in person (maskless of course) – then send letters to head office – don’t give in to negativity. FIGHT. BACK. BETTER. All the resources you need: https://www.LCAHub.org/
So Dr Bridle, Prof of viral immunology is right – their IS NOT a pandemic of the unvaccinated – its the vaccinated that are driving the scariants….
https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/immunology-professor-byram-bridle-there-is-no-pandemic-of-the-unvaccinated-8-5-21/
SAGE epidemiologist John Edmunds is correct for once when he says he doesn’t really know what’s going on – they haven’t the slightest clue what’s going on – never have done!
Maybe time to listen to scientists that do know what’s going on
Edmunds et al could have listened to quite a few people on this site, not just some brave scientists. Covid was an obvious scam from very early on. I think though, that Mr Edmunds knows this already and he is simply covering his arse in case things go pear-shaped, as well they might.
The UK government long ago took the globalist “shilling” and it is the major problem, not SAGE, which is only a useful tool and its members have no real power.
Covid will only end, when the people make it end and it will likely turn very messy before the Covid traitors in government and elsewhere meet their fate.
It’s quite obvious to me – the snake oil doesn’t work as well as they said it would. No great surprise when you look at the initial trial results.
The manufacturers never said it would stop transmission, infection, hospitalisation or death, only that it might mitigate the latter two in individual cases – which is, of course, unprovable in individual cases.
Edmunds is a strange character, he started off sane and reasonable before turning on a sixpence and going full mentalist.
They are all very odd characters. None of them anything approaching normal – not in SAGE, not in politics.
Edmunds has been in vanguard of the ‘Disney science cheerleaders’ for so long, and now says he doesn’t know what’s going on.
It would be funny if…
Given the geography, Iceland is a massively important test case that totally blows apart all the conventional un-wisdom
It certainly discredits the ‘Islands can do border closure plus vaccination successfully’ approach.
I am pretty sure that Aussies and Kiwis are biting their nails even harder now in light of the Icelandic news.
The key in both cases is to push treatments, not vaccines. Introducing leaky vaccines into the middle of a pandemic just breed variants.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/iceland
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/australia
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/israel
NZ still holding out ….
A scam is not containable simply by being on an Island.
Bear in mind, however – under normal circumstances at Reykjavik airport there are several flights every hour coming in from or going to the USA, with tourism being the major industry. If America’s positive test results are going up, I’m not at all surprised the same is happening in Iceland. Shame, it’s a really beautiful country.
Weaponised Pharma is the enemy and the road to world ruin
And weaponised with the help of Bill Gates’s money. People allowing themselves to be injected with a “vaccine” backed by the Great Depopulator would be laughable if it wasn’t so bloody dangerous.
“Furthermore, the epidemiologist announced that the failure of the vaccine to provide herd immunity means that restrictions will likely be in place for the next five to 15 years.”
This kind of thing is actually the only way out. They have to push too far and be overturned and overthrown by mass noncompliance and an awareness of the harm they have done.
The depressing thing, worldwide, is seeing just how far they have been able to go so far, without it being too far. Real resistance seems confined almost entirely to Republican US states, and a few other countries like Sweden who avoided the worst panic measures.
Yes they have been very skilled in easing off so the frogs don’t know they are being boiled. I’m quite concerned that the “irreversible” lifting of some restrictions in the UK was calculated to give people some relief from the drudgery of lockdowns and there was never any intention for this easing to be anything other than temporary. My only hope is that human social instinct will assert itself now that people have been reminded what normal feels like – but I am fully aware this hope is a faint one.
There was a time when repeating the same behaviour and expecting a different outcome was the definition of insanity. Since the lunatics took over the asylum, it has become the norm.
When we finally escape from this 18 month nightmare and can view the whole affair with a bit of perspective, one thing I hope everyone will see is the extent to which a contagious but not very deadly respiratory virus has made just about every politician and public health “scientist” look like a complete eejit. It has also exposed, once and for all, that “more government” is not only seldom the solution to a big problem – it is very likely to make the problem worse. The few countries which have had a “good pandemic” have, by and large, been those which have decentralised government and which have done relatively little in terms of non-pharmaceutical intervention.
The people who said in the beginning that by and large there was not much we could do to prevent this virus spreading and infecting people and that the best we could do was to try to protect the vulnerable and allow the healthy to catch the virus and build up immunity (the Great Barrington people) will be shown to be correct, and the people who think that mankind can control absolutely everything with technology will be shown to be wrong.
Of course this assumes that in the future we will have a media which is capable of questioning the approach which governments (and the media themselves) have taken, or is even allowed to do so.
The administrative machinery by-land-large just does what it’s being told. If it’s being told that there’s currently a prohibit everything free-for-all (as in Germany), that’s what it’s going to do. The problem is not goverment but the people who govern.
Speaking of Germany, the real problem is the people governed (who allow their governments to do it to them, and are even eager to receive more whipping).
Das ist nur Ihre Meinung :-).
Das ist auch die Meinige.
Das war ein Zitat aus «Didi der Doppelgänger», einer deutschen Filmkomödie von 1984. Es ist der erste der drei Sprüche die «Didi der Firmenchef» «Didi dem Kneipenwirt» als Universalmethode zum Abbiegen von Wünschen oder Vorschlägen Untergebener eintrichtert (die anderen beiden sind «Ich brauche mehr Details» und «Schreiben sie’s auf, ich beschäftige mich später damit»).
Als Entgegnung auf diesen nur kaum unterschwellig sexualisierten Anwurf schien mir das ganz passend. Es ist auch nicht die Sorte Sprüche, die jemand in meiner Gegenwart über meine Mutter (zB) zweimal machen würde, obwohl sie dazu neigt, den öffentlich-rechtlichen Nachrichten glauben zu schenken.
They won’t look like idiots because they are not
They will look evil
They cannot possibly be unaware what they are doing is wrong
You seriously overestimate human intelligence and underestimate their tendency to stubbornly stick to a specific viewpoint in complete disregard of the world around them.
To use a somewhat prominent example of a field I’m familiar with: In the early 1970s, some guy from the USA (Dennis Ritchie) designed a programming language called C. One of the things he did differently from the established European academic experts in the field was that he used a single equals sign to represent assignment, much to the chagrin of a guy from Switzerland called Nikolaus Wirth who was absolutely convinced that the proper assignment operator must be :=.
C went on the become the most successful programming language in the world and the =-for-assignment convention thus spread to a plethora of other programming languages in the next 50 years. Today, Ritchie is dead but Wirth is still alive. And he’s still busy with trying to save the world from using the wrong assignment operator (didn’t look for a couple of years but I’d be very much surprised if he had stopped meanwhile).
It’s possible (and I very much hope so) that people will stop to have listened to Susan Michie et al in ten years (hopefully much earlier) but she’ll still be advocating for use of lockdowns and universal facemasking to stop “diseases”. Reality doesn’t concern these people.
The question is how long till governments start nuking each other to divert blame and redirect fury about the economic collapse caused by our saviors. The situation in Israel/Iran US/China not looking bright at the moment.
This!
I think you’ve sketched some of the conclusions that will be drawn at Nuremberg 2.
First Israel, then Iceland… I wonder how many weeks of “freedom” we have left in the UK?
Not many I’d wager given we’re similar in vaccination uptake. The double vax’d are going to be scratching their heads so much they’ll be bald by Christmas lol.
Yup. Coming soon here. They will claim it is due to the new variant.
Good to hear a shift in opinion is beginning.
The question, why do we need “vaccination passports” when vaccines don’t work must occur to some, surely?
The vaxxed I know are dropping like flies. If you were to suddenly collapse the day after your second Pfizer, and then have to have major surgery for the first time in your life, you might THINK it might be somehow related wouldn’t you?
But no. Apparently it’s just a coincidence.
Booster to save Christmas.
This torture will never end.
Definitely not an experiment of course.
One day they might realise that you can’t effectively control a virus.
They know that
controlling the people is the agenda
Good letter from Iceland, can’t help but think back when the 2008 banking collapse was one of the trigger moments in Europe.
Enforced closures mean families will suffer and need gov’t aid. Very hard to stop a social credit score and centralised digital money when its the only hand that feeds you. The bean counters know at some point the debt needs to be either paid back or ‘reset’.
Exactly mirrors what’s happening in Israel, my own country. Most everybody vaccinated, one of the highest vac rates in the world, Pfizer nation. In April, May, government and public were giddy with triumph, and then since June it’s all gone to hell in a handbasket. Cases keep rising, and number of seriously ill in hospital. More than 70% of serious covid cases and covid dead the last month were fully vaccinated. Latest figures show 95% of serious covid ill have been vaccinated. 85% to 95% of those hospitalised have been fully vaxxed. Talking about another lockdown soon. Never mind that it’s a phantom pandemic. A pandemic of mass testing mania, testing has gone up 5 times the last month, so there has been a fourfold increase in the numbers of positives. Most all are asymptomatic.
So who does our idiot PM Bennett, the goon running the Health Ministry, and the morons in the media blame for the vaccine failure? That’s right. Those of us who had no faith in the vaccines, the unvaccinated. May as well blame us for all the death and maiming these vaccines have caused, like blaming the Jews for the Nazis, blacks for apartheid in South Africa etc. But the irony is through the holes in their heads. Of course they do though. The alternative is to blame themselves for being naive know-nothing fools who took the lying word of lying gangster Big Pharma which is laughing all the way to the bank (Pfizer alone has generated ten billion dollars in profits and counting). It would be too painful for the ego and their fragile minds to admit they are manipulated sheep, so they shoot the messengers instead. This of course is worldwide. The more of a disaster the vaccines are, they increasingly are shown to lack efficacy and the body count and the lives ruined with permanent injuries climbs daily, blame those who didn’t fall for the biggest scam in the history of science.
I should add that they have rolled out the third Pfizer booster dose last week for over 60s, a tacit admission that the vaccine doesn’t work. But most of the idiot public are too stupid to see it. It won’t work neither, watch as those third dosed test positive for the virus, and start getting ill from the vaccine in high numbers (but will be called covid since that’s what’s been happening from the start), since this poison is cumulative. All poisons are.
I saw that about the third dose, it’s like the theory of insanity, keep repeating the same mistake and hope for a different outcome. They seemingly sat down and said “Oh, vaccines don’t prevent anyone getting it, in fact it makes things worse. There is only one solution, we’ll do like the EU’s ‘More EU’ and give everyone ‘More Vaccine’. We are so jolly clever eh chaps?”.
OR perhaps if and when they are desperate to claim success, they will call it flu and pneumonia ……. they are wanting to push mRNA vaccines for flu from this year too ………. Perhaps next year they will have a rushed RSV vaccine despite having given up on trying to develop one over many, many years and that will be for winter 2023
Just to let you know, one goes to hell in a handcart, not a hand basket. I’m not sure why……perhaps it is more comfortable?
Depends if you live in a basket-weaving society, I imagine.
Join the effing club. It’s the League of Nations, once run by thick, greedy politicians, now usurped by malevolent, greedy medicos and modellers.
Will they have a discussion on the use of midazolam, and the NHS document
Just be patient and wait until everyone has become infected (vaccinated or not). Although given the primary and secondary “attack rates”, this may take a while.
You never seem to hear about how Africa is doing…
The problem is we/they really do not know whether ‘cases’ are ‘sky rocketing’ nor indeed whether it is only 10% who are unvaccinated. There are so many insidious, fear mongering, underhand means to coerce the populace. If people believe both of these premises they are more likely to get jabbed or try to persuade others to.
I am really shocked that we have allowed ourselves to be kowed and broken by a few world scientists following big pharma coordinated grab for money. No government in world history has created policy on a disease.
We have had plagues and killer viruses for millenia and yet the species survived successfully. More upsetting is populations are prepRed to throw away the future of their children and grandchildren for the myth of health safety.
Real virologists and immunologists have been silenced. No debate regarding the consequences of experimental injections on the young is allowed. We follow what the WHO tells us to do. Every country in lockstep with their Build Back Better sinister mantras, their rhetoric to have first one booster and now two, three or even constant boosters, without once questioning why.
Governments around the world are becoming huge bureaucratic monoliths. Taking over every aspect of society. Yet no one is allowed to express what they see before their own eyes. No one is dying in excess the usual yearly numbers per country in the 0 to 65 years. However there is excessive deaths in the 80yr old and above who are in hospital or care homes. Doesn’t anyone think this is odd????
We know the great scientists who have worked all their lives on causes and effects of viruses and bacterias are being shut put of the debate. We now know Dr Fauci has been facilitating some dangerous experiments in Wuhan. We know CCP have been harvesting live baby organs to help with vaccine creation. We know that President Trump was so appalled at the close connection between CCP and WHO he stopped USA finding and yet the British Government, instead of calling for investigation into these terrible findings, bridged the funding gap with our hard earned taxes.
When will the media stop obeying their globalist paymasters and ask a few pertinent questions of the Government. When will we have a principled MP who stands in Parliament and calls out their rotten and corrupt Government. When will the feminists actually protest against the cruelty towards children. We are in a spiritual war filled with project fear and propaganda against a frightened world population. Many of whom are being kept in ignorance in order that cruelty beyond understanding can be wrought upon the world. A cruelty that only communism and the technocrats brings.
I could not believe the disappointment expressed by the chief epidemiologist that vaccines have not delivered herd immunity! It’s never been stated by anyone that these vaccines make one immune only that they may reduce transmission and prevent serious disease/death so by what miracle could they alone possibly induce herd immunity in the population. People have been sold a pup!
I have been watching the Reykjavik Grapevine since the latest volcanic eruption began. I get the impression that this ‘grapevine’ is as woke as it can get and I noted the usual presenter use the term ‘nazi’ when referring to the concept of herd immunity. I have visited the country four times and admired its scenery and people. Can someone confirm that the scourge of wokery has even claimed my once-favourite country?
Lockdowns are now necessary because if you don’t lockdown everyone sees that all you said before was bullshit and they throw you out of office. I said when the first lockdown ever, in Italy, started that this would happen and it is the same all over the world today. Somewhere, sometime a Politician has to hold up his hand and say “We screwed up” and let us get on with our lives. Covid-19 is man made and they didn’t bother to make the cure, we just have to get on with it and all the pretend Vaccines and lockdowns are doing nothing of any positive value.
Can DS please stop publishing rubbish that suggests poor old political leaders are being held to ransom by their scientist advisors, just as much victims of coercion as the plebs are. Bollocks. They are every bit as complicit in this charade, more so in fact because they have shown they are absolutely capable of deplatforming anyone whose views don’t toe the party line, including eminent scientists. I just don’t buy that any of the politicians are going along with this against their will, unless the real Powers That Be have some juicy blackmail material held over them (which is quite possible, because it’s my understanding that TPTB got many of them into those positions of political power in the first place).
Nobody suggested that. Our so-called political leaders have been selected by an acclamation process focussed on short-term popularity and are either members of so-called vulnerable groups or at least of the age groups bordering these. The same is true for the majority of their important voters.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, a ‘democracy’ has no other institutional concerns: Even the supposedly most sacred parts of constitutions bend like reeds in the wind when they become unpopular with the right people.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2020-04-17/coronavirus-vaccine-ian-frazer/12146616 It was always going to be difficult to produce a successful vaccine. Surprisingly this man has been interviewed recently and is extolling the virtues of the current vaccines. Might change his mind as events unfold.