I cannot be alone in noticing the huge gulf between the sympathetic coverage given to the Black Lives Matter protests in the mainstream media and the almost universally hostile coverage of the anti-lockdown protests. Celebrities who were encouraging everyone to remain in their homes until last week are now rushing out to join the protests, including Emily Ratajkowski, Jaz Sinclair, Paris Jackson and Billie Eilish. Not only is this virtue-signalling hypocritical – why is Covid likely to be spread at anti-lockdown protests, but not at Black Lives Matter protests? – it’s also irresponsible, given how many of those protests have spiralled out of control into fully-fledged riots in at least 25 cities across America, including Minneapolis, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Louisville, Columbia, Denver, Portland, Milwaukee and Columbus.
Those protests have now crossed the Atlantic, with a march through the streets of Peckham yesterday in which demonstrators held up placards reading “Abolish the Police” and “Riot is the language of the unheard”. That demo did not become violent or lead to rioting, but more protests are planned in London and other British cities over the coming days.
Today, Metro ran an article entitled: “Black Lives Matter: Are protests taking place in the UK and how can you donate?” It included a handy guide to people who want to join those protests, something I don’t recall Metro doing a couple of weeks ago when it wrote about the anti-lockdown protests across the country.
I’m all in favour of the right to protest. I think the suspension of that right is unlawful and it should be reinstated immediately. But the police need to make up their minds. Either it’s now permissible for groups of more than 100 people to stage a protest, or it isn’t.
It can’t be one rule for Black Lives Matter protestors and another for anti-lockdown protestors.
Was the Government Really Following “the Science”?
A few weeks ago I linked to an excellent Newsnight report by Hannah Cohen which asked whether the Government really was following “the science”? Now that the Government has released the minutes of the SAGE meetings in the period leading up to the lockdown announcement on March 23rd – this was on Friday as a direct result of Simon Dolan’s lawsuit – we can get closer to answering this question.
The former barrister Paul Chaplin has gone through the minutes in a lengthy blog post and concluded that placing the entire country under virtual house arrest was a political decision and not “based on the science”. His analysis is compelling.
Chaplin finds plenty of evidence in the minutes that various different containment measures were discussed by SAGE, but at no point before March 23rd did the group recommend the quarantining of the whole population. The measures SAGE considered were home isolation of symptomatic individuals, the isolation of everyone in a symptomatic individual’s household for 14 days and the cocooning of those over 70 and those with underlying health conditions – the three measures introduced by the Government on March 16th. But at no point did SAGE discuss anything resembling a full lockdown. Indeed, SAGE noted at a meeting on March 10th that banning public gatherings would have little effect since most viral transmission occurred in confined spaces, such as within households.
The last SAGE meeting before the lockdown was on March 18th where it was noted that the impact of the social distancing measures introduced thus far would not be known for two or three weeks. The attendees did not at that stage know whether those measures would be sufficient to prevent the NHS’s critical care capacity being overwhelmed and in the absence of more data could not offer any advice on whether additional measures – such as closing bars, restaurants and entertainment centres, and limiting use of indoor workplaces – would be necessary. The only further measure SAGE recommended at that meeting was closing schools.
SAGE advises that the measures already announced should have a significant effect, provided compliance rates are good and in line with the assumptions. Additional measures will be needed if compliance rates are low.
Minutes of the 17th SAGE meeting on COVID-19, March 18th 2020
The attendees discussed locking down London but no conclusion was reached. However, they did say that if additional measures were going to be necessary, it would be better to bring them in sooner rather than later. According to the minutes: “If the interventions are required, it would be better to act early.”
In other words, Boris Johnson and his advisors were not following “the science” when they took the decision to lock down the country on March 23rd – they weren’t acting on any specific recommendations by SAGE. Nor can the Government claim this is one of the options that was discussed at SAGE meetings and it was basing its decision, in part, on SAGE’s analysis of the impact of a full lockdown. That option was not discussed at any of the meetings before March 23rd. In this respect, it was a political decision.
This dovetails with Christopher Snowdon’s analysis of the decision-making in the period leading up to March 23rd published in the Critic last week, although Snowdon only had access to the broad summaries of the SAGE meetings that the Government has released, not the more detailed minutes released on Friday. Snowdon concluded that the Government’s scientific advisors never explicitly recommended a lockdown; on the contrary, at various stages they recommended against it.
Snowdon says that even Neil Ferguson’s March 16th paper, predicting 510,000 Covid deaths if the Government took no measures to stop the spread of the virus and 250,000 if it stuck with its “mitigation” strategy, stopped short of recommending a full lockdown:
Contrary to popular belief, the infamous study did not call for a full lockdown, nor did it model the effects of a full lockdown. It looked at school closures, social distancing and household quarantine for suspected cases and those living with them. It concluded that the greatest benefit would come from a combination of social distancing and household quarantine, with further benefits likely to come from closing schools, although it conceded that school closures would prevent many people from working.
There is no doubt that Ferguson’s model was impactful. It suggested that hundreds of thousands of people would die from COVID-19 if the Government continued to pursue a policy of mitigation. This put containment back on the table and gave legitimacy to more coercive action from Government, but the measures it recommended did not amount to a full lockdown. Its social distancing recommendations were far from trivial and yet they seem modest after nine weeks of genuine lockdown (the authors anticipated most people still going to work, for example). The only time Ferguson and colleagues use the word “lockdown” in the text is when they are making a distinction between their proposals and an actual lockdown. They implicitly dismiss a lockdown as being too extreme for the UK, saying that their favoured policies are “predicted to have the largest impact, short of a complete lockdown which additionally prevents people going to work”.
Snowdon’s conclusion is remarkably similar to Chaplin’s:
The founding myth of the lockdown is almost the opposite of the truth. Science did not triumph over politics on March 23rd. It would be more accurate to say that the strategy which preceded the lockdown, unpopular though it now is, was based on science whereas the decision to go into lockdown was political.
Snowdon’s article – and Chaplin’s analysis – is in some ways helpful to the Prime Minister since it debunks the myth that he was told to lock down the country by SAGE long before March 23rd and failed to act on that advice due to “dither and delay”. That was the story told by the Sunday Times in its May 23rd article entitled: “22 days of dither and delay on coronavirus that cost thousands of British lives.”
But if you’re a sceptic, this analysis isn’t helpful to the Prime Minister since it lays the blame for the lockdown squarely at the door of 10 Downing Street.
Stop Press: I emailed Christopher Snowdon to see if he’d had a chance to look at the SAGE minutes and he got back to me to say he had and they did indeed corroborate his analysis:
The minutes fully support what I wrote in the Critic. The social distancing measures discussed by SAGE – and modelled separately by Neil Ferguson et al. and John Edmunds et al. – are not well described in the documents, but it is clear that they are more moderate than the lockdown that was introduced on March 23rd. Even at the late stage of mid-March, SAGE was never seriously entertaining a full lockdown, nor did the attendees expect their more modest measures to be in place for more than 12 weeks. To claim otherwise is to rewrite history.
Norwegian Prime Minister Admits Lockdown Was Mistake, Says Sorry
Last Wednesday night, Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg went on television to make a confession: she had panicked at the start of the pandemic. Most of the tough measures imposed in Norway’s lockdown were steps too far, she admitted. “Was it necessary to close schools?” she asked. “Perhaps not.”
She isn’t the first Norwegian official to acknowledge that the lockdown wasn’t necessary. On May 5th, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) published a briefing note reporting that when the lockdown was imposed on March 12th Norway’s R number had already fallen to 1.1. It slipped under 1 on March 19th.
“Our assessment now… is that we could possibly have achieved the same effects and avoided some of the unfortunate impacts by not locking down, but by instead keeping open but with infection control measures,” Camilla Stoltenberg, NIPH’s Director General said in a TV interview earlier this month.
An expert committee charged with carrying out a cost-benefit analysis into the lockdown measures in April estimated they had cost Norway 27 billion kroner (£2.3 billion) every month. The committee concluded last Friday that the country should avoid lockdown if there is a second wave of infections.
“We recommend a much lighter approach,” the committee’s head, Steinar Holden, an Oslo University Economics Professor, told the Sunday Telegraph. “We should start with measures at an individual level – which is what we have now – and if there’s a second wave, we should have measures in the local area where this occurs, and avoid measures at a national level if that is possible.”
“If it’s necessary to have very strict restrictions for a long time, then the costs are higher than letting the infection go through the population,” Holden told the Telegraph. “Because that would be immensely costly.”
In particular, Holden’s committee said schools should not be closed again if there is a second wave. It estimated in April that the measure had cost 6.7 billion kroner (£520 million) a month, while having “little impact” on the spread of infection. The NIPH has gone further and said that school closures may have even increased the spread.
Margrethe Greve-Isdahl, the doctor who is NIPH’s expert on infections in schools, tells the Telegraph that if schools hadn’t been closed they could have played a role in informing people in immigrant communities – which were hit disproportionately hard by the epidemic – of hygiene and social distancing rules.
“They can learn these measures in school and teach their parents and grandparents, so at least for some of these hard-to-reach minorities, there might be a positive effect from keeping kids in school,” she said. “There’s now a lot of information available on how it has impacted negatively on the economy and on vulnerable children.”
What refreshing candour from Norway’s Prime Minister and senior public health officials. I look forward to the press conference in which Boris Johnson, Sir Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty admit the lockdown was a mistake and apologise for it.
Was the Government’s Response Predicated on Coronavirus Behaving Like Influenza?
Guy de la Bédoyère has sent in a short piece based on the interview that Peter Openshaw, Professor of Experimental Medicine at Imperial College, gave on the Andrew Marr Show this morning. Guy’s conclusion is that many of the things the Government got wrong, such as closing schools, were dictated by the “UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy” published in 2011.
It’s easy to carp with the benefit of hindsight, but one theme came across painfully clearly from Professor Openshaw’s comments. Some of the scientists who exerted so much influence over the Government were operating like car mechanics who had no workshop manual for the model they’re trying to fix and instead just used the nearest one to hand, regardless of its relevance: in this case, the Influenza Workshop Manual, which looks as if it may have been the chocolate teapot of ways to deal with COVID-19.
As always, Guy’s piece, which I’ve published as a subpage of “How Have We Responded to Previous Pandemics?“, is worth reading in full.
Apocalypse Not
One overlooked success story in the coronavirus crisis is Vietnam. The country of 97 million people has not reported a single coronavirus-related death and on Saturday had just 328 confirmed cases, despite its long border with China and the millions of Chinese visitors it receives each year. That’s particularly remarkable when you factor in it’s a low-middle income country with only eight doctors for every 10,000 people. So what did Vietnam get right?
According to CNN, the key to Vietnam’s success was ignoring the WHO’s advice that there was “no clear evidence of human to human transmission” and introducing temperature screening for passengers arriving from Wuhan at Hanoi international airport in early January. Travelers found with a fever were isolated and closely monitored. By mid-January, the country had introduced medical quarantining at border gates, airports and seaports and on January 24th it cancelled all flights to and from Wuhan. On February 1st, all flights between Vietnam and China were halted, followed by the suspension of visas to Chinese citizens on February 2nd.
Readers of this site will recall my post on May 9th pointing out that the Newly Emerging Respiratory Virus Advisory Group (NERVTAG) considered screening passengers arriving from Wuhan at a meeting on January 13th chaired by Peter Horby, an Oxford professor with links to the World Health Organisation. This is the same Peter Horby who criticised the Government yesterday for easing the lockdown too soon. At this point, seven other countries had introduced temperature screening at airports for visitors from Wuhan. However, the NERVTAG recommendation was that there would be no point in doing this if exit screening at Wuhan airports was already taking place, although they had no evidence it was.
At the next NERVTAG meeting on January 21st, this one attended by Chris Witty and his deputy Jonathan Van-Tam, as well as Professor Neil Ferguson, the boffins were asked to reconsider the question. But again they passed the buck to the Chinese authorities. By now, human-to-human transmission had been confirmed. Nonetheless, NERVTAG’s response was the same.
Neil Ferguson noted that from the modelling perspective, with exit screening in place in China, effectiveness of port-of-entry screening in the UK would be low and potentially only detect those who were not sick before boarding but became sick during the flight. NERVTAG felt there was a lack of clarity on the exit screening process in Wuhan, although it was thought that this process would be robust, and statements had been released by Chinese authorities about stopping febrile passengers from travelling. However, as noted, there were no data on the implementation of this programme.
Minutes of the NERVTAG Wuhan Novel Coronavirus Second Meeting: January 21st 2020
So rather than recommend port-of-entry screening, the assembled brains at NERVTAG decided to trust to the Chinese authorities to screen people leaving the country. That may count as one of the biggest blunders the British Government and its scientific advisers made. Those countries that started screening airline passengers arriving from Wuhan in early January have some of the lowest Covid death tolls of anywhere in the world – Hong Kong (four deaths), Taiwan (7), Singapore (23), Malaysia (115), Thailand (57) and Vietnam (0).
Annie’s Little List
Annie, one of the wittiest commentators on this site, has composed a ditty based on “I’ve Got A Little List” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado which she posted in the comment thread beneath yesterday’s update. Great stuff, Annie.
When the world regains its senses and the reckoning begins,
I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list
Of thugs and wimps and bullies who must answer for their sins,
And they’ll none of ’em be missed, they’ll none of ‘em be missed.
There’s the fornicating expert who despises his own rules,
The SAGES who despise us all and take us all for fools;
The servile politicians, solid wood from ear to ear,
The BBC, dispensing the pornography of fear,
And the morons and bed-wetters who on cowardice insist:
They never would be missed, they never would be missed.
There’s the shutter-off of playgrounds, paths and parks and even trees,
The joyless pessimist, I’ve got him on my list;
The neighbour who reports each normal person that she sees,
She never would be missed, she never would be missed.
There’s the vicious teaching unions who, in cowardice and spite,
Inflict appalling tortures on each hapless little mite;
There’s the spineless crawling bishops whom we’d do well to ignore,
The twit who puts a mask on when he creeps out through his door,
And the silly clapping seals who just don’t know when to desist:
They never would be missed, they never would be missed.
My Sweet Lord
Nick Robinson interviewed Lord Sumption a few days ago for Political Thinking, his weekly politics podcast. Among other things, Sumption says it’s a sad reflection on our democracy that he should be the only major public figure opposing the lockdown.
I think that it would be very much more satisfactory if the sorts of points that I have been making had been made by professional politicians. But the amount of group think and collective hysteria, partly, I have to say, officially generated, has meant that nobody outside the press is actually making these points. Somebody has got to stand up for a sense of proportion, somebody has got to stand up for a measure of balance and somebody has got to stand up for the millions of people who are being propelled into misery and in many cases financial ruin by the lockdown. I’m really sorry that it should be me and I think that it’s a sad reflection on the quality of our democracy that it should be me. But if no one else is going to do it, then I am.
Preach brother. As one reader says,
It is a tragedy that there are so few people like Lord Sumption.
I also think that there is something seriously amiss with a culture that would choose to idolize a sulky child like Greta Thunberg rather than listen to a more traditional “wise old man” like Jonathan Sumption.
Boris: Less Like Churchill, More Like Eden?
A reader has sent me a link to an interesting article in the Oxford Journal of Medicine entitled: “The effect of Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s illness on his decision-making during the Suez crisis.” The article argues that Eden’s illness affected his judgment during the Suez crisis, leading to Britain’s biggest foreign policy blunder since the Second World War.
“I’m wondering whether Boris’s errors of judgement are due partly to his recent illness,” says the reader. “If that’s the case then he more closely resembles Eden than Churchill, and Lockdown will prove his Suez!”
Government Says Odds of Catching COVID-19 Fall From 1/40 to 1/1000
Boris issued a press release earlier today saying the odds of becoming infected have declined. “As the Government moves to the next phase of its response to the coronavirus crisis, the latest clinical advice shows a much lower incidence rate in the general population,” he said. “This means the average chance of catching the virus is now down from 1/40 to 1/1000…”
But how is he calculating those odds? After all, the latest ONS data suggests that about 8,000 new people are becoming infected every week. 67 million divided by 8,000 is not 1/1000 but 1/8375. And as number-cruncher Alistair Haimes pointed out on Twitter, if only ~0.25 of those who catch it will die, that means your odds of dying from coronavirus on any given day are about 1 in 3.4 million.
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:
- ‘Sunday shows round-up: Sturgeon challenged over care home deaths‘ – Summary of what was said in this morning’s politics talk shows. Includes Sturgeon telling Sophy Ridge that she thinks Covid deaths in English care homes are being under-counted
- ‘Revealed: Test and trace was abandoned because system “could only cope with five coronavirus cases a week”‘ – The comedy gets richer
- ‘Dominic Cummings Must be Sacked‘ – This Change.org petition calling for Cummings to be sacked now has over a million signatures. I’m jealous. The Change.org petition calling for me to be sacked as a Government advisor in 2018 only attracted 220,000 signatures
- ‘Sack Dominic Cummings for his wild midnight ride to Durham? Only if you want a LONGER lockdown‘ – Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday says he won’t be signing the sack-Dominic-Cummings petition (and nor will I)
- ‘James Ferguson: the virus, the lockdown, and what comes next‘ – Merryn Somerset Web interviews the financial guru for the MoneyWeek podcast
- ‘Covid Blinkered Syndrome‘ – Sam Case, an ex-policeman, criticises the response of various emergency services to the crisis in Hector Drummond Magazine
- ‘COVID-19: the ethics of clinical research in quarantine‘ – Interesting article in the BMJ that borders on saying the lockdowns have been unethical. Includes the line: “To be ethically justified, quarantine must be at minimum necessary and effective, a proportionate response to the risk of disease, and the least infringing measure available.”
- ‘UK announces 215 more COVID-19 deaths, the lowest Saturday total since lockdown began‘ – Good point made in Mail headline
- ‘ROBERT DINGWALL: Why are we the only country obsessed with the disastrous two-metre rule?‘ – NERVTAG professor criticises two-metre rule
- ‘Testing of NHS staff at Somerset hospital reportedly reveals “40 per cent as COVID-19 positive” as new admissions urgently halted‘ – More evidence that Covid is primarily a nosocomial disease
- ‘Leaked mails reveal battle over Denmark’s lockdown‘ – Emails reveal that Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen steamrollered her own health experts, who counselled against lockdown
- ‘We are sleepwalking from one denial of our liberties into an even more insidious phase‘ – Good Telegraph column by Janet Daley
- ‘Meet the people breaking lockdown rules to have sex‘ – It’s not just Rosie Duffield and Neil Ferguson who broke lockdown rules to have sex
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.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. It takes me about nine hours a day which doesn’t leave much time for other work. 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…
If you thought our own Government’s Covid propaganda was effective, just wait till you see these Japanese posters produced during the Spanish flu epidemic. You can see some of the others here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
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> It can’t be one rule for Black Lives Matter protestors and another for anti-lockdown protestors.
It can, and it is.
It’s all just part of the plan!
And have you noticed how waycist the virus is??
Piers Corbyn should turn up with an anti 5g placard. Try to hijack the message.
Piers Corbyn turned up at Hyde Park yesterday and got arrested again . Very little publicity.
I’m wondering whether *some* people are climbing aboard Black Lives Matter because, deep down, they are desperate to end social distancing and to resume basic freedoms – and BLM is perceived as more socially acceptable than End the Lockdown. Less of a chance of them being ostracized on social media…
Not sure. Looks like the typical ‘social justice’ crowd in photos i’ve seen. But, i know for certain which protest group is more dangerous.
No, don’t think so, they couldn’t give a shit about our freedom, only their agenda. I hadn’t paid much attention to them in the past but I reckon this is some sort of ‘Momentum’ looney left action, extremist anarchists, most of them don’t care about the poor bloke who died in the states. It won’t work in the UK as the majority of people see through that shit, it’s designed to attack Trump and the USA… Then keep remembering what a battle he has with democratic states ending the stupid lockdown.
if you have such concerns as being “ostracized on social media” then you’re a big girls blouse
If you’re not being ostracized on social media, you’re doing something wrong & your opinions are probably made of semolina and kittens.
Well, presumably, if this virus affects black people more (as Troy Deeney keeps telling us it does), and mass gathering mean that it spreads more, then the logical conclusion is that Black Lives Matter don’t think that black lives matter.
That would involve logical thinking, too much to ask!
If you protest against the Lock down the police are heavy handed and aggressive, if it’s Black lives Matter, then it’s all softly softly. The police are not going to come out of this looking good and Cressida Dick needs retiring, quickly.
Cressida Dick should never have had the job. She was gold commander on the day Jean Charles de Menezes was killed in Stockwelll and was therefore ultimately responsible. At the inquest the jury recorded an open verdict because the coroner ordered them not to return one of unlawful killing.
Whoever shot de Menezes was responsible. No ‘voice over a radio’ is a valid reason for shooting someone.
(Not to say Dick is any use whatsoever.).
Ill give you a clue
Menezes may have seen something he shouldnt on the london underground prior to the seven sevens
She is a shambles. I once saw a copy of her “Incident Log” from that day that was doing the rounds at my workplace. Rather than contemporaneous notes to back up her decision making it was basically a load of random scribbles together with her holiday packing list. No joke.
She, along with other senior police grades are Common Purpose trained.
I think the ship has long since sailed on the Met’s reputation… the Menezes issue was just one in a long line of ignominious errors.
‘Sir’ Craig Mackay locking his car’s doors and driving away while PC Keith Palmer was being stabbed by an Islamist is another fine example.
Our whole nation’s police are a disgrace, and the rot set in a long time ago. As with most things I believe it can be traced back to balls that started rolling on 1st May 1997.
Disappointed you missed this one:
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1289332/UK-coronavirus-latest-Dominic-Cummings-lockdown-witness-app-Baroness-Armstrong
And will this person be prosecuted for lying? Sadly unlikely..
Probably retiring on the payoff from GSK.
This is a good channel I discovered (appeared in my recommended), from a proper journalist, on various issues including covid-19:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi9eHpvhK9fYnqALwPX4MNQ
Yo Toby , please correct the error in your comparison of Eden to Bojo. The former was ill during his prime ministership but he lived for another 20 years and saw Mrs T elected leader of the Conservative party.
Interesting observations of Covid19 in the Far East. Might there be a link to obesity there ? Vietnamese as you know seem to be skinny as the proverbial rake.I think this is very different in the overseas Chinese because a colleague of mine told me that many of the Covid patients in a London hospital he was familiar with were elderly obese overseas Chinese men.
Perhaps they’re not fudging the numbers. Temp screenings are useless and Thailand had millions of Chinese visitors in before they locked down.
No edit argh! They also don’t have a care home culture. South East Asian countries tend to look after their elderly relatives, or at least they can’t afford to send them to care homes, so you don’t get large concentrations of the most vulnerable people. And I would say obesity is also a factor.
A very smart pair of glasses frames, though – anyone who knows where I can get a simile pair would be appreciated.
Toby – I’m bloody outraged. You’ve done a fantastic job on this site, which I’ve followed and made a small donation to back in the days when posts received just a handful of comments. You’ve offered a wealth of information outside of here, from your Telegraph articles, your podcasts such as that with James Delingpole, through to your useful re-tweets of important info on twitter. On the latter platform, you clearly receive a barrage of vile abuse for politely stating fact; well done tolerating the crap. Via this site, you’ve offered a platform for so many folk to chat, and I’ve greatly appreciated many of the regular contributors – Rdawg, Farinances, Annie, IanP, BecJT, Biker… many more. I should bother to comment more but since the early days I don’t feel I’ve had much to add. I’ll miss the reads when this is over, perhaps I can find folk on Twitter. It’s been comforting to read similar views and actions; for example seeing I wasn’t the only person to write to my 6yr old’s school stating I have no concerns regarding Covid-19, but have no intention of him returning under measures which are detrimental to his… Read more »
ps – meant to write “don’t I”, not “do I”. Didn’t imply anyone had said I do. I do though. I can now be outraaged at myself for typos. Great day.
I’m Type O; does that help?
And this is why I’m not very fond of the police.
(I used to say ‘doctors take the hippocratic oath, police take the hypocritic oath’…. but I can’t even say that now cause apparently all the doctors are loving it too)
From a personal perspective they’ve failed in the only two tasks I asked of them; finding a burglar, and a year later, catching the burglar who failed on a second incident I told them about 30 seconds after he tried the same door, providing them with a CCTV picture of him. They even seem to have lost my memory stick :/ I can’t offer more than a faceplam at how that wasn’t resolved in a small market town. Likewise, equally unimpressed seeing the manner of the policeman talking to James Delingpole reporting the other week. …but I can only hope police have some bloody good intelligence and reasoned logic for allowing today’s protest. If it’s just so as not to annoy the rent-a-lefty protesters so much as to cause aggression much then it is inexcusable. The protests are deranged, but I can’t criticise folk protesting – inexcusability is because others weren’t allowed to. Clearly those politely commenting they don’t like lockdown whilst standing in a park, or those visiting their family are more suitable candidates to fine. Extremely low chance they’ll retort by damaging your police car, but that obviously the isn’t the reason for the dichotomy. I trust.… Read more »
They are a shower of shit, mired in political virtue signalling rather than doing their actual job. They spend more time chasing people who tweet things they don’t like than thugs who beat up old ladies. Vile.
you only have to watch the new tv recruitment advert. its all “community this” and “protecting people that” – nothing about good old fashioned coppering and nicking criminals . over last couple of weeks i have watched “life on mars” and old episodes of “the Bill”. proper policing..
And as for Dick. never was someone more aptly named but then she ticks all the boxes. Gay, female, middle class oxbridge left wing intellectual family. accelerated police career — and incompetent
Let’s face it, we didn’t watch Life on Mars for John Sims. We watched it for Phillip Glenister.
Great post, Robinh. It’s so typical of the liberal left to out themselves as the vile hypocrites that we know they are. An opportunity to virtue-signal is simply too powerful a call for these people, and they are so drunk on their own moral righteousness that they either ignore or completely fail to comprehend the numerous clashes within their own warped belief system. For instance, they are fiercely pro-LGBT while simultaneously being pro-Islam, they are anti-capitalist whilst being pro-EU, they are pro-lockdown but think nothing of gathering shoulder-to-shoulder in enormous numbers when the opportunity to virtue-signal presents itself. How many of those protesters and media elites were foaming at the mouth over the actions of Dominic Cummings, but now see it perfectly acceptible to rub alongside each other, chanting their hollow slogans and taking selfies for their shitty Instagram stories? And the mainstream media, completely in lockstep with the “woke” crowd, are petrified to criticise such the appalling rabble for the fear of being labelled “racists”, “white supremacists”, “klansmen” or whatever pathetic terms these idiots like to use. This whole sorry episode is hopefully yet another nail in the coffin of the right-on, bien-pensant crowd who persist in revealing to… Read more »
To be honest, I have absolutely no issue with the black community organising and protesting, good for them, more of that please, because we are a free country. And those communities will have been over policed through this, and are generally harangued with stop and search etc (can you imagine lockdown on an inner city London estate?). The difference is the police knows that everybody knows it. We unfortunately are written off as fringe, or tin foil hatters, or nutters. I don’t think anyone would dare do that to BLM (quite right too). It is a double standard, but that’s not on BLM, it’s on the police. Also, I know we’ve had to deal with some trigger happy little hitlers through all this, but I have read quite a bit from senior officers warning that lockdown would do terrible damage to the painstaking goodwill built up over years of community policing, so I can see why, on balance, they decided to take a lighter touch, because lockdown will already have made things fractious. In some ways, I can see why the police would have been in a jam. And if it gets this whole thing moving, and people… Read more »
Bec well said, if I could give you 100 up votes for that I would!
Thanks!
Very good commentary, as ever BecJT. I really can’t disagree with that. Indeed, as I said above, I don’t object to folk protesting, though I do feel more comfortable with those protests that are coherent and have clear aims. I think much of the frustration I feel is how weak by comparison we have all been with voicing our particularly concern. Small enough in number are those who have objected, they just got told to go home again and stop misbehaving. Albeit, that protest too clearly had a mix of views axes to grind. You’re quite right, we’re probably overdue a sizeable lockdown protest. I fear it would blur into todays protest if it happened now. I also feel disillusioned; the damage to the economy is done, and many of us have been are ignoring the rules anyhow. The only real thing that can be changed now is who pays for it all. And that will have its own protests too I imagine. Argh. I do still feel uncomfortable & sorely frustrated that the difference in police response might be interpreted as indicating today’s protest is a valid grievance, but those objecting to lockdown in a small number were not… Read more »
It’s alright, this whole thing is mind bendingly incoherent I agree. And as you know, I think identity politics is a pile of crap, and I’m well aware the posh white kids who call themselves ‘Antifa’ (there’s none more fascist than and antifascist!) have inserted themselves into the whole thing, as much to the annoyance of the black community as anyone else. I’ve just seen an excellent vid from Nashville, where a black guy tells the suburban white kids to go home, and stop setting fire to stuff, as they have no idea what they are meddling with, and they don’t need white people to tell them how to protest. In fact I find the whole privileged white kid thinking they are helping by presuming to speak for people about ‘oppression’ just toe curlingly embarrassing, and kinda symptomatic of the whole mess we seem to be in in the ‘culture wars’. That said, structural racism is literally the worst evil humans have inflicted on each other, and my instinct is to stay out of it and let those communities advocate for themselves. PS for those with the time and inclination a bit of digging on the Covid… Read more »
They are not protesting valid grievances. The sad death of Mr. Floyd is nothing to do with the UK.
I’d quite like to see them outside the Chinese embassy protesting their re-education camps.
No? Tumbleweed?
Did you ever see that University Anti Fascist Soc explaining why Gulags weren’t bad? Absolute idiots. My worry with BLM (totally support moves to dismantle structural racism) will be weaponised and hijacked by the same identity politics idiots who spend their time trying to get statues taken down, and do nothing to demand better community funding and facilities for the people they claim to speak for.
“My worry with BLM (totally support moves to dismantle structural racism) will be weaponised and hijacked by the same identity politics idiots“
The whole concept of “structural racism” is a fantasy made up by precisely the “identity politics idiots” you decry.
And though it is a fantasy based upon political dogma rather than reality, it is nevertheless a hugely dangerous and damaging tool that has demolished a number of establishment structures, such as the Met police, and allowed them to be reconstructed under the full control of said identity politics idiots, to serve their purposes rather than the purposes for which those structures were built to serve society.
Going to disagree with you there, structural racism is not a fantasy. Really surprised at your stance Mark.
I’m a political dissident, and I am not constrained by societal dogmas that I’ve seen imposed on our society over decades, by many of the groups and techniques you’ve just noticed imposing coronapanic upon us.
Structural racism is obviously a fantasy construct. Institutions don’t have sentiments such as “racism”. The idea that entire institutions should be reformed to comply with ideological dogma such as antiracism is clearly a politically motivated scam to reshape those institutions to suit the lobbyists pushing it.
Surprised you haven’t noticed that.
You don’t think there are valid grievances in the UK about the racism of the police?
Not that are overwhelmingly significant – that’s “BBC truth”, not reality. People from every group have issues with the police from time to time, and in general groups that have more problems with the police are the ones that tend to be more physically confrontational, for various reasons. Black youths were stopped and searched more mostly because they were more likely to be carrying knives and drugs, and more likely to give “lip”. Any “racist” motivation (which undoubtedly existed) was probably secondary to the general tendency amongst police officers to seek to put aggressive and bolshy youths in their place. As I pointed out the other day, more whites in the US are killed by police than blacks, and although the proportion is much higher amongst blacks, it remains the fact that this is not a problem unique to particular groups. And the statistics demonstrate incontrovertibly that blacks in the US are more likely to be involved in the kinds of street crimes that involve encounters with the police (if political correctness worries you, you can explain that by arguments about poverty if you want). And culturally, imo there is certainly a higher tendency towards physical confrontation in US… Read more »
At the freedom protest in Hyde Park two weeks ago, nineteen people were arrested for gathering. At the much larger protest yesterday, three people were arrested for gathering and two for police assault. This does seem shocking, but it may be at least partly because much has changed in the last two weeks: we have had the Cummings incident, and the lockdown has been loosened so that six people may now gather. As the police have said, lockdown is now “unenforceable” and, though that doesn’t in any way justify their actions two weeks ago, it may justify their more lenient approach this weekend. I agree with Bec: as far as I am concerned, I welcome any peaceful protests and gatherings which flout the rules, and, for me, Black Lives Matter is a worthy cause. I may even join next week’s protest. My 23 year old daughter texted me yesterday: “I think the black rights movement is going to play a very interesting role in ending lockdown. Young people on social media now encouraging each other to go and protest etc, no longer shaming or banging on about corona”. I asked her why they want to protest about the… Read more »
I think good on them for flouting lockdown (caveated with my comments about the Antifa / Identity Politics idiots who seem to want to hijack every cause and make it about them, which ironically seems the ultimate in white privilege).
“She replied that they don’t think we’ve lost our rights and freedoms.” …. Smoking gun right there.
It’s all fine as long as their iPhones keep working
The iphones will keep working because that’s how they’ll track us and could (probably will) be the only way to pay for things.
The met police are now reported as saying they arrested 23 people yesterday.
“As for the view that Mr Floyd’s death is nothing to do with the UK, the protesters’ view is that international protests by white people will prevent the US from allowing his murderer to get away with it.” You of course have no legitimate idea whether this was a “murder” or not, nor is it any business of yours to give judgement anyway. At most you can leap to a wholly unqualified assumption based on incomplete information and prejudice. And your justification for people in the UK interfering appears to be: it’s the business of people in the UK because people in the UK can potentially influence the outcome of a criminal investigation in a foreign country. Can you see the gap in your reasoning there? Regardless, it’s pretty fatuous to think that the US authorities are going to give a moment’s attention to a bunch of virtue signalling foreign opportunists seeking to exploit the issue, when they are facing open riots on their own streets about the issue. These protests here are all about the personal and political issues of the protesters here, and their attempt to exploit this death to further their own ends, and… Read more »
Not to mention how the unrest will generate numerous ‘excess’ deaths by violence, and the destruction of livelihoods and property (speaking only of the US, for the moment…). That’s a funny way to ask for justice.
Funny how these responses supposedly justified by compassion always seem to end up costing more innocent lives…
And therein lies the problem with a lot of our young now – they get worked up over something that happened elsewhere and nowt to do with us but aren’t worried about our rights at home being eroded by this current situation. Its the lack of perspective and critical thinking that our schools and universities have failed to impart.
Perhaps it’s because they identify with American/black culture over their native culture.
Very likely. Not helped that our MSM love to report anything and everything about America to the point that its the headline news and what we should be concerned about in our own country is pushed to page 65.
The Guardian is guilty of that sort of thing. My father-in-law who is left leaning read it for years has now find that he’s finding it unreadable and one of his complaints is the Graun’s obsession with America.
“Black Lives Matter is a worthy cause. I may even join next week’s protest”
Remember, while lockdown is a severe violation of the civil liberties of everyone it is particularly bad for those with darker skin who are typically subject to even more oppressive policing and are often poor and have particularly small and uncomfortable hoems particularly far from green spaces. I think Black Lives Matter should be supporting the anti-lockdown movement if they truly care about ensuring people can lead lives worth living. You might turn up with some anti-lockdown placards, perhaps, given the sympathies of others at the protest, with a particular focus on how lockdown is racist as well as generally evil.
The reason we have the hate crime legislation and hate speech laws is precisely because people do not resist the argument that identity trumps even-handedness.
The idea that it’s ok to organise as black or homosexual or “trans” or feminist or whatever, but not as white or male, is precisely the poison that divides society into identity groups and drives people towards extremes, even while it serves political ends that make the problems worse.
In the short run it suppresses the dissent that is most troublesome to the powerful. In the long run it destroys society and leaves the nation weak and divided. Antiracism is every bit as hate-filled and divisive as any other extremist ideology, and far more prevalent, because it is officially encouraged and massively pushed by the mainstream media, and because it is hugely subsidised. The identity lobbies pay an awful lot of salaries and budgets in modern Britain.
well said
Hmm…. I think we’re in danger of drifting into topics that will cause this little community to fracture.
Certainly my views on this topic are not widely held. At least publicly.
Perhaps – which illustrates the degree to which certain legitimate political opinions have successfully been made taboo, by much the same methods and groups as have imposed the coronapanic.
Relevant today I think in response to the particular focus of the lockdown piece above on the evil BLM-ers’ demonstration. Probably won’t arise much on other days.
Brilliant post, Bec. It struck me that the anti-lockdown protesters were the first to obviously defy the rules. They were small in number and testing the water while keeping it peaceful.
Any anti-racist protest is going to attract much bigger and infinitely more volatile crowds.
I agree with you: Let’s hope the big coverage of the demo, with loads of police not social-distancing and not a muzzle in sight, will help to wake people up and empower the silent anti-lockdown grumblers to actively take a stand.
Excellent post Robinh.
I was fuming 2 weeks ago about the arrest of people at Speaker’s Corner who were speaking out against the lockdown.
I was fuming again yesterday when I saw a mass gathering in Trafalgar Square where the Met only arrested a handful of people.
The situation we have in this country is that the British Police have been politicised and have become aligned with the orthodoxy of the liberal left and are applying policing of this country accordingly.
Remember their pathetic handling of the Extinction Rebellion protesters in central London last year. It was an absolute disgrace that the business of London was being impeded by a bunch of virtue signalling, liberal left, well-funded, but seriously ignorant individuals that the Met enjoyed dancing and skateboarding with.
You should listen to Mike Graham on Talk Radio this morning. He is also fuming about the hypocrisy by the Met and the Mayor of London over the weekend.
I think the blog name should be changed to Social Distancing Sceptics. I hate everything about “social distancing” and the nonsense of its continued existence.
I’m also curious how single people are meant to date and start new relationships? Do we really live in a country where it is forbidden to hug people who don’t live in the same household? We’ve banned shaking hands, touching, kissing, physical intimacy…what has become of the so-called “free” and democratic world?
It feels like we are living in a science fiction film from a dystopian future. Does anyone remember the film “Demolition Man” with Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes? Sex was forbidden and instead they had to do it using telepathy-controlled probes on their heads. Well, are we that far now from this becoming a reality?! Aaarrggh!
I’ll see you in the sewer for some rat burger. Bloody love that film, and the miserable dystopia created by unelected goons that are only doing things for our own good is becoming increasingly accurate.
Can’t stand the whole “social distancing” thing, it’s inhuman. As social creatures we need to have physical touch etc like hugging. I think people believe it’s only for a short time period and aren’t truly seeing the implications going forward.
Its forever. Why can’t you accept that
Oh do go and do one. Can’t believe you are so stupid. No it’s not forever, not even for now. Your provocations are pointless.
It is you blooming idiot. Enjoy the second wave and I’ll laugh at you and say I told you so
Ah. The second wave theory. Like the second coming…
You’ll laugh if there’s a second wave? Wow. Humanity alive and well with you then…
I’ll say it again you fucking wanker, ‘FUCK RIGHT OFF YOU CUNT!’
Sorry everyone, I had to get that off my chest….
My apologies.
Winston, this is exactly what trolls want, to provoke a reaction. Just ignore. A shame there is n way to report trolls on this site.
from where i’m sitting you look like you’re drowning not waving
Troll alert.
Bromide in the water will be their next move!
For ‘our own good’ natch
Very true but it will fade away I’m.sure , as for the government they v given up they are hoping it all just fades away and are slowly leaving things up to us , the people.
I just had a drink with my neighbours in their garden. No unsocial distancing and hugged them when I left. Oops and the day before I’m supposedly allowed to.
I have no doubt social distancing will fade away, but I fear that Britain will be the slowest country out of lockdown and the slowest country to relax distancing measures. It’s painful.
Too bad
I just assume everyone is one by ine ignoring that now as reality sets in.
The film I think of is Children of Men, in which humanity is on the brink of extinction as the last conception was something like years ago.
That should say “something like 27 years ago.” Oh, for an edit button!
The one filmed in Hastings? Place still looks like a dystopian shitpit!
Mellow greetings, what seems to be your boggle?
i’m now changing my screen name in honour of demolition man…
Hallo!
“I like to think, I like to read. I’m into freedom of speech and freedom of choice… I wanna run through the streets naked with green Jello all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to. Okay, pal? I’ve seen the future, you know what it is? It’s a 47-year-old virgin sittin’ around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake singing “I’m an Oscar-Meyer Wiener”.”
Totally agree! The ‘elbow bump’ is NOT a suitable replacement for shaking hands or hugging…
I was having this conversation with my son yesterday
The handshake was originally a sign that you weren’t carrying a weapon, so symbolises peace. To me, the ridiculous elbow bump resembles a nudge in the ribs and is therefore aggressive.
Also your immune system is meant to adapt to things, especially when you’re a child.
The recent study from Singapore showed that SARS1 gave you immunity against SARS2 even after 17 years. Assuming SARS2 didn’t come out of a lab, those bats and their viruses are still happily evolving away and SARS3 will be along in another 17 years or so.
It may result in nasty illnesses for some of those twenty-somethings who missed the opportunity to have an asymptomatic SARS2 infection and mild Covid-19 back in 2020 because their parents kept them out of school.
Your gonna have to get used to it. Without a vaccine, this is our future. Get used to it
Toby can you get rid of this guy? This is not free speech, it is trolling. Annoymous is an irritating, illiterate little fly who is trying to disrupt our constructive conversations.
I was just about to ask this, can he be blocked?
I’ll endorse that. He’s (she’s?) just being an irritant for the sake of it.
Nah, keep him on… Reminds us all how pathetically insane the the real enemy is
Ignore him – including stopping the downticks!!
🤣 if I ever meet you for real I’ll elbow bump good and proper
Our future, Mr Anonymous, can be like our past. Where brave people accepted that there was a chance they’d keel over from some horrid untreatable disease, but gone on with work and joy anyway. They had cholera, typhus, bubonic plague and bacterial infections before antibiotics to contend with, COVID-19 pales into insignificance by comparison. COVID-19 reduces life expectancy for anyone, at any given age, to the life expectancy someone of that age would have had during the 1970s. Now nobody is happy about wiping out several decades of health improvement, but living slightly “dangerously” is certainly better than being trapped in a surveillance based, every aspect of life regulated, totalitarian “new normal”. There might even be a vaccine which works, so we might only have to live the “risky” life for a year or two.
In the novel 1984 sex was banned. If you are a puritan who hated sex and relationships, the coronavirus restrictions would be a dream. Vernon Coleman had a theory coronavirus restrictions are used as a form of population control which made sense. If a couple don’t live together until recently they couldn’t meet and now they can only meet outdoors and can’t go into each other’s homes. They can’t go to nightclubs, theatres, pubs and restaurants where couples go for dates and these restrictions make it impossible to maintain relationships. I wonder have coronavirus restrictions resulted in partners who don’t live together splitting up due to coronavirus restrictions.
For single people who would like a partner, they would be put off looking for a partner as restrictions would make a relationship unviable.
Pubs and nightclubs wher people meet partners are closed. Events such as speed dating, single holidays etc are currently banned. Restrictions close the avenues people meet new partners. If couples split and people can’t form new relationships, they will not have children.
Coleman’s theory is slightly disproved by the actions of our own dear MPs and scientific advisors, where there is a will there is a way!
Cause Vernon Coleman is a discredited moron
Really ?
Well if you say so, Annoymous, it must be untrue.
The situation’s awful, but
They always find a way to rut.
The people would rather live in the sewer underground than live in a world where your autonomy is taken away. The film is tongue and cheek, this isn’t.
Looking at the photos in the Guardian of so many people voting with their feet and saying eff you as they enjoy the weather. Its not like they (we!) have pubs or restaurants to go to. We have the hypocrisy of the protests where the lockdown protest two weeks ago in Hyde Park was met by police harrassing the the (peaceful) people there, chased around Speakers Corner, the very home of free speech, while protesters were welcomed to Trafalgar Square (establishment promotion?) over someone killed by a policeman in another country and not a dicky bird on ‘social distancing’. We have more flaws in their nonsense. More people speaking out against the hoax/over reaction. It doesnt matter how ridiculous it is, the government, media and corrupt institutions still double down and shows no sign of stopping. What will it take to stop this nightmare?
When people run out.of money! I think by October things will be a whole lot different nobodies had any real hardship.yet.
When more jobs go and businesses go bust. I think we’re already seeing the unemployment rate already up, that would wake people up.
But the damage will be irreperable by then.
Unfortunately you’re right there and I fear that when people finally wake up, its too late by then.
Was the Government Really Following “the Science”?
This is a sickeningly depressing and disappointing report. It confirms my fear that Johnson is nothing more than an opportunistic populist who seeks to follow public opinion to maintain his popularity rather than show real leadership.
To save his reputation he needs to very quickly grow some balls and lead us back to the Old Normal. Vulnerable people need to be protected, of course, but the rest of society needs to be fast-tracked back to work, back to school and back to the life we loved.
Much too late to save his reputation – that went out the door with HS2, Huawei, Net Zero, and covid-handling; let alone the earlier do-or-die, dead-in-a-ditch rhetoric!
It’s not Johnson.
It’s Cummings.
He’s the one that wanted Lockdown.
Turns out Mr Game theory is a bit of a thicko and didn’t understand that this isn’t and was never going to be the Spanish flu.
It’s not Cummings.
Well it is. IT’S ALL OF THEM.
Seriously, where have people got this idea that every single person in government is under the spell of Cummings from? He’s one person. I’ve no doubt he’s influential, but not that influential. Do not take the heat off Boris et al by concentrating too much on Cummings.
Like his fellow ‘world leaders’, he was simply following orders. The only question is from whom. If you think that is a so-called conspiracy theory, you’ve learnt nothing over the past three months.
If you care to analyze the Boris cabinet, you will rapidly discover that they are somewhat to the left of Blair. So yes, it was left-wingers!
So if the decision to lock down was a political one, and against SAGE advice, then why did Professor John Edmunds come out against easing the lockdown in that press conference? What’s changed? If anything, data has come out over these past two months indicating that SARS-CoV-2 is less dangerous than previously though, not more dangerous. I wonder whether these scientists are just enjoying their time in the limelight, given that they’ve had no other opportunities for nationwide fame in the past, and they’re also conscious of how history will judge them, so they want to appear cautious. It’s strange reading about the SAGE minutes now and reflecting on how this whole dreadful saga has unfolded. I always suspected that the lockdown was borne out of a need to avoid political suicide rather than actual scientific advice. I actually remember the weekend of 13th-15th March, the last ‘normal’ weekend for me, so incredibly vividly for a number of reasons. Friday 13th March (unlucky for some) was the first day the company I used to work for implemented its ‘work from home’ policy, and it was also the last weekend I saw my boyfriend before we were forcibly separated. I… Read more »
He’s a scientist, probably in a well paid job with a big mortgage. Say what needs to be said to pay the bills or push your agenda. See climate change for details.
For many years, many of these SAGE scientists would have been rather obscure figures outside their direct fields of interest. Now they can get their mugs on the TV all the time. Ferguson loved it, I also notice Adam Kucharski is rather prominent on twitter trying to flog his book. I’ve even seen a scientist I know and work with getting name-checked in the media.
More worrying, is the extra-curricular activities of some of these characters. I have no doubt some of these tossers see this as an opportunity to try out their, frankly, weird ideas like social bubbles and other rot.
Yup. I really want to know why all these scientists now seem to be lying through their bared teeth.
You do have to wonder if the fact that a large number of politicians, scientists and government ‘advisers’ have sold out to Bill Gates – who has made no secret of his plans to vaccinate the world – has a lot to do with it. Also the EU has at least since 2018 had plans to introduce an immunity passport…
Hope you see you boyfriend again soon, one way or another.
Poppy- I hope you get to see your man again, soon. Maybe absence will make the heart grow fonder.
Anyone else planning on burning down their hometown under the auspices of all lives (not just black ones) matter?
No, didn’t think so.
We really need to pool our resources and buy part of the globe because if we don’t this is it ad finitum.
Simon Dolan appears to have set up a great looking site. I’m hoping that this could grow into a political movement.
Check it out https://www.keepbritainfree.com/
His Twitter feed is also worth keeping an eye on!
Thanks for mentioning. It’s a well-made video which unfortunately made me angry enough to nearly smash the laptop up!
I am sure I’m not the only person still asking what part Cummings played in the Sage meetings of 18 and 23 March and why the SAGE reluctance to recommend the lockdown down was overridden by the Government on 23 March. Commings is not mentioned on the list of attendees:
We are told on both sets of minutes: ‘Participants who were Observers and Government Officials were not consistently recorded therefore this may not be a complete list’
And yet: This was also covered by the DM, DT and BBC etc. in April.
And this, according to Bloomberg: ‘Also joining the meeting on March 18 was Demis Hassabis, Chief Executive Officer of Alphabet Inc.’s DeepMind Technologies, which works in artificial intelligence’. Also covered
here:I do not think Cummings should be let off his part in this disastrous lockdown. His breaking of the rules, bad as it was, is a clever distraction and it continues to work well.
Sorry, the last link was dodgy. Here it is: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/01/coronavirus-uk-government-invited-deepminds-demis-hassabis-to-meeting.html
Alphabet also owns Google, Utube and Verily, a pharmaceutical company in a joint venture with Glaskosmithkline to make electronic chip inserts in vaccines for the eventual immunity passports. .All looking a bit cosy if you ask me, especially when the stated ‘solution’ to end any future lockdowns and social distancing is ‘immunity passports’.
Outrageous!
Hassabis was an attendee at the 2018 Bilderberg Group meeting.
Quel surprise!
Here is the ITV coverage of this afternoon’s London demonstrations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JehnL8mYef4
There doesn’t seem to be any sound. So, for the best viewing experience, go to “Settings” and set to double speed.
Then open a new tab, and set this soundtrack playing on audio while you watch the ITV footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNBL5OMeuno
I guarantee this will brighten up your evening
I thoroughly enjoyed that!
Palestinian flags, sure fire sign of middle class youths looking for something to do.
It’s ‘yoof’, not ‘youths’. Modern days, modern ways, modern spelling.
Wow, that was a lot of people. Who organised it?
https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/31/its-all-bullsht-3-leaks-that-sink-the-covid-narrative/
“It’s all Bullsh*t” – 3 Leaks that Sink the Covid Narrative
A brilliant article!
Good article,
Does anyone else remember watching a video clip of one of the early US daily briefings when the guy at the podium says something along the lines of “we are doing a dry run” and Trump leans over and says “you should have told us?”.
Will try and find the link again and post it.
The ONS estimate was 54000 day which was divided by 7 and rounded up to give that 8000 a day that “scientists” were pronouncing to the Guardian and teachers unions were then jumping on.
So I suppose you could say your chances of catching Covid on any given day are 8000/60m or 1 in 7500.
Actually though as I posted yesterday this estimate by the ONS of 0.24% currently infected (which that 54000 figure is related to) requires a test specificity of better than 99.76%.
The PCR test is at least that specific on paper (and the ONS give a 95CI which will factor whatever it is in) but that’s calibrated against never-infected people. It is known that the PCR test can give false positives on recovered patients because it can detect RNA fragments from dead viruses. I don’t know its specificity for active infections in a population where about 10% are recovered but it needs to be better than 99.76%.
I say all this out of interest. The number of current infections and newly acquired infections is not a cause for concern. Note also that there are more than 8000 recoveries per day.
How is “recovery” from sars-cov-2 infection determined?
I suppose officially if you test negative in a few PCR tests. If you had symptoms and feel better then obviously you are recovered (and would test negative most of the time).
But most people who have mild infection are just…. automatically recovered after their 1 week of sniffles? If they were doing proper ‘recovery’ figures they’d be massive, surely.
Which explains why they’re not publicising them.
Well basically anyone who isn’t dead a few weeks after infection (and some who are) are recovered.
I used to frequent a Covid global statistics site, which tabulated info from all countries. There was a column headed ‘Recovered’ which bore a figure from every country except the UK. Under ‘UK’ it said ‘n/a’.
Same thing for the Netherlands!
They haven’t a clue how many have recovered because they never asked us to report if we were isolating with self-diagnosed infections, which would have been very simple way back in March.
Last time I checked this site was about freedom not policing triviality.
Plus like…. I kinda like it, because that’s precisely what they are. Probably.
I mean. I can imagine them sitting in bed, gradually weeing themselves with fear whilst reading the Guardian over their morning chablis.
Chablis? Surely it’s a kale, banana and chia seed smoothie.
The smoothie is for breakfast and chablis is served with their dinner – all organic of course dahhling!!!
I’d give that a whirl …
Crybabies is a good alternative, and really annoys the crybabies
Neither Johnson nor SAGE lived in a vacuum during the pre-lockdown days. Not only were ‘Our MSM’ full of horrifying images from Italy, the daily “Project CV-19” articles, with fear-inducing graphs, were creating the public opinion that we’re all gonna die unless government did something.
Then, before those ‘three days with no SAGE’, we had. in addition, the whole fear mongering MSM full of faux outrage about ‘herd immunity’ : Cummings (already a well-established hate figure) supported Johnson in this, they alleged, and thus he and Johnson want to kill us all off, especially the ‘vulnerable elderly’ – those elderly who died anyway because the NSH sent them all back to their care homes, medical conditions, CV-19 infections notwithstanding.
Yes – Lockdown was a political decision: a decision taken in the face of MSM outrage which got shriller by the day.
As for not closing incoming flights: Trump did this for flights from China and was branded a racist by the MSM, in the USA and here. I’m pretty certain that Johnson wanted to avoid that label, so – no flights form China were stopped …
Lord Sumption. Hoorah for common sense. A further quote –
In The Sunday Times of 17 May 2020 he further remarked that “[f]ree people make mistakes and willingly take risks. If we hold politicians responsible for everything that goes wrong, they will take away our liberty so that nothing can go wrong. They will do this not for our protection against risk, but for their own protection against criticism” (Wikipedia)
I was doing some further pondering on my trip to Oxford yesterday. One thing I noticed was how many places were at least attempting to supply some form of take out service compared to my fairly large commuter town. Of course I realised it comes down to a question of economics – obviously the numbers in my town don’t stack up enough to make it viable. This doesn’t bode well for what my town will look like under the glorious ‘new normal’.
I saw Raab today admitted that we can’t stay under lockdown forever. Is the penny starting to drop? I also noted that during Sunak’s presser earlier on this week he was asked whether the furloughing scheme would be brought back if there were further lockdowns. He indicated that the scheme ends October come what may. This may be positive news as it seems to indicate they would be more wary about more lockdown, and if they try it the public support will dissipate much quicker….
Glad the Raab said that and that it became a headline, though we really need to define “lockdown” properly because indefinite government-mandated social distancing is lockdown by any other name.
Also interesting that the headline included the word “defends easing of lockdown” or some such phrase. Hadn’t noticed the BBC previously requiring the government to “defend imposing or continuing lockdown”. Almost as if the BBC had made its mind up what side to support.
I get the feeling Sunak’s reply was due to his awareness of the amount of debt that this country has accumulated in a short span of time and that it will have to be repaid at some point, unfortunately the debt will still be there when I’m dead.
Surely the government is also aware that this enforced economic inactivity is unsustainable and if they want to stem the tide of job losses, businesses going bust, the suicides and increase in drug and alcohol abuse that will follow in the aftermath. We’ve not experienced the aftershocks yet and it won’t be pretty.
Whilst we want to see the lockdown lifted, we should also call for the aboliton of social distancing because the damage that will inflict on our economy, way of life and mental health will equally be bad if not worse.
So if an individual’s chances of catching the virus are now 1 in 8375 (which presumably includes those without symptoms as well) and the chances of dying once having caught the virus are now 1 in 3.4 million, that basically means . . . well, it means I would be off down the pub if it was open! Seriously, this is a great and easy to understand explanation of why this lockdown should be stopped, right now, and everything opened up immediately.
Sorry, the lockdown is staying weather you like it or not. Only thr government can dictate that. Not a tiny minority of anti lockdown lunatics (and yes I’m including that discredited quack Vernon Coleman)
The government will follow public opinion. Once people realise they’ve been had, and see nothing terrible happening in Europe, they will change their views and the government will follow as the motivation to not screw up the economy COMPLETELY will outweigh their obvious enjoyment of total control. I’m not sure they have the staying power to be proper totalitarians.
Keep telling yourself that you deluded fool
Telling myself what? Mind your manners – calling someone a fool is just rudeness. Point out which views of mine are foolish, and why.
He’s a troll Julian and winding you up. Ignore him
Right! Just ignore him (or her). I am for alternative sensible visions regarding lockdown and covid19, but this loony is only trying to wind us up with non evidence based fiction stories (which he or she might actually believe in). Let’s just not respond to them anymore!
Is it “anon” that you can’t spell, or is it “annoy”?
Pity you can’t spell ‘whether’. Credibility shot.
Nicola… Are you ok?
Vernon Coleman is brilliant. I suggest everyone check out his site. Plus he can spell unlike some on this thread.
He is a discredited quack who speaks nonsense about the pandemic being fake. That’s all I needed to know about this old fool
Hey get with it, Annoymous…even people who can’t spell know that anyone called a quack these days is telling the truth! :))))
I don’t know much about Vernon Coleman, but I don’t think the virus is “fake” and I don’t think many others do. A lot of us just think that the reaction to something that looks like it is AT MOST twice as deadly as flu – to shut down normal life indefinitely – is misguided, immoral and doomed to failure.
The question you need to address is whether saving lives at all costs can be justified. Everything else is just peripheral.
He’s also in the past been a tad litigious. Hope you’ve got an anoymousised IP address.
Exactly, even the government admits that the chances of catching the virus are low.
How on earth are we still on alert level 4, moving towards level 3?
Cause they listen to experts and not brain dead lunatics that inhabit this site
YOU inhabit this site. So right back atcha.
Where did this very rude and unpleasant person cone from? And why is it depositing its faecal comments here? There are trillions of sites where zombies can wallow in talk of Zombiegeddon to their hearts’ content.
Although I disagree strongly with anoymous’ assertions, I haven’t seen anything that I would ban or silence him or her for saying.
If the person is looking for attention they are certainly getting it.
It’s a troll.
I like the fact that this site values freedom, so won’t block trolls. However, members could create the same effect by stopping feeding it with downticks and wasting time on repostes.
Your lot listen to Imperial College while we listen to Professor Michael Levitt and Dr. John Ioannidis, both of Stanford University.And who has been more accurate so far? Not Imperial, that’s for sure.
Read the SAGE minutes.
Apparently they don’t listen to experts. At all.
Absolutely. They invented this Nando’s scale, then said that by their own criteria we were at 3 but…they’re going to pretend we’re still at 4 just in case. R has been at 1 or below for weeks now hasn’t it?
Literally since mearly March – in the ‘community’ anyway.
Honestly, if R was a real thing (it isn’t), I’d say the only place it has EVER been above one is….. in hospitals and care homes!
I’ve flipped now from thinking everyone has had covid to thinking everyone has been exposed but hardly anyone has actually got covid. Unless they were a vulnerable person in one of these vulnerable environments.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/25/italy-recruit-army-60000-volunteers-enforce-social-distancing/
Get ready for the UK to adopt this
Troll alert.
Can Toby please incorporate ‘ignore’ function so i don’t have to read this fuckwits posts?
I’m not a troll, unlike everyone here I’m looking at the realistic picture. No more sporting events with crowds. No more concerts, conventions. No more social gatherings. It’s over. Why you cant accept that I will never know. Oh wait its because you are selfish idiots who want grandma to die. Okay then
Provide some evidence/arguments for your statements. And mind your manners.
It’s over? LOL.
The ‘old normal’ is not over, but in terms of number of cases the epidemic is and has been for a couple of weeks – at least according to Oxford University:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/11/coronavirus-no-longer-epidemic-uk-oxford-study-finds-cases-falling/
Sadly, the ‘lockdown’ continues. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that what we are seeing now is a massive and costly face-saving exercise.
I was at a social gathering today moron…and not a grandmother in sight
77 Brigade detected .
Stop shrieking you loon. Now tell us… What do you want out of all of this? Doesn’t sound like you enjoy your life very much and are trying to bring everyone down to your misery level..
Or you’re just a bog standard troll.
Which is it?
The really alarming thing about this story is that the recruits will be drawn from a similar group of people as the Blackshirts in fascist Italy, and Ernst Roehm’s Brownshirt SA in 1920s Germany. Although they supposedly won’t have the power to enforce the dispersal of gatherings there’s not a great distance to leap before they start taking that power into their own hands, especially if an irate crowd react badly to being told what to do by them.
Well that’s one for every 6,000 people. Must say I like those odds. Fancy being the one copper at a lower league football match attended by 6,000
They would never get away with this in Germany for obvious reasons.
I’d’ve thought Italy would havemhad more sense – also for obvious reasons. 🙁
Italians normal,ply have a good solid habit of ignoring instructions. I used to be a tour guide. You could tell arriving German groups by the way they formed up and waited for orders; French groups by the loud arguments; and Italian groups by the way they got off the bus and scattered to the four winds. It would take 6000 goons just to make the population stand still.
And I don’t think there will be many volunteers for the job in Sicily.
PS. You could tell British groups from the fact that they never stirred without their raingear.
I agree, I lived in Italy for a while. Lovely people and gorgeous country but ‘couldn’t organise a pissup in a brewery’. Yet we based our entire CV response on theirs.
Non story. It says ‘Italy wants….’ Which bit of Italy wants? The boot bit? I want a million quid, doesn’t mean I’m going to get it. And they’re not going to be paid so that augurs well. So not a lot different from an over-zealous supermarket worker telling us to observe one way instructions here.
Well said Annie. Where I work it was usually Italians I had to tell off to keep their voice down, no eating, please sit on the designated seats and not on the floor etc.
And what’s bad is that their teachers just left them to have a look and they were usually in and out in 10 minutes – a total waste of money!
BORIS MUST GO – HISTORY WILL DEFINE HIM AND HIS CABINET BY THIS ‘COVID CRISIS’ AS A BUNCH OF BUFFOONS
https://www.paulchaplin.life/blog-original/lockdown-boris-violated-sage-advice
Yes, this for me (based upon the actual minutes of the sage group) is the most telling analysis of the last 10 weeks I have seen in the uk. As I told all my friends and family when the full lockdown was announced, why did we not ‘simply’ act sooner targeting the states resources at protecting the most vulnerable, etc. As stated in the article, a scientific and common sense approach. But no, due to his poor leadership skills, we instead get a later political decision to lockdown the whole country – economic suicide.
Why is the mainstream media not picking up on this timeline in their stories? Are they also now just a bunch of clowns? This type of story should in time finish his career! Even in scotland for example, it can be used to savage the 50% care home deaths…
One can only hope, but don’t hold your breath. They’ve been dreadful. Unforgivably so.
But who will replace them?
The Eddie Mair interview years ago should have ended his career, it would have anyone else’s, but he seems a bit untouchable in that regard, like Trump. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAxA-9D4X3o
having read this, was there no one close enough to Boris to say as would Sgt Wilson to Captain Mainwaring “are sure that’s wise?”
He’d thrown them out of the cabinet.
David Starkey suggests the lockdown came as a result of:
Plus of course, the pressure of public opinion whipped up by the media.
First time commenter here, though Toby did quote (and slightly misquote!) in the daily update my lengthy email to him a few days ago. Can someone who is knowledgeable about statistics please try to make sense of the data on the Zoe Covid site (which seems to get little mention here)? It says that there were 2.13 million symptomatic cases in the UK on 1 April, and that symptomatic cases are now down to 0.18 million, as of 30 May. More precisely, it states that 182066 people are predicted to have symptomatic Covid in the UK today. Bear in mind that these figures relate only to people aged 20 to 69. Here’s my problem: if 2.13 million people had symptomatic Covid on 1 April, and, as we are regularly told, about 80% of infected people are asymptomatic, then it seems that about 10 million people were infected on 1 April. As this just applies to those aged 20 to 69, and I’m guessing that that is about 40 million people, excluding children and those over 70, in our population of 67 million, then 25% of the population were infected on 1 April. I guess we also have to chuck into… Read more »
We were told to phone 111 only for advice if we had symptoms but many people won’t have bothered. They weren’t even recording the numbers that did phone. Add to that, the increasing number of people who now think they probably had it back in January (I know 2) and there’s no way they can state the numer of people who’ve been infected, symptomatic or otherwise.
“informing people in immigrant communities – which were hit disproportionately hard by the epidemic – of hygiene and social distancing rules.
So the Norwegian government is saying that non-whites are dirtier than whites?
It’s quite typical in immigrant communities that the children translate information for the parents sometimes, so schools are often useful ways of conveying information to communities that don’t have the national language as their first language.
I thought that was a, let’s say, “unfortunate” way of putting it.
I’m a left winger and I do blame lockdown on left wingers (in a complex way, which we’ve discussed AT LENGTH, and with nuance, for many many weeks now), so how about you don’t just do a hit and run with your judgemental posts. I prefer bed wetters to hysterics due to the sexist connotations of the latter. You’ll notice if you’d read what we discuss, that the conclusion most of us have reached is that it is not the old school left, you know actual working class people, but middle class lefties, in fact this whole thing is rather middle class, because it doesn’t hurt them, they get to feel virtuous, morally superior and sunbathe in the back garden. Everyone’s a winner, except the actual poor.
As a woman of the left (but rather disillusioned) I agree with every word in your post.
It’s not to late, you can work out that collectivism is the very antithesis of humanity and become the person you should have been before you were conned into thinking left wing people actually care about others.
As someone also with left leaning sympathies but out of step with their thinking on lockdown I agree with everything you’ve said
I used to be somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan, but I think that such paltry distinctions are now far less important than the distinction between ‘sceptical’ and ‘zombiegullible’.
We can all retreat into our left-right corners once the battle is over. Meanwhile, welcome, leftie brothers and sisters.
There was and is very broad public support for lockdown – not just from the left, but certainly also from the right. And the support was and is so shockingly high, that it cannot be just middle class, but also has to include blue collar workers. And that support is what swayed this Government in the first place.
So don’t blame this on one group, because nearly everyone is to blame (probably including your friends).
I DON’T. Which is what I’ve just said, we’ve spent weeks and weeks musing all this, I’m more annoyed at a Johnny come Lately flying by here to condemn, rather than getting involved in thrashing this out. My position is nuanced, and it didn’t just start with lockdown, about which I’ve written thousands upon thousands of words on this site (quite amiably, with civility, and much back and forth, with people who would describe themselves as ‘right wing’).
I know there was broad public support for lockdown, which we have discussed ad naseum here. I’m irritated that some twit then drops by and makes a reductive sneering statement that misrepresents what I and many others think.
Your tone of response has been noted. It is not exactly an invitation to respond, but I’m not going to be silenced by aggression.
You, and some others on this site including Toby, are trying to bring a left-right debate into this, and I think you’re wrong to do that. Clearly, left or right is no indicator for lockdown support. So let’s not talk about it. Because if we do, lockdown zealots will find it easier to pigeon hole and dismiss lockdown critics by association with things they already disagree with. Lockdown critics are stronger if we focus on the arguments against lockdown, and step well away from other debates.
I have said this before, directly to Toby.
No, I’m not, which if you’d actually gone and read what I’d said, over and over again, at great length, you’d know.
Hysterics, sexist connotations?
Calm down dear…
Oh do fuck off.
Unfortunately i can’t, as that is now illegal.
I posted a comment a few minutes ago as a first timer, but it has not appeared. Any advice re what I’m doing wrong?
Not sure… but welcome anyway!
My first comment took a while to appear as well but appear it did. Welcome to planet sanity.
I think the first comment has to be manually approved.