The BBC reports that Wales’s First Minister Mark Drakeford has told the Covid Inquiry that local Covid lockdowns were a “failed experiment”.
He could have said it was a failed policy or intervention, but Drakeford chose to say lockdowns were an “experiment”.
An experiment is a scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery and test a hypothesis.
However, at the time, lockdowns were a policy enforced by law.
Mark Drakeford announced in May 2020 that the maximum fine for repeated breaches of the lockdown rules in Wales rose from £120 to £1,920. Up to June 8th, 2,282 Fixed Penalty Notices were issued for – as it seems now – failing to participate in an experiment. People in Wales were twice as likely as English to be fined for breaking lockdown rules. Some experiment.
We are at a loss to explain how the people who set the laws can do so based on experiments. As for experiments, where was the consent procedure, where was the control group and where was the evaluation?
The Welsh Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser for Health, Rob Orford, read from the evidence Drakeford provided to the inquiry that “in hindsight perhaps they weren’t the best idea”.
Yet again, we learned that policy wasn’t based on any evidence. “I’m not sure where the origin of the idea around local interventions came from, whether that was the U.K. Government or Welsh Government.”
We utterly reject the “hindsight” argument, which Sir John Edmunds also used as an excuse for some of his most extreme advice.
We reject it because we pointed out the obvious on April 8th 2020: you cannot affect the circulation of an endemic respiratory virus with any of the interventions known to us, including vaccines, which were not on the table then.
We pointed out that wrecking society and the economy to chase an evidence fallacy was the stuff of nightmares. We and the rest of society have paid a heavy price for this temerity.
Policy must be based on expertise and evidence. If there is no evidence, you either generate it or sit on your hands as the precautionary principle suggests, until such time as the costs and benefits of alternative actions are clear.
No amount of boot licking, spin and hiding from the public can give us back what this mob of politickers, modellers and activists have taken.
The post will not self-destruct or self-delete; it isn’t an experiment.
Prof. Carl Heneghan is the Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Dr. Tom Jefferson is an epidemiologist based in Rome who works with Professor Heneghan on the Cochrane Collaboration. This article was first published on their Substack, Trust The Evidence, which you can subscribe to here.
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“The U.K. Doesn’t Have Enough Workers to Build Labour’s 1.5 Million New Homes”
I have made this point numerous times here on DS in the few months that Ranting has been spouting this nonsense.
And Brexit has F A to do with any of this.
I seem to recall that when free movement kicked in there was a rush of trades from the east to come here and make their fortunes. I dont have an axe to grind about the quality and hard working nature. We had some Polish and Lithuanian builders and they worked like trojans, and delivered good quality, but they also undercut local trades and depressed the market for new trainees. Since a lot of them went home, counting their cash, it seems to have left a bit of a shortfall of good locally trained tradesmen.
And the pressure on young people to go to university rather than learn a trade to meet Eminence Blair’s proclamation that 50% of school leavers must go to university, as well as shutting down the polytechnics.
Many of them were sending their money back home so effectively exporting money from the UK economy. Remind me again how immigration benefits us?
Not only that, many were claiming from the British Welfare State …. child benefit and probably Tax credits … for children “left behind” in their own country. No proof of said “children” was required.
We used to be sending One million pounds per month to Poland in Child Benefit payments. Presumably that has increased somewhat in the last ten years.
Few went home.
Yes. The law of supply and demand kicked in. They imported hundreds of thousands of foreign construction workers who were able and prepared to live in houses of multiple-occupancy and who could therefore undercut British construction workers who had to earn enough to pay for their own house/family.
So young people, who might have considered going into one of those trades, worked out that their income would be inadequate to provide a reasonable standard of living and made alternative choices.
Socialism is all about process not outcome. Quotas must be set, fulfilling them isn’t what’s important.
The solution is surely obvious, import 3 million foreigners skilled at building the mud huts which are all we’ll be allowed anyway.
We won’t need electricians because there’ll be no electricity.
Indoor bathing and central heating also a no no for net zero compliance so no plumbers needed either.
I love it when plan comes together!
In all probability.
Yet again the useless leader of the opposition was on television this morning, spouting on about being an engineer. I don’t know why this makes her a better politician than anyone else, but look at her back story and she is no more an engineer than Reeves is an economist. Why does every speech and interview include this tripe, it’s as bad as father was a tool maker
Prefabs were built quickly after WW2. They lasted decades and people liked them.
True, and some of them still exist, albeit modernised to some extent depending on the local weather etc. However, they were probably not planned to do that. Even five year plans are too short term for most politicians.
I spent a lot of my state education in temporary classroom huts that were there for decades. I had a spell at a private school and there were none there.
And the Luftwaffe had thoughtfully cleared the land ready for construction.
Agreed. But ‘the Regulations’ wouldn’t permit such buildings nowadays. Single glazed steel frames, lack of insulation, use of asbestos panels and roofing.
Now if you were to give me the job (you would be daft) of providing so many houses quickly I would opt for wooden framed houses with brick or concrete block/render outside skins. The wooden frames could come pre wired and pre plumbed to reduce the skills demand. At a site near me they built the roof structure on the ground and craned it on to the house which was probably safer and quicker.
First job: build the factories to produce the component parts in the quantity required. And that will take some time too. And we will need lorries and JCBs too.
It wouldn’t surprise me if prefab type houses are used to get over this ‘problem’. They can be built in China, shipped over and fitted to their concrete bases, job done. Not much skill needed to join them up to sewerage etc – similar to park homes.
Correct. It’s the only way they will possibly be able to deliver the dwellings they have “promised.” That, or Static Caravans/Park Homes.
Agree, John. And of course modern pre-fab housing would be much better than those old pre-fabs were. New materials are available that weren’t even dreamed of then, no reason why they shouldn’t have double glazing and good insulation and so on. We build houses by having bricklayers build them with tiny bricks stuck together with glue (mortar) rather as if they were being built with Lego – surely we can do better. The whole construction system needs to be rethought – and what’s more, I bet someone has already rethought it somewhere in the world.
But we do have enough workers to build thousands of wind turbines, solar installations and thousands of miles of high-tension transmission cables, pylons, interconnectors?
And it’s not just the labour resource, it’s raw material/component supply, manufacturing, transportation, and there’s another thing… can’t quite think of it… oh yes, capital, money – tax, borrow, print money, I suppose.
The trouble with Socialists is they have no clue about economics and how an economy works… well no clue about anything – if they did they wouldn’t be Socialists.
“But we do have enough workers to build thousands of wind turbines, solar installations and thousands of miles of high-tension transmission cables, pylons, interconnectors?”
No.
For the same reason, I wouldn’t be too concerned about electronic control matrices and the like just yet. Watching my own employer scrabble globally to recruit Control and Instrumentation Engineers has been eye-opening.
Such people are essential for the design, construction and maintenance of such things.
Wot no highly skilled cultural enrichers available?
And no ships to lay subsea cables until after 2030.
So, we could build the numbers of houses promised if we had enough skilled people.
So, we could build the numbers of windfarms promised if we had enough skilled people.
So, we could build the numbers of solar farms promised if we had enough skilled people.
So, we could build the numbers of EV charging points necessary if we had enough skilled people.
So, we could build the necessary power distribution infrastructure if we had enough skilled people available.
But many are working on the HS2 vanity project, extended by Labour.
And then is there are enough concrete, steel, copper, project manager, capital etc.
No sign of joined up thinking here.
(Simultaneously posted with JXB comment)
Details, details…
It’s come to something when an industry is so bad that it spawns companies like “New Home Quality Control”.
But then builders aren’t builder any more, they’ve joined the banks in the industry of finance. Much easier to import cheap labour than train your own.
We hear the complaint that builders are ‘sitting’ in land – so-called land banks. Nobody gives thought to why behind the usual low intellect “profiteering” waiting for land values to go up.
No thought is given to availability of ressources to build, or the Byzantine planning rigmarole… except for wind and solar subsidy harvesting farms.
Some of them are. By us there are going to be 1700 houses and enormous sheds. Been waiting for developers to agree S.106 monies. Don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to settle.
These legalised thefts of money by councils – S106, CIL etc. – are all costs to developers. Having had to sign a S106 myself on selling my house to a developer I know that no money is paid until the ground is broken, by which time I had sold and gone so was not for me to pay.
With the open borders and the 1 million African-Muslim invaders each year, surely, pace the fake news and propaganda, most of these men are engineers, brick layers, plumbers, plasterers, carpenters etc ?
We should be drowning in skill trades people according to the no-borders cult?
A lot of them seem to be pretty handy with bladed instruments, so there is that…
Carpenters then?
Butchers more like…
Now watch the floodgates open even further to let in all and sundry pretending to be a much needed tradesman so they can build houses for their buddies pouring across the border.
Then we’ll need even more houses, so we will need to import even more builders…etc ad infinitum
My thoughts exactly
Weird that. Who would have thought that the decline of traditional apprenticeships would lead to skills shortages?
As for all the other technical projects from which we are to “benefit”, who do they think is going to physically do all of this?
There is a shortage of STEM graduates, not to mention craft trades.
After all, electrical engineering is harder than “Decolonisation of Interpretive Dance” or some of the other “degrees” being offered nowadays…
Today’s university fodder graduates to be late-entry shelf-stackers.
If they’re lucky. It isn’t a stretch to say that shelf stacking could be done by a robot. Many large distribution depots now use robotic pickers to retrieve stock for shipment when it is ordered.
Again though, PLC-controlled, so needs the aforementioned C&I engineers/techs to implement and maintain.
Meanwhile the Education Blob is salivating at the prospect of changing the school curriculum (England and Wales), ridding it of colonial influences, etc. Naturally a review has been launched, but we can sleep easy, because it is “expert-led”. Yes, umpteen Profs of the Sociology of Education will decide the outcome.
Will they be consulting with the construction industry on increasing the supply of toxic males into the building industry?
Oops
Brexit nothing to do with it. We had been importing at rates far above what they say they need and few went home.
We get that many people across the channel in a year +\- Trouble is they are completely untrained.
Undoubtedly lockdowns drive many out if work and no new tradesmen were able to learn.
Given the claims by the elites that immigrants are better people than us the 900,000 bet extra last year and 700,000 year just ended means they can build their own houses in double quick time.
Shame we can’t make bricks or windows.
… “few went home”? Where I was living at the time a lot of Poles went home, not sure how much of that was misrepresentation of Brexit and how much was COVID.
So they need to build 821.9 homes per day and since the Student Union took over they should have completed 109,315 houses. About the only way they will get near the target is by building flats which may well be popular with the incoming immigrants who will occupy them.
…and all those flats will have to be heated by air source heat pumps? Where?
We seem to have enough “economically idle” people around to start training up, but that may take some time – 3-5 years?
And they will be trained by whom, exactly?
Can’t some of those Graduates in Critical Studies retrain as plasterers or carpenters… don’t they know a hawk from a handsaw?
… not enough workers?
Not if they bring in more immigrants…
It’s a bit like the plan to build Nightingale hospitals when there were obviously not enough doctors, nurses etc to staff them.
We desperately need politicians who have some basic common sense and intelligence which seems to be in extraordinarily short supply in the Tory, Labour and Lib Dem camps.
Being labour, they’ll start by recruiting a thousand DEI staff to make sure all the new workers are of the correct colour, their experience is irrelevant!
And who are all these homes for ?
Numbers don’t seem to be a speciality, with this lot….are these the fruits of down grading Maths in school.
Dummies In Charge Of The Toy Store…. & The Toys, Are Humans.