Boris Johnson is due to address MPs about the lifting of the ‘last’ restrictions at 4:30pm. However, there was a glitch this morning as the Cabinet meeting to finalise the plan was delayed because of a reported standoff between Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, and Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary. Mr. Javid – a former sceptic who seemed to go native within hours of taking up the post in June – is said to want free testing to continue. The Telegraph has more.
The Treasury and Department of Health have been at loggerheads in recent days over the cost of some of the measures in the Living with Covid Plan, which is due to be announced by the Prime Minister in the Commons this afternoon.
Treasury officials are worried about the continuing cost of free Covid tests, which Boris Johnson has said is costing the country around £2 billion a month.
Mr Sunak has said that any money for testing beyond March must come from the existing health budget.
But Mr Javid thinks testing should continue for more people, for longer, and has requested additional funds from the Treasury to pay for it.
As a former Chancellor and (former) sceptic, Mr. Javid should really know better than to want to drag out the Omnicold ’emergency’ by perpetuating the costly nonsense of constant testing. Let’s hope the sceptical and financially prudent voices win out in the Cabinet meeting that is now underway.
Worth reading in full.
Meanwhile, Sir John Bell – Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford and a member of the expert advisory group to the Vaccine Taskforce – has said it’s time to “step back” from Covid restrictions “and get on with life”. The Telegraph has more.
The time was always going to come for society to “step back” from Covid restrictions “and get on with life”, an Oxford professor has said.
Mandatory, legally enforced quarantine is “probably not necessary” in the face of the more benign Omicron variant, Prof Sir John Bell told BBC Radio 4.
“People on the whole are pretty sensible,” he said. “If they feel that they’re highly symptomatic they’re not going to go in and sit next to somebody at work and spread the disease around.”
“I think we can rely pretty effectively on good behaviour from the population to avoid the spread of disease and even if it does spread we do know it to be mild and we now know that 97% of the population have now got antibodies to this virus.”
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Does anyone else find it odd that we are re-introducing beavers because their dams reduce flooding, whilst removing dams because they interfere with nature?
And yet Beavers are good at felling trees, ask any Game keeper.
It’s not odd. It is because greens are not very clever. They are a product of the past 50 years of apalling tertiary education. Also this is normally what happens when you have female stem graduates in charge of stuff. Sack them all
Whenever Imperial College is mentioned as a source of data early in the story, you know where it’s heading.
I thought you were going to say, you stop reading the article.
Spain has been leading Europe’s dam removal programme, with 108 dams taken down alone in 2021, and an estimated 200 dams removed from its rivers in total since the EU’s Water Framework Directive was issued: https://expose-news.com/2024/11/06/are-dam-removal-projects-the-cause/.
GREEN Politics is destroying the western world. We can see the almighty mess Germany has got itself in. The UK now has the highest electricity prices in the entire world and everywhere Greens go they leave a trail of destruction in their wake. They are a a pseudo-scientific fraud and motivated entirely by ideology that uses the environment and the planet as the excuse for every one of their policies, which amount to Central Planning and total control of every aspect of people’s lives (Communism) and the photo above shows us the result. ——These people are being booted out now in Germany and only when the entire world gets rid of this garbage can we all start to flourish and live normally free from this tyranny. ——Here in the UK we unfortunately are heading in the wrong direction (as usual) but Miliband and Labour must be removed before our mothers freeze to death in their house and the blackouts come thick and fast.
Same as the “unprecedented” flooding of the Somerset Levels a decade ago.
It was only unprecedented in the sense that there were no official records of the extent of flooding before Civil Engineering and the Levels were drained.
The Eco Nutters at the Environment Agency thought it was a good idea not to dredge the drainage channels in the interests of prioritising and protecting wildlife …. most of which drowned when the floods occurred.
And remember some farmer in Herefordshire who dredged a river, and saved local houses from being flooded, the busy-body Council took legal action against him. Can’t have independent people looking after locals can we!
Ben, is it or is it not true that a number of flood-control dams in the Valencia catchment have been de-commissioned for environmental reasons?
I went to Valencia a few years ago and the town was very proud of their solution to constant flooding that used to happen on a regular basis. They diverted the river that ran through the centre of town and made the river bed into a park.
This brief article from 2012 explains the scheme.
https://metropolismag.com/projects/how-valencia-turned-crisis-river-into-park/
I wonder if the removal of dams upstream then affected this scheme in unimaginable, or at least un-modeled ways?
It seems to be standard practice in climate modelling to add uniformly distributed noise to some of the continuous variables. This is the only application I’ve heard of in scientific simulation and I’ve never seen anything but a hand waving justification. As Einstein might have said, God does not play die.
What a great couple Ferguson and Otto. Maybe they could model a relationship together?
Preferably while locked in a room in the basement of Imperial.
A lot of towns in the hilly area of Valencia are built in river valleys, flooding has happened before and will happen again,very rarely reported until now, a point completely ignored by the likes of the BBC
“… are in the grip of a movement that requires the demolition of dams. On that bizarre green view, dams degrade society’s relationship with nature.”
The same movement wants us to build dams to provide pumped storage to solve the problem of unsustainable, unreliable, intermittent wind/solar power.
Funny old World.
Global warmimg is not the real problem, it is global idiocy.
“I call this sport eco-hyperreality,” I have a better name for this and all the other numerical gibberish that underpins the CAGW scam – ‘arithromancy’. Wish I could claim authorship, but honesty forbids…
If anyone is interested, please read Professor Willie Soon, an astrophysicist. He explains very clearly, there is no man made climate change. Watch his interview on X with Tucker Carlson, if you are interested in the truth about “climate change”.
Most on this list are converts. The problem is how to get his and many other similar messages out into and accepted by the majority of the global population.
This Green ideology is basically the return of Paganism. If something goes wrong, it is because we have displeased the gods of the natural world.
Our world has turned its back on Christianity and re-embraced the primitive religion that Boadicea would have respected and probably followed. See The Wicker Man for further details.
The Viz, again.
So dams are wholly unnatural, engineered artefacts of culture.
But wind turbines and solar farms aren’t?
At least dams are nominally functional and worthwhile.