Latest News
Did Dominic Cummings’s press conference in the Downing Street rose garden yesterday succeed in taking the heat out of whether or not he should resign following his trip to his parents’ farm in Durham? For a while it seemed to, but this is a dumpster fire that refuses to go out. Today, Douglas Ross, a junior minister in the Scottish Office, has resigned over the matter.
“While the intentions may have been well meaning, the reaction to this news shows that Mr Cummings’s interpretation of the Government advice was not shared by the vast majority of people who have done as the Government asked,” Mr Ross said.
This comes after more than 30 Conservative MPs have called for Cummings to go. In another attempt to quell the flames, Matt Hancock announced at today’s press briefing that the Government would be reviewing those fines issued to people for breaching lockdown rules to seek childcare.
But the Prime Minister is unlikely to do a U-turn, even though his approval ratings have dropped 20 points in the wake of the controversy, according to the Telegraph.
Dead Cat Announcement
In what was widely seen as a “dead cat” move – a political term referring to a politician’s attempt to deflect attention from an embarrassing story by throwing a dead cat on the table – Boris announced at yesterday’s press briefing that high street shops, department stores and shopping centres are set to reopen on June 15th in the biggest easing of the lockdown since it was imposed on March 23rd. The Prime Minister added that outdoor markets and car showrooms would be the first to open on June 1st provided they had social distancing measures in place.
Boris also said the Government would be updating its “plan to rebuild” the British economy, and the update was published on the Government’s website this morning. You can read a summary of what’s new in the Telegraph.
According to the Times, At Cabinet yesterday Mr Johnson told ministers about his plans to allow people to hold barbecues and garden parties at the end of next month with a limited numbers of guests. The move is part of a broader plan to allow people to mix with a “bubble” of friends and family. The Prime Minister also said that the British Grand Prix would go ahead in July.
But don’t get out the bunting quite yet. In most non-essential shops, it will be a case of “look, don’t touch“, says the Times:
Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, said that shopping would be different when the restrictions are lifted. “We need to ensure that some of the shopping habits people may have grown used to in the pre-Covid days are habits that we exercise a degree of restraint on,” he told BBC Breakfast.
“So when it comes to touching and testing goods, when it comes to trying on clothing, when it comes to trying make-up and so on, that all of us exercise restraint in not doing that and recognise that as these stores reopen, it is a new normal.”
COVID-19 as a Workplace Hazard – Part 2
On May 15th I published an excellent article by an occupational health doctor about the economic risks of treating COVID-19 as a workplace health hazard, similar to asbestos. He pointed out the difficulties this created, particularly for small businesses that might not be able to afford the additional costs associated with making their work environments compliant with the new health and safety regulations:
Every single employee, returning to almost any workplace in the country, now needs to be risk assessed to characterise the risk to their safety. For many, this will be a quick process. But for many others with common, chronic health conditions (who will number several millions nationally), it will require significant resource to undertake assessments. As there is little guidance available and given the fear of a backlash from the media, unions, lawyers or the authorities, many employers will feel forced into excluding workers, even where there is little evidence that this is necessary. Employees may feel forced back in fear of their lives, whilst others will not be allowed back despite being desperate for a return to normality.
Since then, the Government has issued some guidance about how to make workplaces “safe” but it is incomplete and ambiguous and I don’t hold out much hope of it being adequately fleshed out when it’s updated. In particular, it over-estimates the expert guidance that anxious company directors will have access to. The same occupational health doctor has written a follow-up, reviewing the latest guidance, and concluded that if the Government doesn’t raise its game the economic recovery will be far slower than it needs to be:
The end of lockdown will only signal the beginning of the next phase of this crisis. The potential for COVID-19 workplace measures to continue to exert drag on the economic recovery is clear and a failure of Government to adequately address the support that employers need can only prolong the damage to businesses and livelihoods. Without this leadership, businesses and organisations of all types will continue to wallow in confusion, while all the while being vilified by the press. There will always need to be some degree of local interpretation of guidance or legislation, but fundamental misunderstandings need leadership otherwise the resulting confusion and chaos will only serve to prolong the damage to the economy and to livelihoods.
Worth reading in full.
Irish Taoiseach Flouts Lockdown Rules
Leo Varadkar, the Irish Taoiseach, was photographed topless in Dublin’s Phoenix Park yesterday, despite official warnings against having picnics. Tsk, tsk. Will he read out a long statement in the Irish equivalent of the rose garden – the shamrock garden? – and then take questions from a baying mob of journalists?
Will Blue States Fare Worse Than Red States, Post-Lockdown?
Some interesting data in today’s Wall St Journal. Nearly two-thirds of leisure and hospitality jobs in New York and New Jersey and about half in California and Illinois disappeared between February and April compared to 43% in Florida, which was among the last states to lock down and first to reopen. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also provided exemptions for lower-risk businesses including contractors, manufacturers and some retailers. Four percent of construction workers in Florida lost their jobs compared to 41% in New York, 27% in New Jersey, 17% in California and 11% in Illinois.
Worth remembering that as recently as last week the Washington Post’s Ben Terris and Josh Dawsey dismissed Gov. DeSantis as a typical “Florida Man”, with his “devil-may-care” attitude and “oafish” demeanour. That’s liberal, Ivy League code for “conservative”. Turns out, DeSantis made the right call.
HMRC Officers So Worried About Catching Covid They Won’t Calculate Inheritance Tax
Every cloud, as they say.
I got an interesting email from a self-employed man today who’s business has been disrupted by over-anxious employees at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (that’s the UK’s IRS to my American readers):
I am a self-employed will writer who also assists clients with probate and estates and am lucky that I’ve been able to continue my business, albeit at a reduced level, during lockdown. Sadly, the same cannot be said of our glorious public sector.
One of my clients has been advised by HMRC, in relation to his late mother’s estate, that “due to current measures to control the spread of coronavirus we are not able to send you copies of your Inheritance Tax calculations”. Presumably, some idiot has advised them that there is a risk of the virus spreading to the wider community on the paper calculations, but, apart from the fact that I believe it is unlawful for them not to show my client how the tax has been calculated, they advised him of this by (yes, you guessed it) sending him a letter in the post! I wonder if some muppet licked the stamp?
The world, or at least the one inhabited by the public sector, really has gone mad.
Good Briefing Document on Why Schools Should Reopen
The Reopen Maryland group, which is petitioning the Governor of Maryland to end the shutdown, has produced an excellent briefing document, laying out the case for reopening schools. Some of the highlights:
- Schools that have reopened haven’t caused a rise in infections anywhere and those countries that never closed schools, such as Taiwan, haven’t seen a higher death rate than those that have.
- The World Health Organisation’s chief scientist says children seem “less capable” of spreading coronavirus and are at “very low risk” of illness.
- Children accounted for fewer than 2% of total COVID-19 cases in a large CDC study, and of those children who did contract the virus, a maximum of 2% required hospitalization. Almost no children have died of COVID-19 anywhere.
- Remote learning can be less effective than face-to-face learning.
- Remote learning disadvantages children with special education needs, as well as students from poor backgrounds and those for whom English is a second language.
- Spring 2020 closures are estimated to place students 30-50% behind where they would otherwise have been, with more significant loss in maths. Some students will lose almost a full year of growth from the spring term closure alone.
- There is widespread agreement that school closure is harmful to children’s mental health, with parents reporting increased depression, stress, anxiety and suicidal ideation.
- The economic impact of school closure and interruptions to learning are substantial and harmful.
New German Anti-Lockdown Medical/Scientific Group
A new initiative in Germany has been launched called Medical Professionals and Scientist for Health, Freedom and Democracy. “Our credo is to act on evidence-based science with common sense and empathy, for the sake of health and freedom in a democratic society,” it says in this English-language YouTube video. One of the people involved is Dr Bobo Schiffmann, co-founder of Widerstand 2020, the German anti-lockdown party. But the driving force appears to be Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, Director of the Institute for Medical Microbiology. He is a long-standing lockdown sceptic and penned an open letter to Angela Merkel last month which was translated on Peter Hitchens’s blog.
The Big Debate
I’ve just concluded a debate on the lockdown policy with Matt Labash in the pages of the Spectator USA. It started off as a light-hearted, humorous exchange of the kind you might witness in a gentleman’s club, but quickly degenerated into a schoolyard knife fight. I think we covered most of the issues, although I didn’t linger on the economic argument and herd immunity gets nary a mention. Hard to know whether either of us will have changed anyone’s mind. Probably not.
Here’s Matt trying to goad me with some death data:
Skeptics love to quibble about the true mortality rate of Covid. Which, fine. I get that. Any reliable analysis has to concede that God-knows-how-many people are walking around asymptomatically, never even thinking to get tested, let alone, dying. However, there’s another supremely inconvenient statistical reality that the skeptics dodge, almost as often as they dodge giving the death toll, when discussing Covid-19’s lethality.
And that is: how many people are dying who actually do get logged as identified cases? That’s not a model, that’s perfectly knowable right now. In the US, we have 1,674,054 total cases, as of this writing. (Again, these numbers are obsolete almost as soon as I set them down, since they’re always ticking up.) And we’ve had 98,315 deaths. Aside from that meaning that one out of every 198 Americans is identifiably infected with the coronavirus, it also means of those cases, 5.9 percent die. And that number hasn’t budged in weeks, no matter how much more we’ve tested, no matter how many more cases are added to the pile.
It’s even worse in other hotspots. Way worse. Spain and Italy both test at a higher per capita rate than we do. Yet Spain’s death toll among diagnosed cases is 10.1 percent. Italy’s is 14.2 percent. And while I respect your skepticial (or sceptical) propensity to ask some tough questions, I wouldn’t rest easy if I were you, either. The UK’s current death rate among identified cases is a whopping 14.1 percent.
And this is my irritable response:
I’m afraid your back-of-the-envelope calculation of the infection fatality rates in different countries are worthless. The number of cases doesn’t reflect the number who’ve been infected – not even close. To get that figure you need to carry out seroprevalence surveys, as John Ioannidis and his team at Stanford have done. In Ioannidis’s latest preprint, he calculated the infection fatality rate by looking at 12 seroprevalence studies in which the population sample size was higher than 500. His conclusion is that it’s ‘in the same ballpark as seasonal flu’, i.e. between 0.1 percent and 0.2 percent. Yes, your chances of dying from COVID-19 are higher than being struck by lightning, but not much.
But we’re getting distracted here. The argument against the lockdowns isn’t that the virus isn’t as deadly as people initially thought. It’s that there’s no evidence they suppress fatalities. I don’t know how many different ways to say this so that it sinks in. Some non-pharmaceutical interventions work – Taiwan’s decision to quarantine people entering the country in early January was smart and South Korea’s track-and-trace programme has been effective. But stay-at-home orders don’t work. That’s the reason I have every sympathy with those protestors in states like Michigan and Colorado. The civil rights of hundreds of millions of Americans, which are supposedly guaranteed by your constitution, have been suspended needlessly. They should be restored immediately.
Worth reading in full.
Trump Regrets Ordering the Shutdown – Or Does He?
In typical style, President Trump has given an interview in which he admits he wouldn’t have ordered the shutdown on March 13th if he’d known then what he knows now – and then immediately contradicted himself and said it was an “incredible” decision, a “great” decision, one that saved “hundreds of thousands of lives”.
Here’s a transcript of the relevant bit of the interview with Sharyl Attkisson of the syndicated American TV show Full Measure:
President Trump: So I was hearing millions of people, and it would have been millions of people if we didn’t shut down. Now, would I shut it down again? No, because we understand it now much better. We didn’t know anything about it, it was new, it was fresh.
Sharyl: You mean you would not have, in retrospect, shut down the –
President Trump: I would have done exactly. We’ve done the exact moves that I would have done. And I did it early. Tony Fauci, Dr. Birx, they all said what I did was incredible. In retrospect, Tony, as you know, never thought he was going to be as severe as it was. And we’re talking about months later, a long time after I did the ban. I did a ban and nobody thought I should do it. I mean, literally I don’t think anybody thought I should do it. I made that decision by myself and it turned out to be a great decision. Hundreds of thousands of lives are saved.
Latest Episode of London Calling
James Delingpole and I debate Cummings-gate in the latest episode of our weekly podcast. We both agree: he shouldn’t resign because he drove to Durham with his wife and son, but his decision to support the lockdown is unforgivable. Listen to the whole riveting discussion here.
If you enjoy London Calling please do subscribe.
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:
- ‘Before condemning Cummings, we should all take a look in the mirror‘ – Helen Dale urges us to look for the beam in our own eye before pointing at the mote in Dom’s
- ‘The Pandemic Is Exposing the Limits of Science‘ – Ferdinando Giugliano points out in Bloomberg that much of the science around Covid is still uncertain
- ‘Alan Jones on Sky News Australia‘ – Great rant from the Australian Sky News host on the futility of lockdowns
- ‘German Government offers Lufthansa $10 billion bailout‘ – German Government set to become a minority owner of country’s largest airline
- ‘What’s Happening on the Isle of Mann?‘ – Big Brother Watch investigates reports of heavy-handed policing in the Isle of Mann in the wake of the Government granting itself emergency powers
- ‘Attempted suicides by elderly may be increasing six-fold, says Royal College‘ – The hidden toll of the lockdown continues to mount
- ‘Emily Thornberry accused of encouraging protesters who threw eggs at Dominic Cummings‘ – Failed Labour leadership candidate, aka “Lady Nugee”, praised protestors outside Dominic Cummings’ home, including those throwing eggs at the Government advisor
- ‘The lockdown fanatics have revived Project Fear‘ – Paddy Hannan in Spiked says Covid hysteria has a lot in common with Project Fear
- ‘Antibody testing will expose the folly of lockdown‘ – Angus Dalgleish, Professor of Oncology at St George’s, says the Government’s antibody testing will enable us to pinpoint when Covid arrived in the UK and almost certainly confirm that the lockdown came too late to make any difference
- ‘Online porn and gaming surge in lockdown, study finds‘ – Online vices have been flourishing as people fester in their homes, according to the Telegraph. But with all sporting contests postponed, what are they betting on?
- ‘Mexican border city tightens checks on US visitors‘ – Coronaphobia really has turned the world upside down. The latest story from the “You couldn’t make it up” department
- ‘Oxford scientists working on a coronavirus vaccine say there is now only a 50% chance of success because the number of UK cases is falling too quickly‘ – And here’s another from the same department. Oxford vaccine scientists are worried there won’t be enough infectious people to test it on if they don’t hurry up
- ‘Gunshot Victims Count As Coronavirus Deaths in Washington State‘ – And here’s story number three from the same folks, who really have been busy lately – Washington state officials have admitted that people who’ve died from gunshot wounds have been counted in the state’s official Covid death toll
- ‘Italy to recruit army of 60,000 volunteers to enforce social distancing rules‘ – Italy is recruiting an army of paid martinets to make sure people don’t sit too close to each other while eating pizza. No need for such extreme measures in the UK, of course. We have an even bigger army of jobsworths willing to do the same for nothing
- ‘Antidepressant prices soar by more than 800% during lockdown‘ – If you’re depressed, that must be depressing
- ‘The Truth About Social Distancing‘ – A New Zealand doctor says there’s little scientific evidence that social distancing prevents Covid infection. Watch it before YouTube takes it down
- ‘NHS to treat severe COVID-19 patients with Ebola drug‘ – The NHS has approved Remdesivir to treat COVID-19, according to Matt Hancock. Will Hydroxychloroquine be next?
Theme Tune Suggestions
Some more suggestions for theme songs from readers: “Cut Your Hair” by Walk Disco, “I Never Promised You A Rose Garden” by Dominic Cummings Lynn Anderson and “Can I Have My Money Back” by Gerry Rafferty.
Small Businesses That Have Reopened
A couple of 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.
We may not have to keep this service going for much longer, following yesterday’s announcement that car showrooms and outdoor markets would be allowed to reopen on June 1st and all other non-essential retail outlets from June 15th, including shops selling clothes, shoes, toys, furniture, books, and electronics, together with tailors, auction houses, photography studios. and indoor markets.
Still no news about when pubs, restaurants, cinemas, theatres, gyms and outdoor sporting arenas can reopen, though.
There will also be plenty of over-anxious Covidiocy to report on. According to today’s Times, shoes tried on in newly-opened shoe shops will be quarantined for 24 hours.
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 still takes me about nine hours a day, what with doing these updates, moderating your comments and commissioning original material. And all my journalist helpers have gone! If you feel like donating, however paltry the amount, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in tomorrow’s update, email me here.
And Finally…
Some good news amid the gloom. The Turner Prize has been cancelled. The picture above is by last year’s joint winner Oscar Murillo.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
So we might get to see groups of friends and family… outside… in another MONTH? How is this really different to the current measly social allowances? Who the hell is going to actually abide by this? And why has the opening date for non-essential shops been pushed back? Still no word on pubs, cinemas, hairdressers, restaurants… all these are now open in other European countries…
I can’t believe how slowly we are lifting restrictions. The rest of the world is getting on with things and getting back to normal (albeit with silly distanced queues and muzzles, I was hoping these will disappear once people sense that the danger has fully passed) while we’re still in our tenth week of lockdown. What the hell is going on?!
Boris and Dom retrospectively compensating for our supposed late lockdown by imposing as many masochistic/sadistic gestures as they can get away with. The records will show that they took this really seriously, yessirree.
We cannot lift restrictions at the moment as we believe some small business may still be able to recover, best to wait another month.
Could you get my PA to check the value of Amazon shares, they seem to be doing rather well at the moment.
Sceptic what me, never.
Skepticism is over-rated.
Every clever trousers calls himself a skeptic, and they’re typically the most credulous of fools, believing nonsense that would make a peasant of the dark ages blush in embarrassment at sharing the same gene pool.
The real clever people are cynics.
Everyone is abiding by this, I meant a 35 year old friend that runs marathons for a walk at the weekend. He wouldn’t stand within 2 metres of me because of the risk.
You’re right these changes are slow.
Gove actually said “the new normal”, as he painted the most depressing picture of retail I can imagine. No browsing, no trying on clothes. This is madness.
I think that people will follow these rules. I am a sceptic and wouod be happy to meet with people, but my family and friends are not sceptics.
But I bet Gove and co have no problem distancing from their tailors when they go suit shopping.
Yes and where are they all getting their hair cut. I’m a shaggy mess.
To call it madness is an understatement,well Gove you slimy little toad,it’s not the ‘new normal’it is completely abnormal and so are you and the rest of your useless government.The morons that run this country are insane,they must be,if not what the bloody hell is going on ? !.I agree with you James007,most people will just go along with this like brain dead drones,just like they have been doing for weeks,I’m sure my family members that died in the second world war would be really impressed with the utter and complete lack of backbone this country has now,I really am heading towards despair now.
“New normal” is repeated by governments around the world. It’s not just Gove, which is no coincidence.
happening all over them world, here’s an example:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/4nJdjNbWSVIB/
You can spot it if you flick between BBC, ITV, Sky and so on and catch all the phrases and sometimes whole reports with the same wording repeated between national and local news.
Gove is a complete snake. This is the man who gave us three years of Mayplosion purely out of self interest because he couldn’t bear to see Boris become leader over him: three years ago, according to Gove, Boris was not fit to lead and now, according to Gove, he can do no wrong… People like Gove are really scum, sorry to say – don’t like to talk about fellow humans like that – but what else can you say?
He’s a fool, I can assure you everyone is not
My sentiments exactly. I really can’t fathom why, despite the mounting evidence showing how trivial this ‘pandemic’ has been,that very few in the MSM or the Westminster bubble appears to be openly challenging the Governments stance on this.I can’t believe that I won’t be able to see my family in any meaningful way for another 5 WEEKS!
Errrr just do it. No one’s going to stop you…..
Do you want people to die?
Yup. Life without death would be horrible.
Just imagine creativity and expression fading away as we live yet another season; listless and empty humanity ceases to care about anything as the very act of living becames pain beyond pain.
Sounds like lockdown actually.
I clearly should have included < /sarc > !
I got it.
I knew what you meant Barney.
That it was sarcastic I mean.
Me too, but people are on a hair-trigger now…
I could name a few ……
The virtue seeker’s revenge
I will do one day!
That’s sarcasm, right?
I saw my parents two days ago, and we had lunch and tea inside.
I went to a secret party and Dom C and N Ferguson were there, had a shit time talking bollocks, the champagne was warm and canapés all vegan so I sprinted back to my lockdown cell for a beer and a sausage roll to find out the RNLI want the beaches closed! Marvellous.
Unbr,irvzble.nI thought RNLI ‘heroes’ were willing to risk their lives to save other people’s, not vice versa.
OS Hell of a typo, sorry, need edit button.
Try living in Scotland where we’re around 14 weeks from where England will be in 3 weeks.
My condolances – this is bad enough!
Or in Wales – total paralysis under a nauseating squad of brainless Stalinist thugs.
I’m reminded of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7scMC7YSDQ
The government doc says that “Sage are considering us to allow the use of bubbles like in New Zealand”, but this will only allow us to connect with one other household, and that is if the medical experts see fit to allow this.
How will they actually enforce the one household rule though? It’s also totally impractical, because your chosen household has to choose you as well. Most people will just interact normally with several households.
Probably the 20,000 trace and trackers, more CCTV, and porbably offering cash incentives to report.
That is happening now in London. In gardens and parks.
Really Hancock? A special post-hoc carve-out for people who incurred fines trying to sort out childcare commitments? That’s your effing answer?
How about cancel all the fines, for everyone, and while you’re at it, jump off a f**ing cliff?
I thought all of them had already been cancelled as they were unlawful.
Cummings is a protected species. So change the law to accommodate him.
Just finished watching mini documentary series about Gates on youtube.
For those who haven’t seen it:
https://www.corbettreport.com/gates/
GSK have the remdisivir contract, (which has zero affect on death rate) and their offices are in Barnard Castle. What are the chances? Developed by Gilead, with funding from the conspiracy holy trinity, Gates, Clinton, and Soros. Fantastic! Maybe we are living in a simulation after all.
Quite – we couldn’t know (unless the red/blue pill choice is offered). I genuinely find it hard to understand how the current idiocies could occur within a real reality!
I understand that Dominic Cummings’ car reg has been shown on news reports. Would be interesting if someone could see if his car was anywhere near the offices of GSK …
There are a lot of things around the ‘Barnard Castle Defence’ that do not stack up. Even if we accept he needed to go for a nice little run to test his eyes a few days after he tested them when he picked his wife and boy up from their overnight stay in hospital (as to that – which hospital and why would an ambulance be dispatched to pick up a child who had ‘just’ vomited in the night?) why not travel to a much closer beauty spot (Shotley Bridge). The man who spotted him walking along the river in Barnard Castle was interviewed last night on Sky – he only saw Cummings and ‘others’ in the distance. Obviously he has now given statements to the police, but at least in this interview he did not mention specifically a woman (Mrs Cummings) and a child. So was Mr Cummings meeting someone else/other people?
It reeks of.a story constructed after the fact.
They can still make money out of it but there is zilch to make out of Hydroxycloroquine it’s been around too long.
What? GSK and Gilead are competitors (in HIV), not partners. And Barnard Castle is just a manufacturing site. GSK’s offices are in that big ugly building off the M4 flyover.
I share the general negativity about Hancock and I am anti-lockdown but I have to admit that today’s presser was a masterclass from him. He fucked off Peston and La Kuenssberg in fine style. Fair play. This is what politicians do when they’re on top form.
Sadly, top form for Hancock is down in the sewers.
I’m sorry I cannot take any comfort from that. The whole spectacle is literally tragic. Hopelessly misguided leaders sparring with equally misguided journalists, both sides thinking they are taking part in a real debate. Only a fool argues in a burning house.
Agreed, it’s like watching two bald men fight over a comb.
Well, he might have been central to the biggest peacetime disaster ever visited upon this country, and he may have the biggest drain on the nation’s morale, resources and health in his portfolio.
But at least he’s good at doing a turn in the circus.
Sorry, I’m not having it. Next time I have to dial 999 for an ambulance, just send a quick-thinking rhetorician instead of a paramedic, eh?
As mentioned, there’s an update to the government’s virus roadmap out today. There’s nothing I could find focusing on the updates only so I skimmed the whole thing. It’s a fairly light read. The intention may not be evil, but the effects will be, if we are not careful. I recommend everyone read it, and send it to your friends, and enemies, post links to it everywhere, maybe with your own summary of what you see as the key points. It’s clear that the intention is to micromanage public and private activity in this country, in an unprecedented way, indefinitely. Social distancing, covid-safe rules, possible repeats of more stringent restrictions, are all here to stay. There’s nothing that says we’ll ever be able to get back to normal. EVER. The only good thing I can say about it is that there’ll be more focus on protecting care homes and vulnerable groups, testing, and PPE. Those all seem like sensible things, but they should be business as usual, and the national emergency needs to be declared over. I fear it won’t be. I remain convinced a lot of people still think this will be over soon, and a lot of those… Read more »
The indefinite continuation of monitoring and control of the population must NOT be allowed to happen..
Incredibly depressing document.
I oscillate between optimism – that we will get out of this, that things will go back to the OLD normal – and severe dejection – that we’ll be stuck with these life-curtailing measures forever.
I’m setting up a new website for the Conservative Freedom Party. Really conservative, and totally anti-lockdown.
It will just be a talking shop really to start with. Some kind of pressure group thing with a space where people can suggest policies if they want.
Having read that document, I now feel physically sick.
Truly frightening document iv been steadily getting in to more of a panic as the weeks go by I work in hospitality and truly think that bojo will quite happily sacrifice this sector and 3 + million jobs for the greater good of course!
I think that Boris and his parliamentary chums will end up with a situation where the 1% can still afford to drink and eat and socialise in places that have put their prices up 300% to make their businesses viable under social dick-stancing.
The rest of us will be stuck with queuing to go in a fucking Wetherspoons that looks more like one of those experiments they build for lab rats.
Yes, that’s part of the problem – they will find myriad ways to avoid following their own rules so they have no skin in the game.
I’ll give it a read.
I think you’ve hit upon the most important question that needs to be asked:
When the threat has gone, i.e. no new infections and no deaths, will we return to normal – no masks, no social distancing, no plastic screens, cash accepted everywhere, pubs fully open etc etc?
Doubtful as they’ll use the restrictions you mention as the reason why there’s no new infections.It depressingly looks like the current restrictions are here for the long term.
We may get to zero infections and deaths, we may not. We’ll certainly get to numbers that are small enough to not scare people.
But the threat of a second wave can always be used. The document is very clear that the phase we are in will continue in whatever form the government deems appropriate until a vaccine or treatment is found which it freely admits may be never.
“This document sets out a plan to rebuild the UK for a world with COVID-19“
I think by rebuild they don’t mean rebuilding what they have just knocked down, they mean reshape.
It is indeed a world with COVID-19, but a world with many other illnesses and diseases. By and large throughout human history we have learnt to deal with them in a way that suits us, with all the compromises that entails.
I think it’s important to get it into people’s heads that COVID-19 is just another thing than can kill you, among many. It’s not unique. We don’t shut the world down or stay 2 metres away from eachother, forever, because of the flu.
They might as well say “This document sets out a plan to rebuild the UK for a world with the common cold.’“ Wowza. Don’t let them grind you down. Vote with your pockets. Unless you really HAVE to do something don’t participate anywhere there are imposed restrictions.
Bill gates recorded and interview a while back threatening there will be wave after wave unless a vaccine is given to everyone. Will try and find the link if ti still exists.
I think it may have been the same interview (but not 100% sure) where the interviewer told him to stop calling the vaccine “the final solution”.
Wondering if that’s the same interview I’ve seen, where Gates specifically says that we don’t want a situation in which loads of people are walking round having recovered from the virus…
It’s funny but my (one) vehemently anti-lockdown friend, who also despised Bill Gates 25 or so years ago, reckons that in recent years he’s become more genuinely philanthropic. Whereas I reckon the man is a lethal megalomaniac who’s buying his way into every possible corridor of power.
Whatever else comes back, cash will be gone for good.
And all those pubs, restaurants etc that have gone away are not coming back and many more yet will now fail… and they won’t be coming back either.
But then, a lot of these could be handily converted into relatively affordable flats, so there’s that, if the planning shitmonkeys can be counted on to get their homunculus asses out of the.
I will be forcing cash into the hand of any seller who refuses it. Legal tender, f*ck the “safety” policies. I do not accept cashless fascism and urge everyone else to copy this example, if enough of us don’t play by the rules of the “new normal” surevillance state then they will have to give up.
I have a standing prediction that at Rishi’s next budget he’ll set the wheels in motion for the abolition of cash… it was a big ambition of Osborne’s.
Short answer : No. (Just in case)
“It is clear that the only feasible long-term solution lies with a vaccine or drug-based treatment.”
WTF! It doesn’t even really affect anyone under 70 apart from those with underlying illness, yet we are all waiting for a vaccine that will more than likely kill or disable more people than the virus ever would!
Oh…. But but but it (the virus) might evolve and adapt…
Said some poor sap to me today
I keep hearing this from people too, what they don’t take into consideration is that most viruses evolve to become less potent, as it’s not in the virus’ best interest to kill the host, as it is killing itself.
They keep giving the Spanish flu as an example, but it is believed that the doses of Aspirin people were treated with was responsible for killing people in the subsequent outbreaks after the first wave.
Absolutely right about aspirin and Spanish flu. The following is from history.com, and an ominous warning for the “we’re going with the science” brigade:
“Before the spike in deaths attributed to the Spanish Flu in 1918, the U.S. Surgeon General, Navy and the Journal of the American Medical Association had all recommended the use of aspirin. Medical professionals advised patients to take up to 30 grams per day, a dose now known to be toxic. (For comparison’s sake, the medical consensus today is that doses above four grams are unsafe.) Symptoms of aspirin poisoning include hyperventilation and pulmonary edema, or the buildup of fluid in the lungs, and it’s now believed that many of the October deaths were actually caused or hastened by aspirin poisoning.”
Depressing as this kind of stuff is, there is an element of “the worse the better” in it. The stupider and costlier they make their policies, the more people will start to rebel, and the more businessmen will be interested in backing resistance.
I hope you are right, and I stupidly hadn’t thought of businessmen as a good source of resistance. They are often not seen in a good light, and they haven’t always done well in battles against excessive regulation.
I would just like to get as many people as possible open to what might be coming so it stops sooner and the catastrophe only sets us back 5 years and not 10 or 20.
There’s a few high profile names have come out strongly against it: Simon Dolan, Elon Musk, Sir Rocco Forte, couple of others I can’t put my mind to atm.
Yes, let’s hope the Dolan legal case gets some attention.
Read an interview with the head of the Spanish association of retailers. It represents big retail chains including. IKEA. He wasn’t happy about what is happening and when asked if his association planned legal action, he replied with an emphatic yes but that it was not the best time to do it. Hope to see this legal action soon as businesses slowly come back to some sort of life.
Yes, i think there are quite a few who realise the disaster they’re facing but can’t risk coming out in public opposition yet while the panic is still in full force.
That’s good news!
Hate to be a pessimistic sod today, but you do know the law could simply be changed to not allow for a legal challenge? In the name of ’emergency measures’…
People are already ignoring social distancing. Young people, in particular, will not stand for it much longer. I’ve seen plenty of groups milling around and no sign of Plod. A lot of this stuff is just written by imbecilic civil servants who have no expectation it will ever take effect.
Yes but every business, venue, club etc etc will have to comply with these rules or be shut down.
Online schools and universities, no touching things in shops, offices where you sit miles apart and can’t congregate by the watercooler, public transport where you are hectored by marshals, empty pubs with no standing room, no more music festivals, half empty stadiums, leisure centres, museums etc etc.
All of those places will have the life regulated out of them and however much we ignore the rules the rules will continue to exist as long as the lies and delusions continue to be believed.
There will be the constant threat of legal cases, government inspections, snitches. Human nature will push back but we are not out of the woods. There are a few precedents for free countries that lost their freedom. Quite recent, too.
They are unbelievably stupid. So people are going to stop dating are they? They’re going to stop meeting new people and they’re going to stop having sex? Only the most insane morons could come up with something like this.Resist. Maybe we’ve all read 1984 too many times.
Two gin-scented tears trickled down the side of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
We don’t! We hate BB! BB is ungood! We support Goldstein!
BTW, haven’t we acquired a lot of Newspeak lately? And isn’t it just horrrrrrible?
Yes, and yes… Doubleplus ungood.
One by one people are waking up
I hope to God you’re right.
The fact there is no phase 3 says it all. The document implicitly states a vaccine or social distancing forever. Somehow i think there may be a revolution as there will be no vaccine. Not a fucking hope in hell. If cases continue to fall i can see mass disorder in the next few weeks and months if this shit doesn’t end. Also, the document was no doubt written by s proper twat.
There could be, but for it to be safe to roll out to the public you are looking 5-10 years. Then you have the manufacturing stage to produce 70 million doses just in this country, and then the logistics of scheduling everyone to be vaccinated. It would take decades!
Unless (and it’s a real possibility) Covid just burns out like SARS in which case (apart from the collateral suffering) all their posturing will be irrelevant. I do not believe that for the rest of their lives people are going to be on the alert for a non-existent virus. In the 1970s London was really in the grip of a hard hitting IRA bombing campaign. You didn’t stop going to work and nobody looked under their bus seats for bombs. You just got on with it. People will forget SD (I refuse to call it ‘social’ when it is anything but) when they realise they’re trying to avoid a virus that isn’t there. Gotcha!
Have you ever known so many people to be brainwashed though? I find that terrifying quite honestly. No matter how many facts you thrust at them they’re in denial… And still sign off with ‘stay safe’ for god’s sake
It’s classic cult behaviour.
I remember after the 7/7 London bombings, people stoically continued using public transport. After all, we all needed to get to work and to continue living our lives. Even after a failed attempt at further tube and bus bombings three weeks later, we just carried on. I remember feeling slight trepidation at first, but that sensation quickly disappeared.
I just fail to understand why everyone is now allowing themselves to be terrorised by a pathogen which, evidence suggests, is far less lethal for most than the flu potentially is. People play hard and loose with their health and safety all the time. So what on earth is going on??
What the fuck are these lies… For a start, it isn’t a respiratory infection. It’s more like a blood clot ffs… Remember all that crap about ventilators? Went quiet didn’t it? because they do no fucking good, and they are more likely to kill a patient than cure them. So why still mention respiratory?
Jesus, this is now so sinister it’s beyond scary.
How long can someone play this NHS overwhelmed card when hospitals are fucking empty. I feel like booking myself in for something just to film how bloody ‘overwhelmed’ they are.
Those YouTube dance routines don’t film themselves.
Are you sure this is from a government website…or did they copy and paste it from 1984? I f**king despair for this country..What have have we become and how much worse will it get?
Whilst furloughed from BA and awaiting my fate, I’m currently working for a well known high street supermarket as a home delivery driver. None of my colleagues in this huge supermarket seem bothered by Coronavirus and are carrying out there duties pretty much as normal. Good job, as otherwise the country would starve. Only a small number of customers wear masks, though the absurd 2m queueing rule is observed. The lockdown is over in all but name. Let people decide for themselves if they wish to take precautions. In the meantime let’s all get back to work and go for a pint on a Friday like we used to pre madness.
I enjoyed a motorway drive yesterday and it felt as though I had gone back a few decades. Maybe this cloud has one silver lining.I was expecting to see an Austin Maxi in the left hand lane. For those who are millenials the motorways used to be like this and it once was a pleasure to drive. I was on essential business of course and was going to take the opportunity to meet as I was passing by a family member and his wife for tea .
However my sister in law is a ” mitarbeiter ” of the Stasi and felt it was inappropriate . I suspect as our merry band of sceptics are outnumbered by the wet pantyhose wearers that is not uncommon to find there is sharp disagreements in families probably similar to the Brexit/Remain divisions.
Shopping today in M and S with the queue and nutters wearing their masks, coming with the news that we are in lockdown/social distancing for the forseeable future makes me however truly despair.
I do a thousand miles a week for work, and I must admit, it has been quite nice! Not having to worry about rush hour for the last 3 months, don’t need to plan around traffic. It’s been less stressful. A lot busier than it was, but still no traffic. Fist couple of weeks were so odd, you wouldn’t see another car at all across 4 lanes of the Motorway. It was like it was 3 in the morning all day.
It had occurred to me that, given how deserted the motorways were at the beginning, how did DomCum drive 260+ miles (each way!) without the police motorway spies noticing?
Precisely!
I’m getting an ever more hard to resist urge to slap mask-wearers as they parade themselves around my town with the haughty aloofness they all seem to have,I will try hard to resist the urge but it is difficult.I refuse to use any shop that makes customers queue outside and they can all stick the 2 metre crap where the sun never illuminates.
As long as you slap them like this…… https://youtu.be/gVsloCJDYjE
I’m with you on the mask wearers. Regarding shops and queuing… I don’t think it’s their fault, as there is the constant threat of being shut down if they don’t comply.
Best analogy I heard against wearing a mask (which I have always thought was stupid and ineffective) is that’s it’s like using a chain-link fence to stop a mosquito.
Don’t be lulled! I had the same feelings driving too. Absolute pleasure have to say, just make sure you have enough fuel as no services are open
It does not compensate for the total madness though.
But keep your eyes peeled … I have said it before but their are huge infrastructure projects happening right now. Smart (hate them) motorways, all lighting is now new energy efficient- noticed that?, 5g rollout, fibre optic upgrades… The fucking works.
If the end game is to wipe us all (as is frighteningly plausible) out then why go to all that trouble? Unless it’s the tiny carrot for accepting the big stick of fucking ‘new normal’
Owing to shortage of wardrobe space, or possibly an excess of clothes, I have a twice-yearly routine of swapping winter clothes for under-bed-stored summer ones in spring, and vice versa in the autumn. I’ve just done the springtime swap-over and it was a weird experience. When I last wore those clothes, I was a free woman in what I thought – in fact, took for granted – was a free country. I wore that jacket to church most Sundays. I wore those trousers on my riding holiday. I was wearing that t-shirt when I last went to Hay-on-Wye and got punch-drunk on unlimited book-browsing. I wore that skirt to the music society’s summer party. I could do all of these things freely. I could hop in the car and go where I liked, when I liked, and nobody could stop me. And now I am a prisoner in a slave society. I can’t drive anywhere, or even walk anywhere, without that creepy feeling that the police, or some malevolent informer, is watching me. My instinct is to wear dark colours and creep into corners and slink along the back roads. Going to church is impossible. Going into the café across the road from the… Read more »
I was looking at my full wardrobe and thinking that, as there’s nowhere to go, I might as well clear out a lot of my clothes.
Keep them! Wear them at the end-of-lockdown parties.
I have helped fight for smaller causes that once seemed equally unpromising, and we won.
Never, never give in, even in the darkest recesses if your mind.
I realised I was in denial today when I sat in the garden in my Christmas sparkly jumper (I’m not even making an effort anymore!), too hot, and irritated because I do the same as you, and have a winter and summer wardrobe (and shoes) and swap them over into and out of storage. I have some LOVELY, elegant, summer clothes, and I realised today I have resisted unpacking them as I can’t bear it. I have also got two new pairs of shoes, still in the box, that arrived just before lockdown, that I bought for work. I’m with a new firm and I’m having to do more client meetings (I’m an associate consultant, so can skulk at home for most of the time), and needed a better working wardrobe. I bought them for that inbetweeny – we’ve left the winter, but it’s not quite proper spring – period and it struck me today, they’ll stay in the box now, because it’s bloody summer! Although, a close family member came over today, first time I’ve seen her in ten weeks, and it was so good to chat and laugh, and find she’s as sceptical as me (well maybe not… Read more »
Dominic Cummings: ‘ We agreed that we should go for a short drive to see if I could drive safely. We drove for roughly half an hour and ended up on the outskirts of Barnard Castle town.’
Edmund Blackadder: ‘Great Boo’s up.’
Yes – and if he found he couldn’t drive safely and stop in time to miss the person who stepped out in front of him, he would always have the excuse that the other person had been out for more than thirty minutes!
This is not intended as a defence of Dom Cummings, but I need to say it. The MSM keeps harking on about public outrage regarding his actions. They’re outraged because they believe the inaccurate & narrow-minded coverage in the hate campaign peddled by said MSM. And I’m not surprised they’re outraged, either, because most people won’t know about the subtleties mentioned in the official guidelines around caring for small children, which were there from the start, because NOT ONCE have they been covered by said MSM. Said MSM, instead, would rather incite complete hysteria and fear amongst the population by cherrypicking and recontextualising statistics from all over the world, when they could have been helping people to understand guidelines. And this same hysteria, peddled by said MSM, and lack of understanding of the guidelines, allowed to happen by said MSM, is why the public are so outraged by him taking a reasonable action in the case of caring for his child. And now said MSM gobbles up this outrage and spews it back into the papers and television reports. When will the majority – I’m excluding you guys because I know you get it – in this country wake up… Read more »
“Creating a world where outrage and polarisation win out over all reason and humanity? It’s a disgrace.”
Absolutely. It’s like a once well respected and important institution has become rather like a tabloid newspaper. Hysteria and panic sell.
Who questioned the government on reason and humanity, as they pushed us into an authoritarian existence? Telling us we are not able to see our loved ones?
They are wrong.
We are right.
So visit them anyway!
Got no answer yesterday, so I ask again. Can someone please direct me to the “official guidance round caring for small children”. I can find “vulnerable adults”, children in care and where there may be contact orders, but not for the rest of us. Maybe I need to as Dom.
I understand your frustration, because they’re not easy to find and they haven’t been clearly explained.
I’ve just checked, and they’ve changed the website since the guidance update recently, but for what it’s worth, when I first checked the guidelines on .gov at the start of the lockdown, it explicity spoke about things like being able to travel to a different household to avoid domestic abuse, and taking children to different households if care is needed.
I realise it’s easy for me to say this, but from one man to another, this is what I read in the guidance when it was first published on the .gov website. It may have changed many times since then; I didn’t check again. Make of that what you will, I guess.
To me, it highlights a more important issue, that the mainstream media, with its inherent reach, should have taken it upon themselves to explain these guidelines clearly to the nation. And they didn’t.
It is even worse than that. It is an entire class of public guardians, paid big salaries to exercise a kind of moral control over the population. We need to take an axe to it.
I was a BBC fan until about 1985. And then they started reversing footage of news reports. Downhill since then.
What was most disturbing about the BBC (I was a supporter prior to this) was how they so quickly turned from impartial arbiters of even-handed journalism to the state’s propaganda arm.
I genuinely don’t understand this attitude. From my perspective “the state’s propaganda arm” is exactly what the BBC has always been. They make no secret of their belief that they are there to indoctrinate people in “responsible” attitudes and behaviour. That was exactly the raison d’etre of things like The Archers, iirc.
I suppose it’s not something you notice unless you are a real dissident and they are actively propagandising against something you have real sympathy for (or for something you are strongly against). Certainly the BBC has been my political enemy for decades.
Yes indeed though isn’t it true there has been a shift in their values, in what they are propagandising in favour of? They seem to have become more extreme to me.
The idea of impartial journalism seems implausible to me anyway. Much better to have partial journalists who try to argue their case as best they can, cards on the table, and let people make their own minds up.
I’m pretty sure they are no different now to what they’ve always been. If you imagine yourself someone who has opinions that are nowadays strongly politically incorrect but that within living memory were commonplace (any of the taboos – sexist, homophobic, racist), then you might be able to imagine how it felt to be on the receiving end of BBC propaganda 30-50 years ago. It’s just that at the moment it’s turned against opinions you hold, and care about.
Though there was a marked shift a few decades back on news coverage specifically where they collectively decided that impartiality is morally wrong (and, as you say, impossible). But that affected the whole of our journalistic classes, not just the BBC.
My view on that is that perfect impartiality might be impossible to achieve but it’s better to have journalists who at least aspire to it. Especially in a state-funded supposed national broadcaster. I’d rather they at least feel guilty when knowingly lying to us, rather than feeling smug that they are doing their journalistic duty to the Greater Good by doing so.
I guess you are right. I have always accepted they have a pro-establishment slant. The coverage of the recent Royal wedding was sickeningly one-sided for example. However, I had mostly overlooked it which is exactly where their soft power lies (I think). It is exactly because they are viewed as harmless, easy to figure out centrists, they can be trusted to be responsible to a certain degree. Well on this occasion, their “sensible” advice has been far from it.
You live and learn.
Been saying it all along. If not for the MSM, this thing would be over by now. Absolutely hammer them to dust, and do what you want to every day. I do
I gave up on the BBC quite some time ago, and especially around the time of the Brexit debates. I barely read of listen to any of the MSM, and especially now, as I can’t stand the blatant bias and misreporting.
Most of this confected hysteria around whether or not someone drove with his family from one part of the country to another is nothing more than a smokescreen to engineer his resignation, to weaken the government’s position on Brexit. It’s said that while D.C. and Boris were both ill, that unnamed persons were ready to ask for an extension to the Brexit transition period, and it was D.C. on his return who put a stop to it.
And that’s really what this is all about.
And to reiterate, this is about whether someone can go out for a drive somewhere. Think about that.
The media are an easy target, and a lost cause, but lets at least be honest and acknowledge that it was government ministers who dumbed down the message to meaningless slogans, because thats what they wanted. When people did respect the actual guidelines, police chose to overstep the mark, and furthermore their overzealous interpretation of these guidelines was supported by ministers
JOB ADVERT FOR THE RNLI We are inviting applicants to manage our beach and harbour sites under the current lockdown. Our aim is to save lives at sea. However, for the foreseeable future will be maintaining a 2 metre distance from the public at all times. So, in the event we are called out to potentially save a life, we’ve produced some scenarios for your professional training. Scenario 1 Male has fallen out of his fishing boat, become adrift and is drowning 0.5 kilometres out to sea. On arrival in rnli rib, etc, maintain a 2 m distance from him and state clearly three times “stay alert” and give instructions for floating like a log (refer to diagram a). If successful, deploy a lasso rope around his waist (refer to diagram b, noting that it may take several attempts), whilst maintaining a 2 m distance. And finally tow to the shore at a reduced speed. If unsuccessful (male drowns), state clearly to his next of kin that his probability of drowning at sea was approximately the same as that of a healthy under-65 year old with covid-19 also dying. In other words, as god once said to his disciples, shit… Read more »
Frankly, if the RNLI aren’t willing to work during the pandemic (and they have tended to strike me as the brave and heroic type, so it is mroe likely the management at the top interfering with the brave workers on their frontline), then people who manage to get themselves into trouble off-shore can just go without help. That was how it was in the days before mobile phones. People have the right to choose for themselves if they still want to go to the beach when the RNLI aren’t there to save them in the event that something should happen.
RNLI went downhill after employing a full-time professional management team who are PC and HSE obsessed about 5 years ago. I stopped donating after members of a lifeboat crew were “scared” for transporting someone they saved to hospital in a land rover as the ambulance couldn’t get there for an hour or more. Idiot professional managers
have forgotten it is a volunteer organisations.
I live in a seaside town with a lifeboat and I just can’t believe that the crew could be such utter wimps, And yet…
The same tossers sacked members of the Whitby crew for having mugs with a naked women printed on them. Will never donate to them again.
“German Government offers Lufthansa $10 billion bailout” – why doesn’t it merely issue new stocks? citizens could buy new series financing the company back to business. Governments inflate all sorts of bubbles to prop up economy and give the middle class chance to build wealth but when real opportunity appears they destroy it with bailouts.
“The Pandemic Is Exposing the Limits of Science” – think Climate Change models and the history of absurd predications
Lufthansa being controlled by the state. Hasn’t that happened at a point in time before?
More good news!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/24/how-did-the-covidsafe-app-go-from-being-vital-to-almost-irrelevant
Australia’s tracking app is proving itself a giant nothingburger! 🙂
Interestingly enough Australia, despite their record of data abuses, backdooring and crimes against cryptographic secrets, has actually put some good laws in place around that app. They have expressly forbidden anyone to demand someone installs the app as a condition of entry/employment/purchase/sale/travel… For a country where one of their states legalised putting CCTV cameras in the homes of people with positive antigen tests it is remarkable to see they have done one thing right. I don’t feel confident that Britain will put laws around the app to ensure it is not made mandatory and not used as a way to discriminate against people, looks like the population need to be ready to write up and enforce such laws for themselves.
‘… South Korea’s track-and-trace programme has been effective’.
Well if you could explain that one Toby I’d be grateful.
So has Japan’s. Oh, wait…
When even lockdown sceptics are saying this we are in trouble …
Sadly today has been the hardest day for me, mentally, since the start of lockdown. It’s been like a punch in the guts as far as wellbeing and hope goes. Every time I hear the phrase “social distancing” or “the new normal”, I want to punch the person who says it. Michael Gove is very much on my list of people I want to punch. The damage this will do to the retail, hospitality, leisure, travel and tourism sectors is…I don’t even want to think about it. It is completely unworkable, unsustainable and most importantly…pointless! Take all the joy and purpose out of life and no wonder we are experiencing an international mental health crisis and vast number of suicides. And for what gain? What evidence is there that any of this provides any benefit or saves any lives? I absolutely refuse any of the following: – Masks and gloves – Social distancing – Any NHS or track and trace app – Any form of self isolating or quarantine post travel – Any rushed out vaccine, that we clearly won’t ever need I don’t care if I get a fine or prosecuted. Sometimes you have to do what you know… Read more »
Yes, I am beginning to understand how decent Germans (there must have been some, right?) felt as Hitler clawed his way to power: the knowledge that terrible things were happening in your society, but, because the mass of sheeple weren’t seeing it, you could do nothing.
Of course there were decent Germans. Aren’t there any decent Brits at this point? Of course there are. There are decent people everywhere… but believe it or not most people have been led to believe that totalitarianism only ever comes in the form of a short guy with bad breath and a mustache.. “Our British government involved in dismantling democracy? Never. We are the victors and liberators of the world after all! We can do no wrong. Totalitarianism is only for genetically tuned Germanic people. And the Chinese. We Brits, we would see totalitarianism under the disguise of a new normal coming a mile off…!”
“Britons never never never shall be slaves” and “Scotland the Brave” definitely both need rewriting. For that matter all the stuff about freedom in Men of Harlech is pretty embarrassing now..
Cower, Britannia! We cower from second waves!
Britons surrendered all their rights as locked down slaves.
When Britain first, at the medias command,
Lost our collective brains,
This was the ruin of our land,
Before a mild-ish flu-like strain:
Cower, Britannia! We cower from second waves!
Britons surrendered all their rights as locked down slaves.
States like Sweden they stay free
They don’t, to lockdowns fall,
Yes, they’ve kept their economy:
With herd immunity for all.
Cower, Britannia! We cower from second waves!
Britons surrendered all their rights as locked down slaves.
Curtain twitching neighbour spies,
Reporting tyrants decrees broke,
With Drone harassment from the skies
If you walk past thy native oak.
Cower, Britannia! We cower from second waves!
Britons surrendered all their rights as locked down slaves.
There are three more verses to do if anyone wishes to
That’s pretty good stuff. Now we just need a satirist who can sing. Or a professional singer who’s willing to sing subversive stuff and a wealthy backer to get it recorded.
Well, if there’s any consolation to be had – not that I applaud Hitler or anything(!) – his fledging Nazi party started from nothing.
And it didn’t get very far either. Huge, unspeakable damage of course in the twelve years or so. But then it was gone.
A quick war, and the Johnson regime could match that record in just a couple of years…
But the war Hitler started killed 55 million people.
Quite a challenge to little Covvie.
On the other hand, Covvie has killed the soul of the British people in just two months. Quite a reproach to Hitler.
I don’t believe Boris is any kind of Hitler, but I do seriously have to ask what he and his government think they’re playing at.
And I’m thinking that little would be different if we had Blair in charge right now….
I’m with you mate. I feel really lonely to be honest. Like I’m in a constant state of sleep paralysis, Surrounded by unquestioning dullards that are too thick or lazy to do even the tiniest bit of research. Even when you present them with irrefutable facts they can’t acknowledge it. Just say you’re a conspiracy nutter etc. I can’t even say Social DIstancing out loud. It makes me feel nauseous. The whole thing is so absurd, why can’t anyone else see it?
I’m calling it antisocial distancing. See the reaction
Yes, I started calling it that a couple of days back!
Just been on Facebook for the first time in weeks. Am astonished that people are just reciting the Party (MSM) line. No-one seems to be doing any research outside the Party (MSM) box.
I had to take myself away from Facebook because any suggestion that lockdown was going to have consequences for millions was met with the usual assertions that I want to kill people and don’t deserve to ever receive treatment from the NHS (despite my years as a tax payer). I tried going back yesterday but it was full of the same nonsense as a month ago, so I won’t bother again for a very, very long time.
100% agreed.
I dread what management have conjured up for my workplace and I seriously doubt that we will be swamped with people especially with unemployment and bankruptcy figures expected to go up.
I am hoping common sense will prevail but part of me doubts it.
It’s awful but you need to give yourself a break bow and then. We are winning, we just need a but more patience. Their rules are unworkable and so they won’t work.
Well, possibly a bit extreme, but they are going in a very wrong direction.
One consolation is that none of them seem up to the job – just look at the defences of Cummings – amateur hour. As I said yesterday, make Rufus T. Firefly look like a statesman.
I sadly agreeing with you. This is a very depressing time.
Not sure if you have seen V for Vedetta. The whole film is based on a mystery virus that was found and the whole country after being “terrified” by the endless media scare stories allowed a totalitarian government to take over.
It’s basically now a documentary. Very depressing.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=chqi8m4CEEY
The famous speech says it all
And it was a Conservative government, if I recall correctly, which I said at the time was ridiculous.
Boris seems to be following the Democrats playbook rather than the Republican one. He’s certainly no Trump, that’s for sure.
100% with you on this – it is like banging your head against a brick wall – and every day is the same.
Only thing different this morning was I emailed my MP about Cummings. He replied with a copy of the statement he was sending to our local paper, asking Cummings to resign. He is one of the 40 MP’s on the list. I didn’t think he had the bottle to do this, but he did.
I feel the same. There are so many of us in the same boat. It was hard starting work this morning. I live alone and much prefer to work in the office. Where this will all end up who knows?
That sounds like where I was over the weekend. Especially after my sons, both early 20s, voiced their worries about their future; felt so helpless and angry.
I usually stay quiet about things but decided to blog about how I really feel about this farce, felt better. Then I read about Gove’s ‘new normal’ and the air turned blue!
I am totally with you on not doing any of those joyless, soul-destroying idiotic things!
Me too. I lost it at one store, as described elsewhere, after being told that I had to take a trolley in when i didn’t want or need one. I’m sick to death of all this queuing, tape and perspex screens everywhere, the occasional hostility from people, and the general air of suspicion.
This isn’t fun. There’s no feeling of “we’re all in it together” unless they’re referring to being in a gulag or open prison together….
I am with you. Yesterday was a very bad day for me too. I went to the bank in my local town for the first time in 6 weeks. Only because I have an old school music teacher who only takes cash and I needed to change notes. We have struggled on with remote lessons so far.
Then it wasn’t too bad. But yesterday there were massive queues and plenty of idiots in masks. Even one sanitising her rubber gloves FFS. And after eventually getting inside and waiting 15 minutes getting nowhere I asked if they could change my notes, to be told they don’t do that any more as it’s not an essential service. Another blow for the small business. I very nearly lost it. Really struggling to cope with this situation, like many others here. Who do Johnson and co think they are?. What have they done? Monsters the lot of them
Name and shame that useless bank !
HSBC
Ta Cbird. Was thinking about opening an account with them too.
Perhaps try a local post office, they might be able to help change notes. I find them more helpful than the bank.
And in the gulag, everybody was prepared to do everybody else down so as to grab their spoonful of porridge.
I’ve just re-read Ivan Denisovich after many years. Basically, they survived as a team, with a kapo to run things. Inter-team rivalry for sure, but not individualism as such.
Ooh, also I spoke to another of my bezzies today who has a little girl. She is chomping at the bit to get her back to school, and “really hopes only a fraction of the parents send their kids back, so Holly can get the benefit of tiny class sizes”. !!
I asked her if she’s worried about Holly getting psychologically scarred by all the OCD and she said, “Not when I know when she comes home she’ll be having me, her dad and the dog slobbering all over her…. and when she’ll be going to stay with her grans and grandads every other weekend regardless of the rules. There’s no way those teachers will be able to keep those rules in practice anyway, at least not for long.”
Thumbs up.
I dislike inappropriate analogies, but the recent behaviour of the twitter mob, the bishops and the broadcast media, is as close as you will get to Brownshirts without physical violence, and that is not far behind.
They have set themselves up as public guardians, which is of course what the Roman symbol represented.
The fact is, if you disssent publicly, you are at risk of losing your job, arbitrary arrest, and arbitrary prosecution (by the CPS, who are judges of “public interest” in prosecution).
We seem to have lost entirely the spirit of tolerant sceptical enquiry: the idea that you can politely disagree and challenge the public “wisdom”. The media interviews of Cummings yesterday were not journalism. They were the Brownshirts hunting a dissenter.
Yes, though sadly he dissented on one important issue (Brexit) but failed to dissent on an issue that is infinitely more important (reaction to covid-19).
I thought the MSM were more like prosecutors interrogating a hostile witness who they’d already decided was guilty.
But I’m happy with your analogy as well.
Someone here a week or two ago suggested putting underpants on your head if you are forced to comply with facemask-wearing rules. It seems a woman did exactly this in Ukraine, and it was caught on film, hilariously:
Woman strips off and puts her knickers over her face after Ukrainian shop worker refused to serve her without a mask on
(She doesn’t actually “strip off”, in case you’re worried it might be nsfw, that’s just Mail click-bait.)
And while I’m browsing the Mail’s underbelly for coronapanic stories, here’s the other one I found:
I know the Mail does like to use any pretext available to get sex and scantily clad females onto its site (that nurse in lingerie story from Russia is still lingering on the international front page a week later), but I must admit I found this one funny:
Sex workers offer to limit customers to two positions which ‘minimise the risk of transmitting coronavirus’ to enable brothels to end lockdown in Switzerland
“It comes as Switzerland’s adult industry has been heavily hit by the pandemic, after the government placed a temporary ban on prostitution two months ago to help stop the spread of the virus.
The plan to reopen the industry, prepared by the organisation ProKoRe, suggests that sex positions which allow for a safe distance between faces, such as ‘doggy style’ and ‘reverse cowgirl’, are advisable. “
The other interesting story I saw about Switzerland is that their watch exports were down 81.3% in April. If your story’s participants had the inclination, mine would not have had the time!
The end-state is a glory-hole economy.
I can see Hancock’s fingerprints all over this advice – they must have consulted our expert.
If you’re after ludicrous DM stories
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8357149/Men-longer-ring-fingers-face-lower-risk-dying-Covid-19.html
The company said they do not condemn the customer’s actions and are not going to report her to the police.
Now there’s hope!
Watching channel 4 news – they are chasing Cummings like a rabid dog.
Imagine if they put this much effort into investigating the dodgy science behind the lockdown.
I’m not sure if you are suggesting that Cummings is like a rabid dog or the channel 4 news people! Both, perhaps?
Not a fan of either now I hear of DC’s role in orchestrating lockdown…
“James Delingpole and I debate Cummings-gate in the latest episode of our weekly podcast. We both agree: he shouldn’t resign because he drove to Durham with his wife and son, but his decision to support the lockdown is unforgivable.”
That’s a conclusion I can definitely get behind, provided the corollary to an unforgivable decision is that he should go, now..
He did a bit more than just support it though – he was one of the key architects, with Ferguson. No mercy!
He should however have to resign for potentially taking covid back to No 10 after going home to see his wife and for driving in a potentially unsafe condition when he went to Barnard Castle – what if he had then hit a pedestrian crossing the road?
The crazy justification for banning car journeys was what if you break down? Well, knowing Land Rover’s reliability record Cummings should have at least taken the Corolla.
GOOD:
Went shopping at the big Morrison’s today in my area – there were no queues to get in, no one way system and everyone was ignoring those circles in the queue to use the tills. Sure there were some masked zombies but one can’t have everything.
BAD:
Received an email from Blenheim Palace announcing their reopening this weekend however the first week will be restricted to one year pass holders and members. Visitors will have to pre-book beforehand. Now what are the odds that this will descend into farce and chaos?
Daughter had the same thing with Bolton Abbey in North Yorkshire – forget it was her response.
The Morrisons in my city doesn’t have a way system. Am I right in saying that no branch of Morrisons has a one way system.
Indeed… I’m hearing that Morrisons is eneavouring to get back to as normal as possible while Sainsbury’s is still a jambouree of loud-hailing Karens.
Morrisons never had a one way system from day one, they did have a system of queuing to get to the tills but I’ve not seen it for the last 3 weeks. Staff don’t wear masks and gloves, if you see one chances are they’re new.
I think AidanR is right. The M&S in my area has a one way system but everyone including the staff ignore it. Plus their staff like the one in Morrisons are pretty chilled.
The Sainsbury’s in my area is pretty chilled as well. OK you might have to queue outside as its a Local but once inside, again no one way system and the staff are carrying on as normal as well with none of them wearing masks and gloves.
Daughter tells me Morrisons allowed her and her boyfriend in together. Strictly one at a time where I am in Sainsbury’s, Tesco and M&S.
On a brighter note, had some builders round today to fix heating and various other jobs, no PPE, no distancing, just behaved normally.
Morrison Board not that linked to the “globalists” for want of a better word.
Tesco’s 2 main bods both have links to Bill gates via Imperial College and the UN Agenda 2030 new green deal with the others linked to pharmaceuticals and international private banking, Sainsbury’s family foundation is linked to Bill Gates through belief in vaccines (was reading about it a few weeks ago, will try and find the link again) and ASDA are part of Walmart which are implicated in being willing participants in false-flag shootings and having empty stores prepared as FEMA camps in the USA last year.
Morrison seems to be the only big supermarket chain without obvious links to the scam.
My sainsburys doesnt have a one way system, no Karens either.
What is this nonsense about not being able to touch things in shops. Does the government I’m honestly believe customers haven’t been picking things up and putting them down in supermarkets around the country since March? The idiocy of this government gets worse by the day. Why can’t we just see what other countries are doing and follow suit. Although our lockdown wasn’t as strict as Italy, France, Spain, our exit strategy is so painful
It is beyond crazy. Ditto the idea that clothes shops can open but you can’t try the clothes on!
Crackers!
Government: We’ve allowed shops to open but you mustn’t try clothes on. Don’t forget you must still stay home as much as possible.
Me: But if what I’ve bought doesn’t fit because I haven’t tried it on, I have to make another journey back to the shop to return it.
Government: Yes.
Me: But that’s an unnecessary journey that I wouldn’t have had to make if I’d just tried the clothing on to begin with in the store
Government: Yes. Oh and try not to do unnecessary journeys. Stay home as much as possible. Or go out. Or don’t shop. We’ve opened the shops but we don’t expect people to actually shop in them!
Me: Arrgghhhh! .
This is what I would like to believe will be the ultimate undoing of these awful rules and regulations – how inconsistent they are to anyone with a brain cell and how inconvenient and onerous they will make life.
Make sure you don’t buy anything unsuitable or defective in Asda because they won’t let you return ANYTHING!
just pick up a pair of trousers, rub them all over your body and walk out the shop without paying. No one is gonna stop you and if they get too close trying call the cops and get them to arrest them for breaking social distancing
As my wife has just said, after I read her this thread, we’ve been buying clothes online during lockdown, trying them on & sending them back if wrong size etc.
At this rate, our exit strategy is beginning to read like Dante’s Divine Comedy where we’re still at the Inferno stage
I read somewhere that in Germany a shop was selling face masks and people were picking them up, trying them on, then throwing them back and trying another one.
Surely the handling things issue could be covered by providing hand gel at the entrance?
The government seems to be going out of its way to make this as ridiculous as possible. They’re just playing with us. The nationwide roar of ENOUGH! can’t come soon enough.
When the cameras aren’t on surely some of them must be laughing at how compliant the sheeple are in going along with whatever ridiculous, unworkable nonsense they come up with.
I think I might start touching everything I see in supermarkets as well if I see any mask morons in there. That will shit them right up
https://medium.com/@d_spiegel/is-sars-cov-2-viral-load-lower-in-young-children-than-adults-8b4116d28353“We suggest the pre-print should be withdrawn from the website, and the inappropriate analysis acknowledged. Is SARS-CoV-2 viral load lower in young children than adults? Jones et al provide evidence that it is (in spite of their claims to the contrary).”Kevin McConway (The Open University) and David Spiegelhalter (University of Cambridge) This is a complicated paper but still very important. In the Jones article one of the main authors Christian Dorsten is one of the leading men of the Covid-19 response in Germany at Robert Koch Institute. Merkel has been relying on him for the Covid-19 response especially his advice to close schools. The irony in it is, that the article he co-wrote above, really showed that children had less viral dose but by doing some complicated groupings, the conclusion of the original article was changed to suggest a risk of spreading from children hence the advice to the German government. There is a strong reaction in Germany against the whole handling of the Covid-19 response from the Robert Koch Institute and especially Dorsten. They even produced graphs which clearly showed that the lockdown was instituted in Germany when the R was already below 1 and totally unjustified. The anti… Read more »
It was clear that as soon as there was discussion in other countries about school closures, teaching unions and some teachers, supported by metropolitan climate change Nazi-type mums (and some dads) conspired to have that imposed here. They were just waiting for the signal provided by Ferguson’s model. My younger son said in his house at school other kids (teenage lads larking around) were coughing loudly at registration hoping to prompt the teacher to tell them to go home to self isolate. At that stage, there was already a significant minority of staff at home self isolating. I might add this is not a state school, and in an area that even now has had so few cases and deaths that none of my circle of contacts knows anyone who has even tested positive for the virus.
This is beyond parody now. Have I died and woken up in some insane dystopian novel.
Who is advising the government? are they simply taking the piss now or do they simply have an IQ below their shoe size.
160000 people die in the UK every year from cancer.
200000 people die in the UK from heart attack every year
Let’s ask give to stop people touching fried food and pizza.
Let’s just ban smoking.
But no they are running amok talking utter bollocks on a daily basis about A flu virus
And the media generally doing zero reporting, just asking stupid questions about whether DC broke “the rules” or not
How about actually questioning whether the rules are utter nonsense in the first place.
Very very annoyed now
“Have I died and woken up in some insane dystopian novel.”
Yes.
It doesn’t get more dystopian than being a minor piece in Dim Dom Cummings 4-D chess game.
Pretty clear now that this is all his doing.
He is the PM.
Lockdown is his idea.
For awhile I thought that Ferguson was a useful idiot and his model was just a way to lock us down for _whatever_ reason.
But now I think he’s a genuine idiot and believes all of this is justified and that he actually fell for Fergusons model. What a twit.
My family quizzed me why I won’t take a vaccine, I said even by the official CDC numbers 97.74% of people will survive it, Why on earth do I NEED to take a vaccine? They said they will do what the doctors tell them.
But which doctors? (OR should that be witch-doctors?)
I’m reminded of something my dear old Mum used to say:
“Some people would wipe their arse with a broken bottle if a doctor told them to.”
Indeed Gracie. The advice I got from doctors regarding my arthritis and heart disease has been 100% wrong. I take no medication and have never felt better in my life.
its even better CDC report 99.74 % survival.!
Isn’t it strange how actually contracting the virus will not give you immunity (at least not beyond a few months), yet a vaccine which will give you a low dose of the exact same virus WILL give you immunity. How does that work, then?
don’t ban smoking i couldn’t stand it. They’re already trying to take away petrol for my motorcycle and if smoking goes too all i’m left with is tea and since that comes from China we’re gonna run out of that. Life won’t be worth living
Just don’t do the smoking and petrol at the same time!
Absolutely Stefan. This is the most stupid policy programme ever. People will die too.
Just from your two examples – cancer treatments have been postponed for this. Imagine the fear and uncertainty that has caused. I know personally someone who had an urgent cardiology appointment cancelled. A few weeks later, rushed to A&E with a serious heart problem. They could have died.
I sometimes think they don’t really believe in the efficacy of what they are doing. This is all for looking like a strong Churchillian government.
This site and a few others are doing a great job to highlight the madness Of this charade but most people Just see the bbc and the daily mail click bait. Clueless sheep. Very depressing.
I agree, and I think Toby and other sceptics missed a trick not wrestling hold of that narrative, and spinning it back the other way in their desire to protect him (I’ve just watched Jonathan Pie, I appreciate he’s annoying but he’s absolutely bang on on Cummings).
Only ‘annoyed’…? 🤣
Slighly saddened by a what a small minority I’m in over at the Torygiraffe…
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/26/campaign-remove-architect-brexit-telegraph-readers-whether/
I find it very surprising how wound up the posters get over Cummings both on the DT and Guido Fawkes’ web-site (and even over on the usually more sane Conservativewoman site). I sometimes wonder if Cummings has an army of paid posters!
He’s one of those “totem” characters that political zealots absolutely love and will defend to the death, even when, as with Cummings and the lockdown and quarantine decisions, he’s been exposed as acting in direct contravention of their interests. As iirc Tyneside Tigress or Bec pointed out here, it’s like Clinton-worshippers who are supposedly feminists but still won’t hear a word said against their hero.
I don’t know much about him, but what I did know made me think he was a force for good, on balance. But what he has participated in, along with the rest of them, is unforgivable. None of them are fit to be in public office, ever again.
Exactly, and it should make one doubt the honesty and integrity of anyone who claims to be anti-lockdown but wants to let off in the slightest degree any of the main perpetrators for personal or political reasons. They are all Guilty Men (including the women), and given the severity of what they’ve inflicted on the country, and the danger of a repeat, we should be thinking about trying to hound every last one of the out of politics forever, and making their fate a terrifying warning to the next politician to contemplate imposing a lockdown because he’s worried about getting blamed for not acting.
Granted it doesn’t look very achievable atm but things can change quickly, and you have to start somewhere.
There is the “lesser of two evils” argument, to which I have subscribed in the past. When this madness ends, if it ever does, would you rather have Johnson or Starmer or whoever?
Peter Hitchens has been clear that he won’t vote on that basis. I don’t know exactly what it achieves but it’s hard to imagine myself voting for any of the current parliamentary parties until swathes of them are expunged – so probably not in my lifetime.
“Peter Hitchens has been clear that he won’t vote on that basis.”
“The lesser of two evils is still evil” is the argument. it makes sense in a way. But sometimes it’s hard to justify not supporting one side to keep another out.
I’d definitely see both Johnson and Starmer as unacceptable. If that’s the choice we really are stuffed. But I’m pretty confident Johnson won’t be fighting another election as party leader.
No. As I keep saying he is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
He called the virus a plague yesterday after Chris Whitty had whispered the opposite the other week.
I have been having lots of fun on Twitter posting my own images.
It’s clear that certain ones, which you know will get lots of likes don’t get any.
It must be the 77th Brigade in action.
Take courage the tide is turning and anyone who wants to join us on Glasgow Green at 12.00 pm on Saturday will be most welcome.
Let’s make a stand. It’s in our hands
The below the line commentators over at the Spectator are all cheerleaders for Cummings – commentators I have agreed with in the past and who I thought were sensible all seem to believe his astonishing excuses (a practice drive to test one’s eye sight? Of course, who hasn’t done that…?). Douglas Murray defending him, too. All chums together, I think, very disheartening.
I said this the other day. We shut down sceptics are not all in this together.
And yes it is disheartening but the war goes on.
I’m pretty sure he has a bot. A script, probably called “autopleb.py”, written by one of his “geniuses”. Yesterday the Mail comments were filled with posts by different sock puppets, appearing every few seconds, saying very generic things in DC’s favour. Nothing specific to the actual article or to any of the other posts. They were receiving plenty of dislikes by the carbon based readers.
It makes perfect sense when you look at it through the prism of the Brexit wars. The line of thinking is that if Cummings goes, then there’s a good chance that Brexit will be delayed, diluted or even cancelled if Starmer gets in. I’m not unsympathetic to that view, but for me his hypocrisy as an advocate and architect of lockdown makes his position untenable and I wouldn’t be sorry to see him go.
Pretty biased population at the Telegraph I suspect. At least you can be pretty sure some of the “storm in a teacup” voters are people who actually oppose the lockdown but are helping its perpetrators out on this occasion just to protect “their guy”.
What a f***ing loser!
Dominic Cummings’s coronavirus ‘prediction’ claim undermined after it emerges blog post was secretly edited
Cummings said he wrote about coronavirus threat last year, but online clues suggest the reference was added to his blog on April 14 2020
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/26/dominic-cummingss-coronavirus-prediction-claim-undermined-emerges/
Excellent!.Anything that helps get rid of one of the Guilty Men is fine by me.
Yes, and I would give you extra up votes if I could for calling it right even if until now you might have been naturally on DC’s “side” on other issues. It’s easier for me because I always thought he was disastrous. Yes he’s smart and competent but dangerously radical and arrogant.
I tend to be pretty tolerant mostly (for a grumpy, reactionary old misanthrope) but I can be quite binary on specific issues. On a key issue for me, if a politician crosses the line that’s the end for them as far as any support or sympathy from me is concerned. In the past it’s usually been waging a war of choice, but this lockdown has definitely done it for me this time.
Yes, agree. I posted here yesterday that I was shocked by some of the comments under Camilla Tominey’s article – deeply personal and insulting because she has been calling for Cummings to go. She is a Brexiter, and a working mum with 3 primary school children, only one of whom is in the first group to return on June 1 – she wants them all to go back now (in effect calling time on the lockdown)
Hmmm, it’s a bit of a loaded questionnaire in terms of answers in my opinion…. The 77% does not necessarily indicate direct support for lockdown. It indicates a stronger disdain for the media reaction to what Cummings did
I’ve now spent a bit of time in the comments over at the telegraph. Clearly commenters there have chosen their sides, and that is that. Anyone who thinks Cummings should go over all of this must be a rampant leftist who should sod off back to the Guardian where they belong.
Free thinking and rational enquiry are not on the agenda over there just now. They just want to protect the guy that the left are baying for.
Just another reason why he needs to be gone and the sooner the better. He’s dividing conservative opinion and pushing people who oppose the lockdown into the government camp on this issue.
Does anyone know of any research going on as to whether this could actually be the second wave that is passing through now? I know they are finding evidence of possible Covid in some countries even before Christmas and people have been posting about illness after the military games in Wuhan in October. I thought I had read where someone had suggested this could be the second wave that we are currently going through, but can’t find anything related to this. Thanks.
Yes I’ve heard that too. I’ve heard anecdotes about a 1st wave in the UK before, people with flu-like symptoms, some in the tourism and travel industry. Not seen any hard evidence though, so possibility.
Meant to say January and Christmas. Flu-like illnesses, around tourist hotspots.
I’ve heard this idea but why would there be a second wave? I think the first wave certainly started sooner than it did “officially” and also that the secondary epidemic in the care homes was a bit later.
No country that’s opened up has had a second wave. They just like to say that to keep everyone in fear and to justify whatever other restrictions they have in the pipeline.
Seems to me we’re gonna be under siege till we can have another election where i hope Farage or someone stands as a freedom party promising we can go back to normal and the public can boot out these lunatics who seem to think my life is theirs to do with as they see fit.
Is he a lockdown sceptic? It’s support a freedom/reform party. And There are lots of ex-torys shopping for a new party now.
Last I heard on this forum, he was a lockdown enthusiast (even while breaking it to follow his own political stories).
He’s spoken out against the lockdown from day one.
I’m open to the idea. I’ve only picked up hearsay on here about his position. Though if he’s come out against it I haven’t seen any sign of it in the MSM (only saw the report about plod visiting him after a trip to Dover).
He’s a tosser in any case.
Count me in il.never vote Tory again!
Historically the Tory party is usually the fastest to sort itself out. But we’ll see. Labour is recovering from Corbyn quicker than I had expected.
I’ve registered Conservative Freedom Party. Blog type site to follow before too long… It will be really conservative, and totally anti-lockdown.
Yes it might be our only hope the people in charge our truly insane.
On another local campaign, our on a sticky wicket (politically) MP kept saying to us that whilst he was happy to help us in private, he was unable to do so in public, unless we wrote to him, and he kept saying ‘heavy post bag means I can do something’. It sounds really tedious and ineffective, but the very best thing we can do is keep writing to our MPs, writing open letters to newspapers addressed to our MP and getting people to sign (organisations, businesses, youth groups, churches, whatever), and keep on lobbying. Whatever you think of Cummings, several MPs resigned today ‘due to representations from constituents’ – the pen really is mightier than the sword sometimes, polite, well crafted letters really do make a difference.
I’m a remainer, but I would vote for Farage IF he did that.
A few general elections back there was a campaign called “Not the big 3/4/5” depending on where you lived as it was the tories, labour, libdems plus the local ones – SNP, greens, paid cymru. Spit on all of them.
Idea was to vote for anyone except the main parties in an effort to get a lot of independents into parliament with no party affiliations to shake the place up.
Didn’t really get that much momentum, maybe now is the time to start it again.
I just watched that video featuring that NZ doctor and well done her for delivering her professional opinions in a calm, clear and rational manner. It’s appalling how no-one has looked into this in a wholistic manner and while this lockdown is supposedly about saving lives, in reality this has condemned more people to die from cancer, stroke and a host of other ailments as well as condemning people with chronic conditions and pains to carry on with them without any recourse to relief. And that’s even before we get to those suffering from mental conditions such as depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder who have also been forgotten amidst this situation. Dr Bailey is also right about the psychological effects of lockdown and social distancing which has led to increase in anxiety and depression. We are already seeing the ill effects of this and I predict it will get worse as we hear of more job losses, the closure of businesses and bankruptcy that could lead to an increase in suicide rates as well as instances of drug and alcohol abuse. I am getting frustrated that no-one bar us in this blog seems to realise this. What will it take for… Read more »
There is lots of dissent on Twitter.
Yes. I’ve seen that and on YouTube too.
One of Thomas Sowell’s many famous quotes: “It’s not that Johnny can’t think. It’s that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is. He confuses it with feeling.”
That’s the far left for you. That’s also the remain hardliners who still know best. And that’s the lockdown fanatics. How do you reason with them? You can’t. It doesn’t bode well.
Ah, Thomas Sowell. One of my idols. For some reason I am now reminded of another idol of mine, Philip Larkin. This is from an interview with The Observer. By the way, I’m not some right-wing fanatic (at least I don’t think I am). I used to find this amusing even in my Labour-voting period. One could very easily make a case for reversing the right and left divide – I am sure we can all think of so-called right wingers who are idle, greedy and treasonous and left wingers who value thrift, hard work, reverence and desire to preserve. The funny bit is where he points out which are the virtues.
Larkin: I’ve always been right-wing. It’s difficult to say why, but not being a political thinker I suppose I identify the Right with certain virtues and the Left with certain vices. All very unfair, no doubt.
Observer: Which vices and which virtues?
Larkin: Well, thrift, hard work, reverence, desire to preserve – those are the virtues, in case you wondered: and on the other hand idleness, greed and treason.
Excellent. I hadn’t seen that before.
Yes, Philip Larkin. I remember when High Windows came out. No-one as good as that now, and certainly not the Poet Laureate.
Yes, he’s one of the greats of the 20th century. Google the interviews he did with The Observer and Paris Review. They are hilarious. I wonder what he would make of this all.
I think it’s any fanatics (including militant brexiteers!), and it’s definitely the modern disease, I heard a really good way of describing it ‘catharissism’ – a narcissistic vomiting of feelings dressed up as virtue.
I wish I could find the quote or the clip now, but there was at least one case of someone responding to one of his rational statements with “well, of course you would say that as a privileged white man.”
Ah yes, here it is…a review of one of his books, on the blog of the LSE no less.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2012/05/26/book-review-intellectuals-and-society-by-thomas-sowell/
Amendment: This review was amended on 22 November 2017. The original post contained the line ‘easy for a rich white man to say’. This has been removed and we apologise for this error.
Fabulous, thank you!