Cakes and Ale Back on Sale
Boris has earmarked June 22nd as the day when pubs and restaurants across the nation will be allowed to reopen, according to the Mail. This is two weeks ahead of schedule (the original date for the grand reopening was July 4th). The accelerated timetable follows a crunch meeting last Tuesday when the Prime Minister was warned by Business Secretary Alok Sharma that prolonging the shutdown could cost 3.5 million jobs in the hospitality sector.
According to Tim Shipman and Arthi Nachiappan in yesterday’s Sunday Times, the 3.5 million figure came as a shock to Boris, who is supposed to have said, “Christ!” when told the news. If the Prime Minister was surprised to discover that the lockdown is causing job losses – and will cause many, many more – he hasn’t been paying attention.
But don’t get out the bunting quite yet: those pubs and restaurants that do reopen will only be able to serve customers outside. Not a very appealing prospect, given the current state of the weather.
In other news:
- Britain recorded its lowest daily death toll today since March 22nd, with only 55 new deaths reported
- No new deaths were reported today in Scotland or Northern Ireland
- Britons should be able to travel freely within the EU without having to quarantine for 14 days by mid-July. Shame ministers aren’t put in the corner for 14 days every time they walk some crazy policy back
- Sunday trading laws could be suspended for a year to encourage people to go shopping
More on the Dreaded “Second Spike”
I was having supper with my children on Friday, having just filed the latest daily update, when they all received news alerts on their phones warning that the R number was going up again. “Looks like you were wrong about lockdown easing, Dad,” said my 15 year-old son.
This was based on a Public Health England/Cambridge University study saying there was “some evidence” the R number had “risen in all regions” of England. But on closer inspection, this wasn’t as alarming as it seemed. What the study in fact said is that it was “probable” the rate of infection was below 1 in all regions apart from the North West and the South West. But even in the latter, the study estimated the R number was “around” 1. So in fact it was only above 1 in the North West.
When asked about this at Friday’s Downing Street press briefing, Matt Hancock pooh-poohed it, pointing out that SAGE believed the R number was below one across the country.
The problem with the R number, as I’ve pointed out before, is that it’s fiendishly difficult to calculate, given incomplete data about who is and isn’t infected, and if the number of infected people in a particular region is quite low, as it is across the UK, a localised flare-up – in a care home or hospital, for instance – can push the R number above 1 without cause for alarm. Indeed, that’s what happened in Germany a few weeks ago. So few people were infected in the country, that an outbreak of infection at a single meat-packing plant in North Rhine-Westphalia pushed the R number above 1. The following day it fell back down again.
YouTube’s Censor-in-Chief Heading For Nervous Breakdown Trying to Keep Up With WHO’s Constantly Changing Guidance
My heart goes out to the poor drudge at YouTube charged with overseeing the removal of any content that challenges the WHO’s official guidance on COVID-19.
As you’ll recall, the CEO of YouTube Susan Wojcicki told CNN’s Reliable Sources at the end of April that the social media platform would be “removing information that is problematic”, including “anything that would go against World Health Organisation recommendations”.
But the problem is, those recommendations change from one day to the next. So how is YouTube’s Censor-in-Chief supposed to keep up?
Take face masks.
Readers with long memories will recall this WHO video which tentatively recommended the wearing of masks, in combination with other protective measures.
Then, on April 6th, the WHO updated its advice. Now, apparently, there was no point in wearing masks:
there is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types) by healthy persons in the wider community setting, including universal community masking, can prevent them from infection [sic] with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.
But in its latest official guidance, published on June 5th, the WHO has recommended that everyone should wear masks in public areas. The WHO’s technical lead expert on COVID-19, Maria Van Kerkhove, said in a Reuters interview: “We are advising governments to encourage that the general public wear a mask.”
No doubt in a few weeks time, the WHO’s advice will change again. It’s almost as if the organisation is trolling us now.
Question for Susan Wojcicki: If your video was removed because you expressed a point of view that was contrary to the WHO’s guidance on, say, April 9th, but is now in line with it because the WHO has changed its mind, can you apply to have your banned video reinstated?
In case you missed it, Lockdown Sceptics published a summary of the scientific evidence that wearing face masks reduces transmission on Friday that you can read here. TL;DR: it’s pretty threadbare.
Stop Press: The WHO has just announced that asymptomatic coronavirus patients aren’t infectious.
Editorial in Wall St Journal
There’s a great editorial in the Wall St Journal today entitled “Doctors For Lockdown Discrimination” pointing out the rank hypocrisy of Democratic politicians and public-health scientists who condemned anti-lockdown protestors, but who are now enthusiastically endorsing the Black Lives Matter protests. The editorial board homes in on the letter circulated by public-health researchers at the University Washington last week, signed by 1,300 health-care providers, epidemiologists and medical students around the country, seeking to justify this volte face.
“On April 30th, heavily armed and predominantly white protesters entered the State Capitol building in Lansing, Michigan, protesting stay-home orders and calls for widespread public masking to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Infectious disease physicians and public health officials publicly condemned these actions and privately mourned the widening rift between leaders in science and a subset of the communities that they serve,” they write.
“As of May 30th, we are witnessing continuing demonstrations in response to ongoing, pervasive, and lethal institutional racism set off by the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among many other Black lives taken by police,” they continue. “However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission” because “white supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.”
“This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders,” they add. “Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives.”
So there you have it folks. If you want to protest in favour of Black Lives Matter – a political group that wants to end capitalism, among other things – that’s perfectly fine. In fact, it’s your moral duty to do so. But if you want to protest against the lockdowns, you’re a “white nationalist”, i.e. a fascist.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be too outraged by this. After all, it means we don’t have to worry about a vaccine before we can dispense with social distancing measures. All we need do is proclaim our allegiance to a progressive cause and we’ll be immune from infection.
Good Thread By QC on Draconian Quarantine Regulations
I spotted a good Twitter Thread by Tom Hickman, a QC at Blackstone Chambers, about the new quarantine regulations that came into force today:
(1) So, the 14 day quarantine regs. How do they affect your summer holiday plans? Your work? Let me explain. And let me explain some surprising features of the rules.
(2) You may be thinking that people arriving in the UK – including you returning from a summer holiday – would have to observe the sort of stay at home measures you were observing in March and April. Wrong.
(3) The regs would require you to stay at home full stop. No leaving for exercise, not even once round the block. No leaving for shopping, unless you are on brink of starvation and no-one can go for you (“exceptional circumstances”) No cleaner, no nanny,…
(4) There isn’t even the “reasonable excuse” exception (otherwise known as the Dominic Cummings exception) like there used to be in the lockdown regs.
(5) These rules are criminal law, backed by criminal law sanctions.
(6) Here’s some surprising features of this system. In lawyerly sub para numbers.(6.1). As I have hinted at, these restrictions on liberty are far more severe than were imposed, and were effective, at the height of the pandemic, when transmission rates in the UK were very high.
(6.2) These are more stringent restrictions on liberty than those people diagnosed with or displaying symptoms of Covi-19 are subject to – 7 day isolation, based on guidance, entirely voluntary and based on individual responsibility.
(6.3) The restrictions apply in an entirely blanket fashion even from arrivals from countries with v low transmission levels. Contrast England with 17k each day.
(6.4) Buried in the schedule is an exception for people whose work requires weekly travel to the UK or to countries outside the UK. So most frequent work travellers are exempted from quarantine and can continue to come and go as they please.
(6.5) Whilst the UK Gov website proclaims this a UK wide approach starting on 7 June there are currently no regs have been published outside England. Therefore if you enter the UK outside England or live outside England on Monday: no quarantine.
Herd Opinion
Good question posed in the thread beneath Friday’s update from an executive of a large American corporation:
I have to be a little circumspect here, because I can’t risk being identified, especially in the current economic climate.
I work for a large American corporation, which is a very large employer in many countries around the world. I was surprised to see in the last few days that our CEO decided to send an internal communication to all employees taking a definite and unequivocal position on the BLM protests that are happening in the US and elsewhere. It’s not the first time I’ve seen him go on record with a political opinion, but it’s the first time I’ve seen an official party line be broadcast in this way.
For three months, the entire focus of the top management of the company has been on how to mitigate the blood bath that we’re seeing in terms of results around the world because of lockdowns. I know this, because I’ve been in many of the “meetings”. Nobody has been supportive of the lockdown and everyone thinks it’s an overreaction. We’ve lost, at a guess, between $3 – $4 billion in revenue this year compared to last year (again, to be very clear, I’m not naming the company and I have not seen the actual numbers. This is a gut feel).
Nobody has made any statement on our opinion beyond “keeping employees safe”.
How can it make any sense that the corporation is prepared to go on record with an opinion about the death of one man in Minneapolis but not prepared to comment on the destruction of the global economy? It’s perverse.
What’s the answer? It must have something to do with people being frightened to challenge herd opinion. Free speech used to be better protected, but one of the reasons governments around the world have been able to take away the civil rights of over a billion people is because people are frightened to challenge prevailing orthodoxies for fear of being publicly shamed or worse.
Is the NHS Becoming Schrödinger’s Cat?
Alarming email from a reader:
I called my sister on Saturday for news about our ailing and widowed father who is insisting on soldiering on in his house. She has given up keeping away, realizing that reassuring and caring for a confused old man at the end of his life is a more important priority.
She works at a local secondary school helping the special needs children. It’s already become apparent that ‘social distancing’ is ludicrously impossible. She goes in once a week at the moment to deal with the offspring of essential workers. They frequently turn up without equipment like pens and need constant assistance. Various members of staff have discovered they have to give them something to write with and can’t possibly sort out computer problems and other issues by standing half a mile away. Nonetheless, the headteacher has taken it upon herself to patrol the school, ever vigilant for such misdemeanours, and has already issued two teachers with disciplinary warnings – these of course will stay on their professional records. With that kind of motivational leadership, it’s easy to imagine how oppressive a school could become for everyone concerned.
One of her friends, a lawyer, went to the dentist at the of February and was told a lump in her tongue caused him great concern. He referred to her GP. But by then the lockdown was in force. Naturally, this GP NHS hero was a great deal more concerned about his own welfare and refused to see her. He passed her on to a consultant. He likewise seems to have forgotten his Hippocratic oath and refused to see her too. Only when her husband managed to take a photograph of the lump and send it in with a suitably-worded letter did the health-conscious consultant decide to remember what he’d been trained to do (and is being paid to do). The woman was called in immediately and operated on very recently to remove the tumour before cancer destroyed the whole organ. One dreads to think what might have happened to her without the emergency treatment.
The woman and her husband are educated professionals who wouldn’t take no for an answer and knew how to demand treatment, and even then it was a very close call. How many other people are silently malingering with conditions that will become irreversible and terminal? Protecting the NHS has become one of the greatest absurdities of our time. It’s like having a cherished vintage car in the garage you never dare take out in case it gets dirty or damaged. The NHS is turning into Schrödinger’s cat – before long it’ll be so invisible we’ll wonder whether we even know it exists. For many people it has already ceased to do so.
Around the World in 80 Lockdowns
I’ve been receiving a steady flow of ‘Postcards’ – first-person accounts of what it’s like to be locked down in different parts of the world. You can see them all on the right hand menu under the heading: “Around the world in 80 Lockdowns.” Today, I’m publishing postcards from Mexico, Slovakia and Zimbabwe. Here’s an extract from the “Postcard From Zimbabwe“:
Though conditions have been relaxed and some business that provide essential services have been able to reopen, the Government recently announced that lockdown would continue indefinitely with fortnightly updates. One particularly annoying and, to the minds of most people, illogical regulation concerns the wearing of face masks which is required even when you are alone in your car. Given the low levels of infection, these impositions on our liberties are somewhat puzzling not to say inconvenient. Further, all travellers to the country, and there are many Zimbabweans trapped abroad, are required to be quarantined for 21 days, either in Government-operated facilities which, to be blunt, are disgusting, or in certain approved hotels and guest houses at great expense to themselves.
All of them are worth reading in full.
Round-Up
And on to the round-up of all the stories I’ve noticed, or which have been been brought to my attention, in the last 24 hours:
- ‘Britain’s “Professor Reopen”‘ – Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall St Journal interviews Sunetra Gupta (not paywalled)
- ‘Missing school is bigger risk for children than catching Covid, warns Government adviser‘ – Dr Gavin Morgan, an educationalist on SAGE, says the impact of COVID-19 on children’s health is “miniscule”, but spending a prolonged period out of school is devastating
- ‘Britain’s double shame: coronavirus deaths and economic collapse‘ – Simon Jenkins in the Guardian from about 10 days ago. Dunno how I missed it, but it’s a corker
- ‘More than half of England’s coronavirus-related deaths will be people from care homes‘ – The Guardian reports on a new analysis by the healthcare business consultancy LaingBuisson
- ‘Madrid chief warned against refusing hospital aid to care home residents: “They’ll die in undignified conditions”‘ – Spain, too, has a care home deaths scandal brewing
- ‘Early June graphs from Christopher Bowyer‘ – Good post for Hector Drummond Magazine
- ‘Boris Johnson wants to slash social distancing to one metre to help kick-start the economy and save millions of jobs‘ – The Daily Mail reports on Boris’s conversion to the one-metre rule
- ‘Boris has been taken prisoner by scientists‘ – Damning article in Conservatives Global
- ‘Furious relatives of Italy’s coronavirus dead launch legal action calling for full inquiry‘ – Expect to see more of these around the world as lockdowns ease
- ‘Coronavirus in Scotland: early study finds no greater risk for ethnic minorities‘ – The Times reports on the initial findings of Public Health Scotland. The headline means that ethnic minorities have not been dying in disproportionately large numbers north of the border
- ‘Lancetgate Is a Humiliation for Trump’s Medical Critics‘ – James Delingpole socks it to the critics of hydroxychloroquine
- ‘Safety is No Salvation: A Catholic Perspective on the COVID-19 Crisis‘ – Chris Larkin in Hector Drummond Magazine is fed up with the Catholic church’s wet response to the lockdowns
- ‘More Hysterical Media Misreporting: Fanning Faltering Flames‘ – Lockdown Sceptics contributor Omar Khan on the failings of the MSM
- ‘“Hundreds” of NHS Test and Trace staff are being let go after being left with nothing to do‘ – File under “quelle surprise”
- ‘Why lockdown could cost more lives than it saves‘ – Bristol Professor of Risk Management Philip Thomas predicts 675,000 could die from the collateral damage of the lockdown
- ‘We’re either lazing in the sunshine or cowering in the dark – and both must stop‘ – Robust column from Dan Hodges in the Mail on Sunday
- ‘Tell MPs “not in my name” if you are horrified by this social experiment‘ – Janet Daley in the Telegraph urges people to write to their MPs telling them to end the lockdown
- ‘Alex Berenson’s coronavirus booklet hits top spot on Amazon after online retailer initially rejected it‘ – Lockdown Sceptic Alex Berenson benefits from the Streisand Effect
- ‘30 private schools preparing to close due to COVID-19‘ – As I predicted when Boris Johnson’s old prep school announced its closure a couple of weeks ago, the virus will decimate private schools
- ‘LOCKDOWN LUNACY: the thinking person’s guide‘ – Blog post from JB Handley that several readers have flagged up. Worth reading
Small Businesses That Have Reopened
A few weeks ago, Lockdown Sceptics launched a searchable directory of open businesses across the UK. The idea is to celebrate those retail and hospitality businesses that have reopened, as well as help people find out what has opened in their area. But we need your help to build it, so we’ve created a form you can fill out to tell us about those businesses that have opened near you. Please visit the page and let us know about those brave folk who are doing their bit to get our country back on its feet.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. It takes me about nine hours, which doesn’t leave much time for other work. If you feel like donating, however small the amount, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in future updates, email me here.
And Finally…
Picture taken by a reader on Sunday. Just in case you were in any doubt about what the UK’s state religion is.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
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i see the NHS is now promoting a self congratulatory celebration day for next month .. after killing all the oldies in care homes, killing countless hundreds in the future by not continuing with cancer treatments and leaving us with millions of outstanding out patient appointments, and worst of all appearing as such simpering morons thanking their Uber drivers in that advert..?
well they can just go an f*** themelves
People that can’t do their jobs properly normally tinker with other issue to look better
It’s not insanity. It’s about not allowing a crisis to go to waste. The far left seized upon the death of George Floyd as an excuse to protest, and hopefully damage Trump’s election chances. Khan has done much the same, i.e. to further his own political ambitions, and to help destroy British culture and history.
Twitter Censorship – the saga continues
The documentary, “Plandemic,” is undoubtedly one of the most widely banned videos of all time. Across the board, the film has been banned from social media platforms and hidden by Google. Google Drive has even deleted the film from private Google Drive files
Knut Wittkowski, Ph.D., DSc, an epidemiologist and former head of biostatistics, epidemiology and research design at Rockefeller University, has also been widely censored. His video, in which he challenges the wisdom of lockdown orders, was removed by YouTube after garnering nearly 1.5 million views
YouTube’s CEO has gone on record saying they will censor anyone speaking against the World Health Organization. This despite the fact that WHO has been severely criticized for its handling of other pandemics, including the 2009 swine flu pandemic
YouTube has also been caught automatically deleting comments insulting the Chinese Communist Party
Twitter now falsely labels any and all Mercola article links as unsafe and malicious, warning potential readers my site might steal passwords and other personal data, or install malware on your computer — a tactic that decreases views by about 95%. This is absolutely false. On the contrary, my site… Read more »
Mercola is a great site!
Hi, Is “Guardian journalists prepare to stampede on discovering a trainee reporter doesn’t support the BLM movement” referring to a specific Guardian article, or is this hypothetical?
Yet another useless twat who has done bugger all for knife crime and all the assorted problems we have here in this metropolis. God help us!
https://twitter.com/AlistairHaimes/status/1270366210350342144/photo/1
This nice graph shows the R number for UK, Sweden and Germany. They all follow the same pattern and dips below 1 before the full lockdown. The exponential increase stopped before the lockdown.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/satellite-data-suggests-coronavirus-hit-china-earlier-researchers/story?id=71123270
“Satellite data suggests coronavirus may have hit China earlier: Researchers say surge in cars at hospitals may indicate outbreak in fall”
Nothing conclusive but interesting bit of info.
Next it’ll be books.
If this becomes nationwide policy I am *definitely leaving this godforsaken country.
Where will you go where they’re not doing the same thing?
I only know of the Visigrad nations, who are standing up for their own people, much to the fury of the EU and the woke brigade.
Looking for something to do until the government graciously grants us the privilege to go to the pub again? Well how about settling down to a few episodes of that superior comedy Little Britain?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-52983319
Don’t even think about it from now on!
I’ve had enough of this shit now. The direct debit to the BBC has got cancelled, lets see what they do
What they really want is a Year Zero and reeducation camps for people like Nigel Farage who have the temerity to point out the truths they hate to hear and want it to be outright illegal to even mention.
Ah well I meet him there then and some of you lot as well.
I’d say they’re trying to whitewash history but it’s not very PC.
Link, kh? If this is true, then I think I might be almost as angry about it as I am about lockdown.
It’s true 🙁
https://www.lbcnews.co.uk/uk-news/sadiq-khan-forms-diversity-commission-to-review/
Oh. Fuck. Off. Sadiq. Khan.
Sorry. I normally mind my language, but…
No, you’re right. This is clearly the most important issue of our time and it obviously makes perfect sense and is a completely reasonable use of the unlimited resources we currently have available and is not in the least tiny bit really sodding insulting. Nor is it doctrinaire and luckily it doesn’t ride roughshod over the opinions of the majority of the voting public.
Yes,I saw that in the LBC link. That definitely makes it OK. As long as there’s a commission, it’s bound to be completely balanced and fair and the results will be in no way following an agenda.
Only almost??? The hilarious thing is that the little woke fascists seem to think that this will only offend the over 50s… Really? So there are young people out there who all of a sudden have forgotten about their granddads fighting in WW2?, whilst they decided to write ‘racist’ on Churchills statue.
I really don’t think they know what’s coming for them.
Unfortunately, I’m not seeing anything coming for them. They will just get away with this.
If he actually cared about racial inequality he might start by locking up every police officer involved in the development and deployment of facial recognition systems.
He doesn’t care about any such thing. It’s virtue signalling at its most blatant.
BLM don’t care about black lives. If they did, they’d be more interested in improving the lives of black people by encouraging stable relationships, marriage, improving education, having more police not fewer, etc. Instead they want to blame everyone else, mostly white people, and talking about ending capitalism, white patriarchy, etc. It’s all Marxist propaganda.
This is from the BLM “what we believe” page:
https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
No-one in Government, councils or TV has answered me when I asked them what the following meant:
“We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work.
We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).”
I think it means that they hate familiies, they want to live in a commune like state and want everyone to be homosexual but not too sure.
There seems to be no bottom to the depths of their insanity. If there were not still some sane folks around, I would think that crazy pills had been put in the water supply!
Many years ago, I heard this from a hospital administrator involved in planning new wards for geriatric patients. They had to rebuild the wards for the patients and during these repairs all patients were transferred to other empty wards nearby in other parts of the hospital. The same staff followed the patients. No virus around. But 10 % of the patients just died after the move. The death certificates were the same typical diseases, just many more of them in a shorter period. There must be some unspecific factor around that any change of circumstances for these patients will increase their risk of dying.
This must have happened also in Italy. Lots of the care-homes in Lombardy had Romanian nurses. When the Italian government suddenly started discussing lockdown and blocking the borders the Romanian nurses fled home being afraid to be locked inside Italy. The care of the elderly suffered enormously and when Covid-19 came into the homes the death rate spiraled higher but was quite high already because of the malfunctioning of the system. I suspect that even well thought hygienic rules like facemasks, new plastic aprons, closing down certain areas etc unfortunately would be a dramatic change of… Read more »
On Sunday I cycled across London and had to weave through a placard waving mob in Parliament Square, I got through by ringing my bell and calling out loudly and sourly “Scuse me, scuse me,” but by the time I got to Vauxhall Bridge I was trembling with rage and it took a bit of pedalling to calm down. What sanctimonious Hypocrites these people are, tens of thousands of elderly people die in horrible conditions in nursing homes, I expect some of those old people were black because basically, we all get old, and not a squeak from the wretched Woke brigade, then suddenly they see videos of looting in America and it’s “ooh let’s do that too to show what good people we all are.”
Anyway hopefully I’ve calmed down now. With any luck there will be no obvious spike from the protests and the government will quietly decide they can lift all the restrictions at once, in fact I bet that’s what they’re hoping for.
Yes, that’s about it, but I didn’t know there was evidence that young woke people had been calling for an end to lockdown. Apologies if I have missed this. Please can you post a link?
I do feel the government are giving the looney leftists enough rope and they will hang themselves soon enough (if they haven’t done so already to be fair), but it’s a complete trial of my patience at the moment have to say, on top of the bloody lockdown
Does anyone know where I can find the latest number of hospital admissions with Covid, the number of positive tests for today and the numbers still in intensive care, please? At one time, the MSM would be shouting the numbers from the rooftops but I can’t find it on Sly News or the Biased Broadcasting Corporation. Is there a reason for that do you think???
have you looked down the side of the couch?
What a good idea! Thanks!
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
ONS has more detailed data, but it lags. NHS has more detailed death data, but it’s less user friendly
Just a thought how are parents supposed to go back to work with no schools, no kids clubs, kids not able to stay with grandparents. I mean serious question ….or are they hoping parents will be forced to ‘break the rules’ and will have no choice but to send children to be looked after by family members. That way the government don’t hold any responsibility …
I doubt they’ve even thought of it they’re so stupid.
They recognise this, but they’re too pathetic to stand up to the pressure.
The report today about the government rowing back on getting all children back to primary school before summer is absolutely galling. They cannot possibly be unaware of the scientific evidence that Covid-19 barely touches children and the vast majority of healthy adults recover as well. Therefore, our leaders are being deliberately dishonest with us. It is deeply saddening that they are doing this to our children when they will be the ones paying for their folly in reduced education, worse job prospects, poor mental health and social skills, and massive taxes for the rest of their lives – long after this shower have gone.
I’m sceptical of conspiracy theories, but I’m really starting to ask myself what the hell is going on now. The scientific evidence is so blatant and so easily accessible, and yet the government is pursuing a completely different narrative. I find it very hard to swallow that our leaders are sociopathic enough to wreak suffering of this scale on the country they serve, just to save face. It is political short-termism at its finest because the consequences will be so grave that they will not escape an almighty reckoning further down the line. I guess… Read more »
Labour, the Unions, the media all complained. Some parents had been terrified by the propaganda enough to complain as well. The government caved. The turning point in that particular conversation came when they conceded that no parent would be penalised for not sending their child back. Made it look like the fear was justified.
I’m convinced that little piece of high profile pantomime actually set the whole relaxation timetable back significantly. It’s that that made them worried that nobody wanted to be allowed out of their house.
Weakness and lack of leadership. It needn’t be more complicated or sinister than that.
Do you have a link for that ‘relaxation timetable’ you speak of, matt ? 🙂
Nope. Speculation, some of it second-hand semi-informed. A natural tendency to ascribe the better motives to people, while reserving the right to believe that most people will disappoint you through lack of gumption and piss-poor execution. Residual levels of hope.
That’s all.
The thing with conspiracy theories is that eventually a lot of them become conspiracy facts.
Go with your instincts and you won’t be far wrong.
I always think that the thing about conspiracy theories, is that they mostly seem to assume that government is far more competent and good at planning than I’ve ever seen any evidence for.
Their incompetence is frequently staged, so harmful policies can be plausibly denied. This is a government that took all our rights away and locked us in our homes very competently
I’d argue that they didn’t do it very competently. We all just cheerfully complied, which took them by surprise.
I disagree on the point that our rights (voting, freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom to worship, freedom of earning a living) were taken away very competently, with no fuss We may never get those rights back. Regardless of our compliance, the government achieved the task. All gone due to the Coronavirus Act 2020, passed on 25th March 2020
Amazing how that piece of legislation appeared just days into the (fake) pandemic
It wasn’t fake, but it wasn’t exactly the pandemic they thought or told us it was.
But then they told us it was to “flatten the curve”. The curve has now been largely steamrollered, but here we still are. I can’t legally get my hair cut, and there’s no way I’d trust my OH to do it instead.
I doubt the government is the real driving force here and it is there lack of competence that makes that possible. Our MPs do not have the ability to have independent thought or the bravery to action any such independent thought.
Please forgive the grammar error.
“I find it very hard to swallow that our leaders are sociopathic enough to wreak suffering of this scale on the country they serve, just to save face.”
lol, oh I don’t !
Like I said, I like to assume people are good before proven otherwise but perhaps I am naïve because I am young. I certainly couldn’t sleep at night knowing I’d caused this much hell for so many people.
Like nearly everyone, you make the mistake of judging these creatures by your own keen sense of morals and decency.
These type have neither.
And that is why they find themselves in the positions they are in.
Shit floats.
Yes – I think it is probably a combination of sociopathy, autism, moats around them to protect from any consequences and being constantly praised by sycophants.
Boris and his cabinet clearly have the backbone of a shoal of amoeba.
If it’s the teachers that are so worried, then they should have offered them hazmat suits to wear to school. And parents who refuse to send their children to school….made personally responsible for their education. Considering the amount of brainwashing going on in schools (see weekend riots, left-wing Twitter feeds, etc) teaching them at home might not be such a bad thing.
My view on the bloody teachers is this:
If you think that educating children is of the highest importance and value, then you should be demanding that _every day_ that the schools remain closed, the people who are keeping them closed should present incontrovertible evidence justifying why they can’t open.
If you don’t think that educating children is of the highest importance and value and you are a teacher, then you’re in the wrong profession.
I think the collective noun for amoeba(e?) should be a Parliament
I think parents being held responsible is fine once the schools return to normal. As long as the children are being treated like bio hazards in a prison like facility then I think parents should be able to keep their children home so as not to be subjected to such behaviour by teachers.
The irony is that there is a rather nasty and very infectious virus that nearly all children catch at school that puts a couple of percent of them in hospital, and even kills a small number. It’s called RSV and there are a few vaccines for it in the pipeline (and have been for a few years now). Obviously RSV is not a reason to keep kids out of school but there’s absolutely no consistency here with the panic about Covid.
I’ve always found some of the conspiracy theories that have gone around over the years slightly entertaining at best and downright ludicrous at worst but like you I am really starting to think something very sinister is in hand now.Nothing that is happening makes any sense whatsoever if it is purely being done as a reaction to a so-called pandemic.
The economic,societal and human damage of the government’s actions is going to be unbelievable but they clearly don’t care,so surely that means they doing it deliberately or they are collectively insane ?.They constantly toss minute morsels of hope at us and then always cruelly snatch them away,for example,saying pubs and restaurants can open in two weeks,hurray !,but then add only if they can serve customers outside ! which means the overwhelming majority of these establishments will remain closed.
It is very hard to know, but, given Boris’s apparent reply on being told the likely scale of job losses coming (“Christ”), I think they may genuinely be so detached from normal reality that they genuinely thought that there would be a quick V-shaped recovery with minimal damage to the country. That we are led by such buffoons is at least as scary as if it were a conspiracy. What with this, Net Zero idiocy and now BLM lunacy, it is now even harder to see how Western society can survive much longer. Maybe China is the future: if so I am glad I ma no longer young!
The politicians should start acting more like scientists are supposed to, openly admitting their mistakes and pledging what to try next, with the open admission that it is an attempt and if it isn’t effective they’ll try something else. The scientists, well its mostly epidemiologists guilty here, not science in general, should start acting like scientists too. Not like politicians. You expect cover-ups and doubling-down from politicians, scientists should stay above that and be willing to admit that lockdown was wrong.
It is also somewhat disturbing that they think we are all so stupid as to not have rumbled what is going on…
Went to work yesterday ….well I am a key worker after all and work for the state religion, the NHS. Used the A and E entrance and there were the poor clients waiting in line with their marigold gloves on and embroided rags covering their mouths. A rather obese ” health care assistant” was shouting at them from a distance about what to do…apparently the marigolds were not up to standard.
I said rather loudly as I went past ” Wonder when this pantomine will end ” and some at least heard me .
Of course that is the question. We signed up for a useless lockdown for 3 weeks and now it is 3 months and I doubt it will change for another 3 months.
It is insane.
Met an elderly mucker of mine out in the street with flourescent yellow marigolds and fully masked up.
Absolutely broke my heart tbh.
A veteran of the Malaya insurgency no less.
Wrong on so many levels.
Is this to make us so mentally disturbed that we will more easily acquiesce to being forcibly vaccinated just to be released from lockdown, I wonder????
Worrying developments for those of us still locked up in Wales
I live in Wales where we are still only allowed to travel locally and that is interpreted, normally as 5 miles. The Welsh Government has indicated that this will not change at the next review of the legislation. This if you remember was only ‘temporary’ to help’flatten the curve’.
A friend has just reported that earlier today there were military checkpoints stopping vehicles in Mid Wales near Builth Wells and turning back cars. Her husband was trying to go fishing and got turned back.
I asked for more clarification and she replied:
The check points are in routes going north and south through Builth wells and surrounding routes. Google satnav will show orange or red on the roads.
This would seem to be a worrying development in a ‘free society’.
There is a petition for people in Wales to sign here about the travel rules
https://petitions.senedd.wales/petitions/200026
We’re entering a new phase.
Perhaps. The roads were very busy today in my city. I don’t usually like a lot of traffic, but in the circumstances it was welcome.
I sense the thing is ending, but the government are really dragging their heels.
No ‘perhaps’ about it. It’s coming for definite.
“A friend has just reported that earlier today there were military checkpoints stopping vehicles in Mid Wales near Builth Wells and turning back cars. Her husband was trying to go fishing and got turned back.”
Yes, I think you’ve just got to whisper the secret phrase to them: “black lives matter” and then they’ll let you through.
That is SERIOUSLY worrying!
They simply cannot take a decision. Keeping something “under review” means not changing anything in response to the evidence in order to CYA their initial wrong headed decisions. The R number is totally irrelevant now – we are in the tail of the “pandemic” so it adds no information at all. We may as well count the number of tweets trending on lockdown as a measure it is really that dull. As for the 2m rule was never justified – it was only 2m because the men in hi-viz jackets didn’t trust people to be able to judge a 1m gap. Schools not back until September is also beyond stupid.
Regarding schools – aren’t they usually shut for the Summer anyway?
Yes. But not normally from March and you can normally find holiday clubs and things to look after them for the bits of the 6/7 weeks over the summer when they’re off and the parents aren’t.
Yes, but we are in June now.
If it was up to me they would never have closed.
Oh. Yes. Clearly they should never have closed. Thought you were making a different point.
My question today on http://www.gov.uk/ask , thought what the hell why not?:
It was reported in the admittedly laughable MSM that our Prime Minister, to put it politely, was unaware of the economic havoc that the policies that he, as Prime Minister and representative in parliament of Her Majesty the Queen, is ultimately responsible for introducing and continuing in the face of ever mounting independence that the lockdown is and always has been not required.
Is the Prime Minister (but not just him alone) stupid, incompetent, surrounded by stupid incompetents who gave him false information, surrounded by people deliberately lying to him?
He’s a populist with absolutely no leadership skills whatsoever so he cannot make any decisions that go against the MSM or public opinion.
Yes indeed, a clownish buffoon pretending that he is just pretending to be a clownish buffoon.
Just like to say thanks to Toby for helping me stay sane during this fiasco. So pleased I found this site weeks ago and that not everyone is a complete muppet. If the Government had kept with what I think was its first plan (I lose track); keep the over 70’s and anyone vulnerable at home home for 12 weeks and let everyone else get on with it, we would be in a much better place.
I now have staff not wanting to come back to work as Furlough is good once costs of going to work taken out. I go to the supermarket and perfectly healthy looking people in their 20’s and 30’s are stood in their masks as I wonder around with my 52 year old bag of bones.
I see people sat in their own car, by themselves driving along at 30 mph wearing a mask, what do they expect to catch ! If they had no windscreen they would have more chance of choking to death on a fly.
The main media has been as pathetic over this as over Brexit. This is the view, we cannot tell you anything else or give you any other… Read more »
Just watching and listening to Alok Sharma doing the 5 o’clock briefing – so where is he getting his hair cut?
Not looking hopeful re the rumoured 22nd June opening of beer gardens.
No. No, that’s true.
But if it happens, they’ll announce it on the 21st. Or the morning of the 22nd
Not sure about that with all the guff about shops needing to display their risk assessment or whatever. In any case you need the beer in place. However agreed that the press are starting to press the 1m rule
Yeah, I didn’t mean that seriously. Although, I wouldn’t put it past them not to realise that a morning wasn’t long enough to organise everything that needed to be organised.
Joel Hills (ITV) was pushing him. We need a bit more directed aggression at the 5pm briefings to expose this shower of incompetents that are wrecking our country. Meanwhile, I suppose the Dear Leader is catching up on his tennis before he is wheeled out at PMQs tomorrow.
Not that relevant now, I guess, but how did you find out about that kh ?
Dogs eat letters; phones run out of charge; not everyone watches telly. Blissful ignorance is a useful position to be in, sometimes. 🙂
Difficult to conclude anything from his answers to questions. My husband has just shouted from the other side of the kitchen ‘it’s a bit of a low wattage day’. They really are clueless, scarily so!
One thing I’ve noticed – the NHS death figures have stopped rendering the days on which the deaths announced have actually happened as numbers, only as a bar chart. I’ll have to download the bar chart to have a look.
Also just noticed that there is also a tab “deaths, no positive tests”. That might be worth a look, if it goes back further in the past.
Low wattage, LOL. Good description of the collective output of the Cabinet.
Perhaps they run on solar power?
Can’t answer that question. But I am noticing that the tone of the questioning from the media has changed. It’s aggressive, as it often has been, but it’s now aggressively pushing for detail on when things are going to ease up and when the social distancing rules are going to ease up.
Funny that, seeing as they were the ones most vocal in their support for full lockdown.
Oh, I know. I don’t respect them an iota more for it – just pleased by the change in mood you can detect.
When will you people ever learn?
Not to be trusted…
Just crossed with your comment – see above reply to arfurmo
Funny how he’s still insisting on shops following “government guidelines” and not realising that those same guidelines will result in the demise of those shops which will add to those already on the dole.
AAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!
Yes, Boris is the only one whose hair seems *not* to have been being cut since the lockdown…
Guardian keeping up the fearmongering. I’ve highlighted some examples:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/07/after-six-months-of-coronavirus-how-close-are-we-to-defeating-it
“What exactly have we learned about Covid-19 over the past six months? How quickly and how well have we responded to the challenges posed by it?And, much more importantly, what questions do we most urgently need to answer over the next six months? Answers from researchers and doctors should tell us how we might survive one of the worst crises to affect humanity in modern times.”
“This disease has turned out to be much worse than any of the pandemics that we had been anticipating and making plans to counter,” said Martin Hibberd, professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
“It has a 1% death rate and it is highly transmissible, features that were considered to be highly unlikely for any new emerging disease we thought we might face. Such features represent the worst possible realistic scenario that we could envisage and lie at the very limit of what we thought we should expect. So the pandemic we have got now is about as bad as we thought it could ever get. It is a very sobering prospect.”
… Read more »
“This disease has turned out to be much worse than any of the pandemics that we had been anticipating and making plans to counter,” said Martin Hibberd, professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
WHAT?? WHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAATT?
And where’s he getting the 1% death rate from? 1% of people who end up in hospital?
So bad they downgraded it from a HCID (High Consequence Infectious Disease) in March.
“It has a 1% death rate and it is highly transmissible…”
Not transmissible from children to adults.
Not transmissible by symptom-less cases.
Difficult to become infected outdoors.
CDC say 0.26% death rates.
Many other reports say death rate (IFR) closer to 0.1% or lower.
So this is total rubbish! These people are supposed to be professionals…
Well, they are professionals – professional liars. Remember what Churchill said about prospective MPs, “they are asked to stand, hope to sit, and are expected to lie”. This now also applies to all government advisers.
it’s in the Guardian so you can safely assume it’s total bollocks. Oh and fuck the Guardian and all who sail in her, awful people writing total shit for utter wankers.
Now, Biker, you’re amongst friends and people of a likeminded persuasion.
tell us how you REALLY feel?
i love the Guardian and i just want to drink soya lattes and talk about men who cut off their bollocks and think they are woman, i wanna be an ally to black people living in the modern world with every need taken care of but are still fucking moaning, i wanna talk about scraping my motorcycles and using rubber band powered skateboards to get around, i wanna recycle my piss into plastic bottles to sell to climate change warriors, i wanna see Greta Thunderburg on Pornhub, i wanna be a cuck and watch my wife slipped a length by a striking miner from 1984, i want drugs mandatory, i want Elton John to adopt a whole orphanage and rent out the children to the Clinton foundation . i want Elon Musk to crash his battery powered car and have the corrosive acid burn the shape of Alex Jones on his face and then have him present the One Show and most of all i want to ride my motorcycle round the world with Ewan McGregor and when we’re off camera looking over a large ravine in India i’ll push him off shouting you were a shit Obi Wan Kenobi
I’d vote for you
This is the lightest, friendlist, most minor panemic we could expect. We’ve been bloody lucky not to have something much worse on the loose. The sobering prospect is that if we don’t get our arses in gear and learn to keep society functioing and freedom intact whatever the risks, as well as improving our medical infrastructure and properly funding the types of science which actually work (trialling cures, vaccines… not epidemiologists making up junk numbers from unphysical models) so they can medically wipe out* a truly bad virus when one emerges, then we will be smashed as a society simultaneously by a future worse disease and our ill thought out lockdown based response to such a disease which current lunacy is making look like the default option for diseases.
*vaccines stopped smallpox, antibiotics make many bacterial infections recoverable, I don’t think “non-pharmaceutical interventions”, as Ferguson likes to call tyranny, have ever stopped a disease
Just had another thought about this: A virus with a 0.26% death rate, surely no threat to society unless we, oh I don’t know, confine everyone to their homes, break the economy and usher in Chinese government style tyranny internationally. No-one would do that over such a virus? Right?
Now you’re getting it… But who is bringing in the tyranny..?
“The WHO’s head of emerging diseases said quarantining people with symptoms should be the main focus”
Fantastic! So (surprise, surprise) after all the panic and the fear and after incurring catastrophic costs, for which we will be paying for a generation and possibly more, we come back to basic common sense.
The above quote was on the BBC front page link for the following story, but not within the story itself.
Coronavirus: Asymptomatic transmission ‘very rare’
Note that the piece includes a classic coronapanic dishonest propaganda scare quote from a convenient scientist:
“And since people who haven’t yet developed symptoms are unlikely to know that they are contagious, pre-symptomatic transmission has “important implications” for track, trace and isolation measures, Prof Javid said.
This emphasises the importance of lockdown measures in “massively reduc[ing] the numbers of people infected,” said Prof Liam Smeeth, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.”
In actual fact, as has been pointed out here for weeks by, iirc, guy153, the truth of the matter is that if you quarantine the symptomatic rigorously, you reduce the spread of the disease dramatically. Any additional reduction due to… Read more »
Go to fucking bed and take a Lemsip.
Is the basic jist.
Those of us with a traditionalist inclination, who generally regard “progressive” attitudes as at best nonsense and often dangerous nonsense, are entitled to go into smug mode at this point, I think….
I’m so fed up with the hysteria, the masks, the incoherent and inconsistent guidelines, the economic and social damage that has ensued, I’m now adopting Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘ stuff happens’ assertion.
Stuff has happened; it’s life; let’s get on with it .
But it’s no big deal anyway. It still seems rather an extreme measure. Those in the high risk categories can self isolate if they wish. The vulnerable in care homes could be protected.
Everone else can just get on with life. Temperature and cough or not.
Depends what you mean by “quarantining”. The term in itself doesn’t specify if it is coercive or not.
I’d be very happy if the government response were to be to “strongly recommend” that anyone with symptoms should self isolate (quarantine) while symptomatic. If they were to make a law that would require anyone with symptoms to go into what we’ve had for everyone as “lockdown”, that would be a step too far for me, but still infinitely better than what we’ve had.
I wouldn’t like it much, but I’d take it. Especially since nobody’s catching the bloody thing anymore.
I agree, but not from the lectern. If people who might be vulnerable wish to self isolate that should be up to them.
Many residents of care homes are suffering from dementia and cannot make decisions for themselves.
Oh, people who are vulnerable should only ever have had to make their own decisions. It’s a personal risk assessment. Would you prefer to live a few more months with terminal cancer without being able to see anyone you love, or to risk catching something that might kill you a bit sooner? It’s the same risk assessment everyone with a significant, life limiting disease has always had to make. They just haven’t know it before.
I thought you were talking about people with symptoms.
I agree with you matt
All they’d need to do is enforce sick pay. That’s literally all they’d need to do.
“Go home, go to bed, get paid for doing so, [and be celebrated rather than dissed by your slavedriver boss]”.
[Personal aside]
Risk of malingerers “can’t come in today *cough cough* I have a new, persistent *cough cough* dry cough. See you in a week, if I’m spared!”
But it’s certainly a more economically measured response than “everybody go home, everything shut down. The government will pick up the tab”
Just posted this to illustrate the death rate of people under 80 with no other health issues compared to people aged 80 or over and/or with health issues.
…based on the latest NHS England data.
Dodgy ONS figures!
The week 22 figures have removed the death of a male aged 70-74 in Week 6, that had been present for the Weeks 20 & 21 figures. I emailed them questioning this death last but I am still awaiting a response, strange how it is gone this week.
Also, the 5 high profile child deaths ( 2 x 5yo’s, 11yo, 13yo, & 14yo) that were reported over two months ago now that I have been investigating, still do not appear in the figures.
They are quietly revising down, mark my words.
VERY quietly. – Probably because they know their figures are going to be questioned in the courts in the foreseeable future.
How on earth do you know? Do they list them by name?
There are zero deaths registered for males aged 1-14 , that how.
Could it not just be that the media reports were wrong?
I don’t generally trust the MSM, with one or two exceptions.
That’s the point. They were wrong.
Wrong on purpose.
It wasn’t just the media reports though, they we’re all discussed at Government briefings, Gov mentioned one death, and Hancock came out with the “I cried, as I have a 14 year old too!”.