Net Zero electricity taxes and levies are set to cost British consumers almost £100 billion over the next six years, according to the latest official figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). The ‘environmental levies’ total includes a variety of green rackets from paying suppliers to produce uneconomic energy to persuading consumers to install inferior technologies. As the insane dash towards Net Zero continues in elite political circles, the costs have started to spiral out of control.
Almost all green technologies seem to require huge amounts of public subsidy with no end in sight to constant demands for cash. Recently, offshore wind generators refused to take further Government licences in the North Sea unless the U.K. Government complied with their demands for higher guaranteed prices. In real terms the Government is now prepared to pay over £100 per megawatt hour, a price more than the current estimated cost of gas-powered electricity.
The investigative climate journalist Paul Homewood has been digging into the figures for years, and notes the offshore wind business is already being subsided to the annual tune of £4.8 billion. This despite the fact that we have been promised ‘rapidly falling’ wind power costs that would bring our bills tumbling down. “Now we know that was always a lie,” observes Homewood. Looking at the financial accounts, Homewood concludes that there is “no prospect” that costs will decline in future. On the contrary, he continues, they are likely to continue increasing as supply chain and manufacturing problems mount.
“We are therefore now locked into permanently high electricity prices, with contract prices guaranteed for 15 years,” he notes.
Homewood has produced the table below from the latest figures from the OBR. In total it shows how all the ‘environmental levies’ surrounding the production of electricity are set to provide hard-pressed U.K. consumers with an entirely unnecessary collective bill for £95 billion over the next six years. As Homewood notes, the figures below show the cost added to energy bills by the various assortment of renewable subsidies, capacity market payments and the climate change levy.
Homewood has added in three relevant costs to the OBR table. The feed-in tariffs scheme was recently excluded, but in Homewood’s view it is wrongly left out since it increases energy bills. The Climate Change Levy on productive business is noted elsewhere in the OBR report, but Homewood has “taken the liberty” of adding it to his table. It need hardly be added that this does not involve all the cost of runaway Net Zero fiscal madness. Homewood notes, for instance, that there is no mention of the costs of electricity grid upgrades, system balancing cost and constraint payments – all the direct result of increased renewable generation. And, of course, one can take it out even wider to include the cost of keeping vast amounts of gas capacity idle, waiting to fire up when the wind stops blowing, often for days at a time.
But it might be asked, what is £100 billion when an almost complete dismantling of modern economic society is being planned? A mere down payment on wealth destruction on an unimaginable scale. At a time when the political will to control immigration has withered, massive deindustrialisation is being planned in Europe, with unimaginable effects on the less affluent members of society. On the basis of an unproven hypothesis that human-produced carbon dioxide controls a climate headed for disaster – now deemed ‘settled’ and beyond debate – small, well-funded elite groups in society are planning to remove 85% of the world energy supply within less than 30 years. How far they will get in this madcap, nightmarish scheme before being repelled by gathering rational and democratic forces, only time will tell.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Isn’t it more a case of: money can flow to our relative and cronies, therefore money must flow to our relatives and cronies?
(Literally) unaccountable (literally) hundreds of billions of swill has flowed into the trough, and even the runtiest of the swine have got their snouts in it.
Recall that Parliamentary scrutiny of the £37bn (with a b) Snitch-n-Spy system’s main demand wasn’t that those who ordered it and profited from it be hung up in gibbets. No, it’s that “for the £billions spent we need to see a top class legacy system”.
Sure, it didn’t work, but we need to ensure that it keeps not working.
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/150988/unimaginable-cost-of-test-trace-failed-to-deliver-central-promise-of-averting-another-lockdown/
Don’t believe anything these politicians say
Vaccine rebellion rising as Biden wages biological warfare on the American people
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-09-12-top-interviews-with-zach-vorhies-dr-christiane-northrup-mark-grenon-brad-harris.html
Upcoming events anti lockdown roadside events with the Big Boards
Monday 13th September 5pm
BIG BOARD NIGHT – anti lockdown roadside event
High St, ASCOT SL5 7HP
just before A330 Winkfield Road/A329 London Road
Wednesday 15th September 5.30pm Rebels on Roundabouts
Downshire Way, Bracknell RG12 7AA
near Premier Inn/Bracknell Fire Station
Saturday 2nd October 2pm GRAND STAND IN THE PARK BERKSHIRE
– with a couple of guest speakers.
Reading River Promenade
Reading RG4 8BX
Stand in the Park Reading River Promenade Reading
Sundays from 10am
Telegram https://t.me/standindparkreading
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell –
Sundays from 10am
Wednesdays from 2pm
Make friends – keep sane
Telegram http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
COVID Data, Facts Not Fear
We know that much of the raw data underlying the CDC statistics are inflated by the way the data is collected and manipulated by the hospitals and healthcare system. However, that said, if we just accept the raw CDC data and evaluate what they are collecting as a way to estimate the risks….here’s the outcome.
♦ Facts as of 9/4/21:
♦ DEATHS BY AGE:
♦ TOTAL DEATHS account for 1.6% of total cases.
Why is COVID-19 being disproportionately hyped as such a dangerous threat, when the reality of the statistical danger is much less than the intense level of hype?
These FOI (freedom of information) figures for Scotland, courtesy of a hardworking investigator, reinforce your findings.
https://mobile.twitter.com/TheRustler83/status/1436583453315813379?s=20
Sweden.
Partly I see what they did as defensive. Defending themselves from the huge push of the fanatical zero covid and we need to be more like Jacinda Arden mad folk who would readily liked to have brought the government down. Then they had Dominic Cummings on the inside forcing lockdowns and European leaders all doing it. It would have taken a special kind of leader to stand up to all that.
“a special kind of leader”
Well, if by special you mean a leader that displayed leadership qualities, respected the rule of law, respected freedom of speech, tried to honour their election pledges, was able to look at varying expert advice critically, followed established protocols for dealing with “emergencies”, then I suppose so, yes. Isn’t that what a leader is, in a liberal democracy? if you don’t do those things, you’re not a leader.
Yes, and we didn’t have that person
I guess the point I am making is that I don’t regard those qualities as “special” (though they do seem rare). They are the minimum requirement for leadership positions.
The PM sought power and took an oath to defend our country against our enemies. Instead, he has given them aid, and waged war on his own people using our money to do it.
Were the people in Sweden who stuck to the plan “special” or were they just doing the job expected of them?
Yep. And being numerate and scientifically literate would help filter out the bullshitters, the last prime minister to have such skills was probably Thatcher.
I’m not sure that simple numeracy and scientific literacy are the criterion that has primacy, even though it’s important. A lot of the allegedly scientifically literate are part of the problem. Look at SAGE.
I think honesty is more of an issue, and the lack of checks on the exercise of power. I strongly doubt the PM is less numerate and scientifically literate than I am.
I think one of the problems is the ‘floater’ syndrome, where we are in a situation where there are a large number of windy turds coming to the top.
Some might say ”twas always thus’ – but I genuinely think that the quality of leadership has suffered a general decline as a social phenomenon.
Quite possibly. I think the other thing that happened was covid presented a unique combination of circumstances, at a point in time, which enabled people to get away with stuff they probably would not have before. A perfect storm.
Yes. It is a bit of a ‘cart and horse’ problem. What I’m pointing up is that the ‘floater’ problem was growing before this all happened, creating a key condition.
And one who didn’t let his health secretary discharge untested ill old people back into care homes and then spay midaxolam around like it was smarties [allegedly]
Every country in the world, with a few notable exceptions, scrapped its pandemic preparedness plans and adopted Draco’s. Lockdown was orchestrated and coordinated, with sinister intent. I don’t buy that politicians were afraid. Except for Trump. He wasn’t in on the psy-ops. Falling for it was his fatal mistake.
Are we really this naïve? Still? After 18 months of this pythonic squeeze, relax, squeeze harder?
Mandatory imposition of vaxports has been temporarily paused, and nothing more.
The system remains in place, and will remain in place. They are already required as a contractual condition of entry into some venues. The correct sort of chaps with the correct sort of common purpose will be called up and asked if they wouldn’t mind awfully imposing vaxports across their retail and office empires.
Meanwhile, Queen Nicola, whose cabal is limited to public sector parasites, has had to charge ahead openly with the New Normal, and iron out (or stamp on) the hitches and the opposition.
Come Autumn/Winter coughs-and-sneezes season the terror will be ramped up again, muzzles will be back South of the border, and “With great reluctance, now is the time for Vaxports”.
In the meantime, I have no doubt that they’ll come up with a Vaxport Sniffer app so that our outsourced hi-vis Stasi can probe us efficiently and remotely, with our without our consent.
Please, please stop falling for politicians’ words. Look only at their actions and reality. A temporary reprieve in more despotism is not the same as increased freedoms, it is merely a brief relaxation in the slithery coils that are breaking our spirit to resist.
Please, please stop falling for politicians’ words.
We don’t fall for politicians words. We comply to stop the politicians hired thugs beating ups up, fining and imprisoning us…
Perhaps it is a good time to remind ourselves that the precautionary principle – often espoused by the ‘decision makers’ throughout 2020 – is essentially a presumption against action. Its use to justify action always seemed very dubious to me.
The precautionary principle is a process for allowing environmentalists to do what they want and suppressing disagreement…
Does anyone have a link or links where i can fund vaccine rollout rates by country (eg., for country XXX n% vax’d in jan21, m% vaxed in feb21, etc)? European countries in particular, for the US by state?
I’m looking for data to research the hypothesis that vaccines have no significant effect on long term overall mortality rates.
Thanks in advance.
The Our World in Data website should do that for you.
This link should give you a lot of what you want.
Reply to all who gave me info, thanks
“After all, we can’t observe the counterfactual of what would have happened in the absence of lockdown.”
Sweden
You were TOLD that you CAN’T observe it! This was not a comment, it was an order…
With apologies to Isaac Asimov,
The three laws of government :
1) A government through action or inaction must not harm or allow harm to the general public.
2) A government must obey the general public except if in doing so it breaks the First law
3) A government must protect itself except if in doing so it breaks the First or Second law.
But the usual problem arises – “harm” needs to be carefully and tightly defined, otherwise principles using it in the way you do here can easily become tools for justifying illiberal oppression. See the woke speechcrime laws that have applied in this country now for decades, and form part of the European superstate’s quasi-constitution, or the medico-fascism imposed in pursuit of a supposed duty on the state to protect the health of the population..
Even Asimov noted that ‘harm’ could be widely interpreted, and had a story where some robots had the ‘prevent harm’ instruction suppressed to allow them to work with humans in dangerous conditions where a man might suffer moderate amounts of harm – low-level radiation, for instance.
Of course, those robots got loose…
Indeed. Iirc most of Asimov’s robot stories involved clever ways of interpreting and finding loopholes in his Laws.
Clever and entertaining stuff, but the use of principles based on interpretations of harm has a long history in our culture, pervading utilitarianism and a lot of liberal thinking.
Politician’s logic applies to a wider class of people than just politicians. When the medical advisers were asked what to do – and there was inadequate data to base a decision on – that didn’t stop them recommending courses of action…
For what it’s worth. my view of the episode is:
1 – New disease starts spreading from China. Unknown lethality – could be very bad.
2 – Government starts activating pandemic plan. (This is sensible – even though it calls for the elderly to be kicked out of hospital and die in care homes.). At that stage data suggested that we needed to prepare for a bad disease.
3 – Now the Medical Establishment start to be in charge. They start to order PPE in. Suddenly, a lot of money is made available. This corrupts the process.
4 – The Pharmaceutical Companies see their chance to monetarise the 20 years worth of work they have been doing on experimental respiratory disease vaccines to fight flu. They tell the Medical Establishment that they can save the world. The Medical Establishment eagerly support them and brief politicians accordingly.
5 – The Pharma companies need TIME to develop, manufacture and distribute their vaccine. The don’t want the lucrative patient base:
a) to die before getting jabbed
b) to catch it and gain immunity
c) to find a useful pre-existing treatment
So, they stop the Pandemic Plan, call for lockdown and masks, and suppress research into alternative treatments
6 – This whole process requires vast sums of money. Every fraudster jumps in. The Establishment loses control as every bureaucrat becomes a little oppressor. The police go into full oppression mode
7 – By now, effective control has been lost to single-interest groups competing in a purity spiral. Teachers refuse to work, the NHS shuts up shop, large businesses close down offices, Airlines and small businesses lose out and start to go bust….
There was a pre existing very long term plan by Fauci, Gates, Wellcome and their lieutenants who had. worked with WHO and been funded by them, to weaponise the first signs of any possible pandemic disease to bring in rna “vaccines” and universal medical ID.
They’d rehearsed it with swine flu, failed, and planned and bribed via research grants ever since to do it successfully next time.
Add that to the top of your list and that’s pretty much it.
Lockdowns were a brilliant addition to forcing us into vaccines, adopted by the Fauci gang on the hoof because China did it.
Leaders across the world gave in to the idea in the panic because they thought the “experts” knew best and they were being terrified by predictions of numbers dead.
Add in China immediately exploiting the situation every which way to weaken the West.
Noah, Freddie, Toby etc are blinded mainly by their terror of seeming stupid conspiracists, and their disbelief that people like them could do such a thing.
Correct about long term plan. Dr David Martin has documented this – and since explained further aspects on various blogs – in the The Fauci/COVID-19 Dossierhttps://f.hubspotusercontent10.net › hubfs › The Fau…
It has been attacked by “fact checkers” so form your own opinion; his dogged recording of the Patents relating to SARS/Coronaviruses etc etc cannot be denied as they are all public records in the US…and his recent dive into the Pfizer/Cominarty scam is revealing too..Del B at the Highwire has interviewed him as have others.
The fact that aspects of the “vaccines” were patented before SARS COV2 was unleashed should be cause for thought – at the very least.
“At that stage data suggested that we needed to prepare for a bad disease.”
Is that an established fact? I am not so sure. Data from the Diamond Princess suggested is wasn’t, I thought. Anyway, why would we have believed Chinese data?
My pet theory is that they got wind of the possibility of a lab leak and it frightened them into the action we saw.
my memory suggests that the data that came back from Italy in early March 2020 showed it was only old people dying but that a years’ worth of old people dying may be compressed into a month and overwhelm the NHS. This is the sort of stuff Spiegelhalter was saying. The 3 week lockdown was to prevent that but then it dragged on for months (I don’t know why). The winter lockdown was done because they got away with it before and everyone else was doing it.
We stopped following the science the moment we threw out the pandemic response plan and politicians took over (egged on by the media and bedwetting scientists)
…but then it dragged on for months (I don’t know why).
I explained that. It dragged on because by then the Pharma Companies had sold the Medical Establishment on a vaccine cure for the pandemic. But they needed time. So a lockdown was extended to ‘keep people safe until the vaccine was ready’.
Of course, the lockdown did not stop the virus. But by then the entire bureaucratic establishment of the country was sold on lockdown, and it could not be stopped…
I thought Imperial based their doom predictions on Chinese data as well as Italian, but I could be wrong.
It is the job of politicians to lead the response. That in itself is not the problem (Whitty is no solution!). The problem is the motivations and the resulting nature of the response.
Is that an established fact? I am not so sure. Data from the Diamond Princess suggested is wasn’t, I thought. …
Data from the Princess was interesting, but hadn’t been peer reviewed, examined for confounders, etc. It might have been an outlier for all sorts of reasons which we couldn’t appreciate AT THE TIME.
I would not like to, and I’m sure that the Chief Medical Officer would not like to, advise that a whole country need not prepare for a pandemic based on the raw data from one ship.
Of course, LATER, it turned out that the Diamond Princess was a pretty accurate predictor. But we could not have been sure at the time….
why would we have believed Chinese data?
The data that started the panic was Italian…
my money is on Neil Ferguson’s phrase – I’m paraphrasing here – we saw lockdowns in China and didn’t think we could do it here but when we saw they were doing it in Italy “we knew we could get away with it” (his actual words).
I think you are right.
Seems pretty accurate to me.
the key words there are “purity spiral” !!!
“the successes of the command-and-control governments of Asia”
What successes would these be, and who is to say that they occurred because of a command-and-control government, rather than in spite of it?
I expect he is referring to the economic growth of some Asian countries. Well, liberal democracies have done that too, before the Asians. We’ve also done improved public health, low crime, long periods of peace, not being conquered, general happiness, cultural growth, world domination. I’m not saying we don’t have flaws, just can’t see what success we should be envious of, in particular.
Anyway, why assume that our politicians are interested in success, in the sense the writer means it. The evidence is that they are interested in the success of the CCP in staying in power for more than 70 years, largely unchallenged.
Problem is, you are referring to a reaction to a situation and whether that reaction was right or not. But the evidence points to the Govt having created the situation. In which case the scrutiny must be of earlier events than reaction. The evidence is, that the PCR test is inappropriate in this context and was used inappropriately. This would lead to excess positive results, which appears to be what was required. Deaths within 28 days (originally 60) is almost designed to exaggerate. And it is entirely coincidental that the virus chosen to receive these reactions, was a mild one, no worse than flu? How can we extend the ‘pandemic’? Lockdowns. How do we get the public to go along with it? Relentless fear-mongering. And apart from the massive wealth transferred to vaccine companies, I cannot see what the point was? The useless NHS, offering a massively reduced service, demands huge increases in funding, to go back to what they did before. The easily led imbecile Johnson, goes on to apply the logic of a five year old to non-existent Climate Change.
While I would normally agree with your essay during “normal “ times, in the present “new normal” being forced across all nations with rare exceptions, I can’t find the satisfaction that this thesis; politicians just doing something, has much explanatory power.
Rather this is just the normalising excuse used to maintain that this is just a cock-up theory much loved by TY and those attached to the old normal.
It is trully difficult for normies, and now I must include those who still cling to old perspectives like TY and you, the author, to see that this is far more diabolical than you are capable of imagining.
All the leaders of the G7 are fully on board and coordinating this controlled demolition of the old order, synchronised to diminish the individual spectacle and to spread the notion that this reaction was the only possible reaction to an incredibly minor viral pandemic.
After all the cooperation of media outlets, social media giants with singular owners that frequently meet with these same leaders, along with the wealthiest financiers on the planet, all with megalomaniacal beliefs in their role of controlling the planet, knowing full well the financial system will collapse imminently, have planned these recent events and have been freewheeling the general responses across the globe.
I think it’s sweet that you still think the world works like the times of Yes Prime minister. But it’s a nonsense.
This ^^^^
Yes, this. Normies gonna normie. They spent a lifetime thinking within the box and there’s literally no way out for these people. That’s why I find London Calling simultaneously fascinating and frustrating at the same time. It’s good to see James hacking into Toby, but Toby’s defences and smug turnarounds are cringe. Because he’s a normie, and that’s all he has to work with. The worst normie’s are the educated ones, and especially the journalists, because they equate their experience with How the World Works. I was near the front lines of power for two decades says Toby. No, he went to a couple of flatulent London dinner parties. Not the same thing. So yes, Yes Minister represents the peak of ironic wit and wisdom to the normie intelligentsia. This is because in normie world there is no active principle of evil, just too much paperwork sometimes. Even this website is really a great snapshot of normie teetering on the brink of the abyss. Lockdowns bad, masks bad, vaccines maybe they’re ok? See what happened there? Most recent Catherine Austin Fitts interview on Delingpod pretty much nails it exactly in my book. 10,000 year secret government rules earth. If you’re snorting as you read that, you’re a normie.
“ 10,000 year secret government rules earth. If you’re snorting as you read that, you’re a normie.”
Well I guess I’m a normie then. Isn’t there a middle ground where you recognise politicians can be/are often badly intentioned/evil if the circumstances allow them to get away with it, but you don’t think there’s a 10,000 year secret government ruling earth?
Neither you nor I have the slightest idea of whether or not there really is a 10,000 year secret government. The difference between us is you are convinced there is not and are sure you are right. That is EXACTLY how I defined normie above: you equate your experience with how the world works. You never got to meet the 10,000 year old government, nor read about it in your crappy degree, but you’re worldview is tiptop shiny and in no need to review: you are sure that any talk of a 10,000 year old government is completely batshit crazy. You didn’t stop, doubt yourself for a moment, go and listen to Catherine Austin Fitts, and then realise, hey, maybe there is more to it than my tiny mind and experience is aware of. Nope you just hit reply. Yep, you are a normie. Textbook.
I don’t have a degree.
I don’t think I ever said I know for sure there is not a secret 10,000 year government ruling earth, just seems unlikely based on what I know, which is very little, but not sure how much more you would know.
One has limited energy, so one tends not to spend too much time on things that are possible but unlikely, unless they hit you in the face e.g. the covid madness.
You said you don’t think there’s a 10,000 year secret government. On what basis? They didn’t send you an invitation? You didn’t read it about it at your favourite website? You have not the feintest clue whether it is true or not, and no way of knowing. But you’ve made up your mind, because you think you know the limits of reality. My point is you don’t know the limits of reality. You, me, anyone. But as soon as you think you do, as you are doing, you are just making stuff up. Catherine Austin Fitts is not just making stuff up like you. So quit arguing with me, and listen to the podcast, or not, I don’t care. But if you don’t listen, and you still think you know who runs the planet, you’re a normie.
I am afraid I don’t have time to listen to every possibly interesting podcast people link to.
I don’t think there is a 10,000 year old secret government because there doesn’t seem to be much evidence for it. Of course there might be, but I don’t think it’s an important avenue for anyone to pursue, at least not for me anyway.
I’m fully aware there is a lot of evil in the world and that people do things that are bad and attempt to hide them. But most of the time opportunism seems a more likely explanation than a long-running or elaborate conspiracy.
This is nothing but an appeal to ignorance. Logically invalid reasoning since the times of Aristotle and an all-time favorite of all kinds of snake-oil salesmen (such as the Corona practioners). Nothing follows from the fact that something is unknown.
Don’t forget about the lizards
Precisely this. It really is like walking through the looking glass vs peering at the surface and seeing flickering images of the wonderland. Once you step through however, you aren’t going back and that world is absurd and littered throughout with evil actors, practically demonic, but it is the real behind the superficial drama. That’s not to say there aren’t legions of useful idiots vacuously carrying out the plans of the megalomaniacs.
This is not a pleasant place, so you absolutely need to keep hold of the natural and eternal joys that living still offers even as the despicable entities lie, cheat, steal and attempt to enslave.
Excellent summation.
Does anyone have any details around the much censored “self-exemption” rights?
“ “I think I’m on the side that healthcare workers, perhaps social care staff, given that they’re interacting with highly vulnerable people, who are most at risk of Covid, there’s a justification there for requiring vaccination.”
Prof Ferguson quoted above on BBC. Why does it take so long to sink in that it doesn’t stop transmission? Are they lying on purpose?
I’m sure it has sunk in. They don’t care. They are desperate to push vaccines at all costs. As to why, take your pick.
lot of money and job security for a lot of people, pushing vaccines…
The lessons of Yes, Minister? How about Hippocrates?
An Open Lettercc: Mr. Nigel Farage, Mr. Laurence Fox, Mr. William Clouston and Mr. Richard Tice
Britain – whether we wish to admit it or not – is dying
.
This letter is a plea, to all of you, to help resuscitate it… together.
https://thecommoner.substack.com/p/an-open-letter
Politicians follow “politician’s logic” because a vocal, strident sector of the population instigated by the media demand action, any action.
Sayers hits the nail on the head of what has changed, though. China is the hot success story that too many people around the world admire and think we must replicate, in order to “not fall behind”.
Unfortunately, China’s success is grossly misunderstood. Copying anything from the “Chinese Model” will only make us poorer in every sense.
What success is this, exactly?
The demand for action was as much manufactured by government-funded fear porn, injudicious words designed to increase rather than reduce panic, and by a very selective use of data.
Exactly. If this had been treated as most ‘flu seasons are, no exceptionality or ‘crisis’ would have emerged – just levels of illness and mortality quite usual in a moderate infection season.
This isn’t really true: A demand for action manifested itself while the government still claimed to stick to the existing plan because of Italy! and also, because of Fergusons number games.
Government-funded fear porn was part of the action which was ultimatively taken.
I would love to have the time to cross-check the various government press conferences with the publication of the Imperial papers and the news from Italy. Someone who is working on this full time, like one of the DS journalists, ought to do that while the information is still available online.
Belgium was a well run country in the extended period it did not suffer from an operating government. Most of the time governments interfere, they don’t add constructively. but their very existence becomes a growing obstacle for societal development.
this is true. politicians don’t run countries – countries run themselves. politicians are supposed to use the law to change the framework within which countries run themselves. but they can’t help fiddling. what we need is a limit to when government’s sit or when they can change law. MPs should spend far more time helping their constituents with specific issues.
So you’re saying that bureaucrats (who presumably were the guys running Belgium when they didn’t have a functioning government) are better than politicians then?
No. Bureaucrats are a mixed bunch, some bad, some good, most neither. Someone has to keep processes working that a modern society needs. But poiticians generally have insufficient knowledge of detail to constructively help ‘manage’. When they do interfere its often to no good effect.
One of the major problems is that there are far too many overpaid politicians who end up trying to micro-manage because only a few have the wisdom to create policy. Its like all organisations, about 5% are indispensable and carry most of the 95%.
most people I speak to are expecting a winter lockdown. our company is preparing for it
it doesn’t really matter what Boris says about not wanting one. if cases go up (or if flu surges) he will u-turn again.
If politicians say they don’t want to do something, or that they don’t currently believe it to be necessary or proportionate, they’re almost certainly already making plans to do it. I wrote to my MSP about the vaccine passport vote, and the copy and paste response I received included this:
So they’re definitely planning to extend it to all but the most essential services before the end of the year.
“public transport, education and access to medical services or shops.”
But my taxes pay for those so I am paying for those services. Am I to pay for services that I am to be excluded from???
I have yet to see any journo or politician or commentator address that issue.
Locked up prisoners would still get access to education food and medical services. Why should someone who has NOT committed a criminal offence of such severity to be removed from society be put in a position where they are DENIED access to the services a prisoner is still given access to AND is expected to continue to pay to support the provision of those services to others including prisoners?
if you were following ‘the science’ you would not demand care home workers or NHS staff get vaccinated. you would ask for proof of previous natural infection.
if you are under 60 you might even consider getting it on purpose. natural infection is going to leave you done and dusted for the next 50 years.
I didn’t get it on purpose but I was happy to have it, after going to a big festival and getting drunk for a long weekend. quite mild (I’m in my early 50s) but now I am safe to visit my elderly parents.
I travelled all around Europe on the train, visited crowded bars, restaurants and concerts and I still couldn’t catch it. However, I did get a pretty unusual cough from Portugal in January 2020, so I’ve probably got multi-decade immunity already.
At the very start of this I would have gladly gone to a Covid-party to do my bit to protect the vulnerable. Unfortunately, no one seemed to actually have it apart from anyone who stepped foot inside a hospital, and besides I didn’t appreciate that it was so mild that I probably already had it before the PCR-demic got into full swing.
Incidentally, is anyone else seeing that before the mass vaccination we personally knew of literally no one who was ill with Covid, but now we hear of plenty of doubl-vaxxed, some of whom are actually very ill (and far too young to be that ill from the ‘rona). ADE seems to be in plain-sight.
last spring I knew of a handful of people who had it (all mild)
this summer and autumn its about half the people I know – all double jabbed
but nobody is dying with/of it and in a normal world we’d just think a mild summer cold is going round
“a pretty unusual cough from Portugal”
The fiction and confusion has so overlain the actuality that it is hard to tease out that actuality.
It wasn’t from Portugal, but I recall a particular lousy infection in 2019 that had the feature of a totally unusual long-lasting cough.
Nothing COVID-specific about that: As far as I know, this happens because viruses have started to replicate in the lung in numbers. I had this as part of some flu years ago (and didn’t get during the 2019 flu from hell or since, except for half a day in 2020, before COVID became a household monster).
Me too, autumn 2019 and several others I know.
A family I know reckoned their son brought it back from a skiing holiday in France. Lots of other people, self imcluded, had a strange long lasting cough around the end of 2019. No-one died but then we didn’t know we were meant to.
Yes we all got it this July. I’m 50. We had stocked up a long time ago on Ivermectin, HCQ and some other things. It was like flu for 2 or 3 days. Usual anosmia which went quickly. Then we got antibody tests showing high levels. As far as I’m concerned, I’m done. If I needed to I’d show that to people who are still cowering in fear. Unfortunately I have found most of the cowering classes still don’t think that’s enough and tsk tsk me for not getting jabbed and stand well back and masked nevertheless.
*sigh*
I’m in same boat except without antibody test – but if I had one I don’t see why I would need to produce it to anyone not medically qualified. Would imagine if my neighbours knew I wasn’t double jabbed I’d be getting the cold shoulder
“After all, we can’t observe the counterfactual of what would have happened in the absence of lockdown.”
I disagree – Sweden is that counterfactual. They didn’t lock down but they are now refusing entry to citizens of Israel, one of the most locked down and jabbed countries on the planet due to the risk of Covid infection that they carry.
Pretty conclusive evidence that lockdowns and jabs are not as effective as some would have us believe if you ask me.
AFAIK Sweden isn’t discriminating against Israel in particular: they just have a blanket ban on non-essential visits by anyone not from an EU or EFTA country.
Let’s get a couple of Noah Naivety tropes out of the way as minor irritations :
Well – absent any convincing evidence that they do, and considering that any such marginality is without doubt balanced against massive and disproportionate penalites, then any claim to utility is supreme bollocks.
This was a ‘pandemic’ only by virtue of the WHO re-writing the dictionary. There was never a health emergency in terms of excessive mortality, which was a previous condition of the definition. It is hard to conceive how a virus which, at its worst, never reached the level defined as ‘epidemic’ in the UK could be defined as a ‘pandemic’. So it’s a case of ‘when the next new infection arrives’ – pandemic or not.
That said – the knee-jerk motivation described is certainly in the mix, even given a lot of other motives. It wasn’t just Yes Minister that lampooned it – it was also brilliantly done in The Thick of It, with a minister and advisors frantically searching for anything thart could be called an ‘initiative’ – the result of which would always be a major cock-up.
A pandemic is not a pandemic.
A case is not a case.
A vaccine is not a vaccine.
However, a lie remains what it always was: a lie.
Well said!
“After all, we can’t observe the counterfactual of what would have happened in the absence of lockdown.”
But we can. Not all countries locked down, and in the USA we have the example of adjacent states following very different rules. The statistics indicate clearly that lockdowns were very effective at causing economic damage but no use at all in containing the virus.
… and we can note the lack of any inflections related to lockdowns in any curves mapping mortality.
Lockdowns were never really going to work for US states because US states are constitutionally forbidden from closing their borders.
Well, maybe, but didn’t a lot of states have “stay at home” orders applying to residents of that state, that were presumably supposed to have at least some impact to the spread, locally? I doubt whether thousands flocked to say, California, while it was “locked down” as many of their own states were probably also locked down and why go to California to look at closed shops and restaurants?
Many states did everything they could to close borders including fining people if they didn’t quarantine or take covid tests when crossing the state border. It was mostly just signaling, but it did depress mobility.
Work depends on what you want to achieve. If your goal is to have unprecedented and complete control of all aspects of life, lockdowns work.
King Log vs King Stork. You’d think these people would have read a little Aesop.
Doing more things faster is no substitute for doing the right things.
Covey.
But we can test the “counterfactual” of what would have been the results if no lockdowns had been implemented. There actually IS one “placebo” nation – Sweden. The nation of Sweden should actually be viewed as a major epjdemologic study that included 10.17 millions participants in a study that has lasted at least 18 months.
With schools, the “study” involved at least 2 million students, none of who missed a day of class (at least up to age 16), no mask requirements and no social distancing requirements. In the school term of 2020, zero school-age children died of COVID, only 15 had to be admitted to ICU and the mortality rates for teachers and school employees were the same as every other profession in Sweden.
If the UK had done exactly like Sweden did, the death figures from COVID would be identical as they are today. So all the lockdowns didn’t save one life. But they definitely caused deaths that would not have happened absent the lockdowns.
Not to mention endless individual misery, plus economic ruin, plus social disintegration, plus the collapse of ‘liberal democracy’, plus the destruction of education, plus…
Politicians are simply the useful idiots. There is no logic. Information, resources and useful links: https://www.LCAHub.org/
We ‘can observe the counterfactual’ by looking at Sweden, South Dakota, Florida etc.
No offense to Freddy Sayers, whom I admire a great deal, but rhe assymetric risk profile for politicians’ careers between excessive action and less authoritarian options has been put much better by Professor Philipp Bagus in his recent Mises article “Vaccine Mandates and the Great Reset” and even more so in his February 2021 eye opening academic paper “Covid-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria” in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.