Remembrance Sunday Cancelled
It’s Remembrance Sunday today, but Covid restrictions mean only 25 sailors and marines will be taking part in the Whitehall parade. The MailOnline has more.
Cancelled events and health fears mean many of those who served in the Armed Forces can’t mark Remembrance Sunday in their usual way, but veterans have urged the public to “take a few minutes” to pause and reflect. And Government officials have insisted plans to mark the Cenotaph’s centenary “will be announced in due course”.
The ex-head of the Royal Navy Lord West has told the Telegraph that war heroes face catching pneumonia if they’re forced to stand outside churches today and not allowed in.
Lord West of Spithead, the former First Sea Lord, said it was “extraordinary” that veterans were being made to commemorate fallen comrades “in the freezing cold” this Sunday after ministers made going to church a criminal offence with a minimum £200 fine.
Other military leaders also spoke out against the ban on Remembrance Sunday services.
Lord Dannatt, the former head of the Army, urged a rethink and called on the Government to make an exception for Remembrance Sunday.
Major General Julian Thompson, who was British land commander during the Falklands War, described the ban by “panicking” ministers as “absolutely ridiculous”.
Former Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon turned on the Government for refusing to trust veterans to keep their social distance inside a church having previously trusted them to fight in wars to protect the country.
And the Royal British Legion is set to lose out on millions of pounds in Poppy Appeal donations after coronavirus caused in-person collections to be halted for the first time in 99 years. The MailOnline has more on that story.
Charles Byrne, Director-General of the charity, said lockdown restrictions mean that for the first time in the organisation’s 99-year history, in-person fundraising has been cancelled on the streets.
The move came into effect on Thursday – the first day of the new corona rules – but poppies remain available at some supermarkets and donations can be made online.
Many poppy sellers for the Royal British Legion, which raises more than £50million a year during the three-week period of the appeal (Oct 22nd-Nov 11th), are elderly, and the charity is keen to ensure they are protected from the virus.
Mr Byrne said: “This will be the first time in the history of the Poppy Appeal that our volunteers will be unable to carry out face-to-face collections anywhere across the UK.
“The loss of that activity could run into millions of pounds in fundraising which means online donations are crucial, and so we’re asking people to support the Poppy Appeal by donating via the Legion’s website.
“Every poppy counts so whether you choose to print off a downloadable poppy from the Legion’s website or draw your own, we are calling on everyone across the nations to unite in a UK-wide show of support from home, display a poppy in their window in time for Remembrance Sunday and pay tribute to our Armed Forces community.”
You can donate to the Poppy Appeal here.
Is Biden’s Win Bad News For Sceptics?
My biggest worry in the run up to the Presidential election was that Trump would be punished by the American electorate for not doing more to prevent people dying of COVID-19. Had Biden won a resounding victory, as he was widely expected to do, it would have sent a message to democratically elected leaders across the world: If you don’t prioritise minimising Covid deaths, even if the measures you put in place end up causing a greater loss of life than they prevent, you will be slung out of office by the voters. But thankfully Biden won by a whisker, not a landslide. Given that this was in part a contest about how best to manage the pandemic, the result shows that the US electorate are split down the middle on the issue. Trump’s approach, which broadly reflects that set out in the Great Barrington Declaration, may not have won the day, but it wasn’t decisively rejected either. And it’s clear that the American people are much more sceptical now than they were back in March, when there was broad public support for the shut downs.
We’re winning the argument.
Is the NHS’s Lack of Capacity a Manpower Problem?
A reader has emailed me with an interesting question.
In keeping with your retweet of the thread by Ed Conway on transparency today I was struck by an email to Liam Halligan and Allison Pearson related on their Planet Normal podcast this week.
An NHS worker wrote in to Planet Normal to highlight the fact that the organisation has implemented a Covid risk profile tier system across its 1.4 million strong workforce whereby for instance an obese worker is classed as being in a high risk tier and is being allowed to stay at home on full pay (why not 80% as per furlough?). This policy puts pressure on the workers who are deemed low risk to carry the extra load as well as leading to lots of additional agency staff being employed at higher cost.
Furthermore, the implications of this policy are staggering – we have been locked down to protect the NHS again yet it seems privately the NHS is doing a very good job of protecting itself.
In terms of transparency, is the real reason for Lockdown 2.0 not the familiar bed capacity measure but rather the sheer number of staff classed as being too at risk on the NHS internal tier system? Do we have a Human Resources problem not a medical problem? Why is this not big news?
In addition, isn’t the NHS the perfect model to test the hypothesis of Dr Mike Yeadon on community immunity thresholds?
Given nurses and doctors have continued to provide care in the first instance with a highly publicised lack of PPE, shouldn’t we be allowed to see a detailed statistical analysis of outcomes? Under the notorious Ferguson model we would expect to have seen 12,600 deaths (1.4 million x an IFR of 0.9%) among health care workers since March. What are the actual figures for Covid deaths on the NHS payroll? (As of August 11th, 620 NHS staff and social care worker deaths had been linked to coronavirus.) How do Covid deaths of NHS workers compare with the wider working community, e.g. versus frontline workers in food supply chains and civil servants who have been able to work from the comfortable isolation of their own homes since March? Is this data even available and if so why not when so much of our tax money is swallowed by this institution, and once more we are all being asked to make the sacrifice of lockdown in the name of protecting this national treasure/religion! Clap for data?
I’m sure brighter minds are aware of these issues and asking the right questions. But having mentioned these ideas to a few friends, coworkers and family in the past 24 hours this seems to be a potential light bulb set of arguments.
SAGE Wants to Move Christmas to Next Summer
According to the Express, the Government’s team of scientific advisers want Britons to postpone their Christmas celebrations until the summer.
With just seven weeks to go until the festive season comes around, Sage wants millions of people to scrap plans for family gatherings – and instead arrange to see their loved ones next summer.
But they said if people do opt for a large celebration including extended family members they should be prepared to “self-quarantine” over the New Year period.
The advice was laid out in documents released on Friday, a day after England went into its second nationwide lockdown.
The documents, which were sent to Cabinet ministers, read: “Whenever announcing that a particular form of social interaction needs to be avoided, then actively propose and support less risky forms of mixing.
“These could include carrying out the activity at a later date e.g. planning a summer family get together to replace meeting at Christmas.
“If people find it emotionally or practically impossible to avoid making contact with someone outside their household then they should be encouraged to make meeting that person as safe as possible.
“For example, by self-quarantining before meeting (reducing contact with other people as far as possible for 14 days) and avoiding close and prolonged contact when meeting.”
The advice was contained in a document entitled “Positive strategies for sustaining adherence to infection control behaviours”.
Not really worth reading, let alone in full.
Does the Mink Outbreak Invalidate the Vaccine Strategy?
What follows is a guest post by Professor David Livermore, Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia.
Yesterday’s papers carried the story of a new SARS-CoV2 variant circulating in Danish mink, which presumably caught it from their keepers. It has now spread back, in mutated form, to humans. Evidently this is causing concern, with a swift UK travel ban apropos Denmark, without the usual exemptions.
One can see why. From the Statens Serum Institut press release, via Google Translate:
A specific virus from cluster 5 has been detected with four simultaneous changes in the genes for the Spike protein in five North Jutland mink farms and in 12 patient samples. Of these, four people were directly connected to three of these farms.
To those skilled in the art, SSI may report that viruses have had the following changes in amino acids: H69del / V70del, Y453F, I692V and M1229I. Information on all variants will be uploaded in the international system GISAID.
Preliminary studies suggest that this virus from cluster 5 exhibits decreased susceptibility to antibodies from more individuals with past infection compared to non-mutated virus. This has been demonstrated in laboratory experiments, where it is seen that the particular mink virus is not inhibited to the same degree by antibodies from humans who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 compared to other non-mutated SARS-CoV-2 viruses. Studies are currently underway that will further uncover the issue.
This is important because practically all the vaccines in development, including the front-running Moderna, Pfizer, AZ and J&J candidates are directed against this Spike protein. Rare exceptions are a few whole-killed-virus vaccines being investigated in China and India.
The response to natural COVID-19 infection, including the more persistent T-cell response, on the other hand, is not purely directed against the Spike protein but also gives reactivity against other components, specifically the Nucleoprotein.
A fortnight ago I had a deal of flak, in media interviews, from those who said herd immunity wouldn’t work after an Imperial study reported circulating antibody levels dwindled over time. There were good arguments against that assertion at the time – that it’s what you expect circulating immunoglobulins to do post infection, that the T-cell response remained, and that the ‘immune memory’ persisted, enabling manufacture of more antibodies under challenge.
Harder to refute was the argument that the awaited vaccine would give a stronger immune response than natural infection, as shown in Phase I trials.
The mink results weaken this argument considerably. A weaker broad-based response from natural infection may be more protective than a strong response specifically to the Spike protein if virus with an altered Spike enters wide circulation.
With travel restrictions and mink culls, there clearly is a massive effort to stop this from happening. This effort may succeed or fail. What is however revealed is that the Spike protein is prone to consequential change. And if it has happened once, my experience (from a lifetime of working on antibiotic resistance in bacteria, which are far less mutable than RNA viruses) is that it’ll happen again, likely without mink as a vector.
For the absence of doubt: I am not anti-vaccine. I believe that vaccines will play a useful role in reducing the burden of COVID-19 and will almost certainly consent to being vaccinated, based upon a simple calculation of personal risk. I even volunteered for the AZ trial, but wasn’t ‘called-up’.
However, these findings make a further salutary point against the notion that a vaccine is going reliably to rescue us all and that we should wait, taking the massive collateral damage of repeated lockdowns, until one does. It is wiser to accept that we must face the long adaption to ‘living with this virus’, hoping that vaccines will give a boost to naturally acquired immunity, but not counting on them. Vaccine developers might also like to ponder whether putting all bets on one target is prudent…
I got back to Prof Livermore and asked him to clarify something for me. Why does the existence of this new mink strain, and the possibility of other mutations arising from human interaction with other species, invalidate the suppress-until-a-vaccine-is-available strategy but not the GDB strategy? The SSI press release he quotes suggests that antibodies in humans who’ve been infected with SARS-CoV-2 don’t provide much protection from the new strain. Yet Prof Livermore says the body’s response to natural COVID-19 infection would provide better all-round protection than a vaccine specifically designed to immunise people against the Spike protein. How does he reconcile those two things? He replied:
Anything that changes the virus so that it evades some component of the immune system isn’t good news. However:
Vaccines – almost all, except some Chinese & Indian candidates, seek to elicit a response solely to the Spike protein. If that target changes, as in the mink variant, they have a problem. They aren’t hitting anything else.
Natural infection, as will occur if following a GBD strategy – gives a range of differently-targeted antibodies and T-cells. Some recognise the Spike protein and some the nucleoprotein or membrane proteins. Those with other targets rather than the Spike protein will remain fully active against the mutant virus. Loss of the Spike as a target will, very likely, weaken the overall response but, unlike with the vaccine, some protection remains from antibodies and T-cells that target non-Spike components.
Only clinical experience will finally clarify the picture but this does argue that broader, infection-induced responses have a better chance of protecting against virus variants than an Spike-protein targeted vaccine. The SSI press release doesn’t give us enough information on just how the testing was done, and whether they were looking at total response or specifically at Spike-targeted antibodies. They certainly didn’t look at T-cell-mediated immunity.
Stop Press: Coronavirus has been found in mink populations in six other countries, so the Danish travel restrictions are unlikely to contain the new strain of the virus.
Vaccine Tsar’s £670,000 PR bill
The Sunday Times has a story on its front page today about Kate Bingham, the head of the UK’s vaccine task force, spending £670,000 of taxpayers’ money on a team of boutique public relations consultants.
Kate Bingham, a venture capitalist married to Jesse Norman, a Conservative Minister, was appointed to the role by Boris Johnson.
Since June she has used eight full-time consultants from Admiral Associates, a London PR agency, to oversee her media strategy.
According to leaked documents, she has already spent £500,000 on the team, which is contracted until the end of the year. It means each consultant is on the equivalent of £167,000 a year – more than the Prime Minister’s salary.
Bingham, 55, is said to have “insisted” on hiring them despite concerns they would duplicate the work of about 100 communications staff at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), in which her taskforce sits.
The decision was signed off by civil servants, not Alok Sharma, the business secretary.
This revelation follows last week’s story in the Sunday Times that Bingham had disclosed sensitive information about Britain’s vaccine efforts at a $200-a-head event for US venture capitalists.
During an hour-long talk to the financiers, she had given some of the most detailed insight to date about the UK’s immunisation programme, including confidential data about the government’s investment priorities.
But Bingham used her appearance before the Science and Health Select Committee at the House of Commons on Wednesday to deny any wrongdoing.
Asked whether she had disclosed anything that was not in the public domain, she said: “No. And there have been a lot of nonsense reports, and inaccurate, and I’m afraid to say irresponsible, reports suggesting that I did,” she told Greg Clark, the Tunbridge Wells MP. Her account is understood to have been met with scepticism in Downing Street.
Today, new evidence makes the questions more urgent still. In February, Bingham is due to appear at another elite function: a conference hosted by Biocom, a Californian biotech firm, charging $2,460 (£1,870) a ticket to bring together “executives, bankers [and] venture capitalists”. It promises networking that will “be fruitful for your business ventures this year and for many years to come”.
In brochures, Bingham is advertised solely as head of the UK vaccine taskforce and the literature says she will discuss her work “to find and manufacture a Covid-19 vaccine”.
During her talk to venture capitalists last month, Bingham showed guests a confidential list of 51 vaccines in development. Of these, Bingham told guests, officials had marked 14 as priority one, meaning they expect to place orders worth hundreds of millions of pounds. “We haven’t necessarily signed contracts with all of them so far, but they’re all in our sights,” she said, pointing to a slide in which the relevant treatments were split into blue, representing priority one, or purple, priority two.
For those present this was sensitive information they could use to make investments of their own. Bingham even showed the estimated price of vaccines per dose, based on an analysis prepared by Rx Securities, an investment bank.
It’s not looking good for Bingham.
Worth reading in full.
Teachers Disagree With Unions Over School Closures
According to Teacher Tapp, just 39% of teachers believe schools should close during the November lockdown, while 46% think they should remain open. The Telegraph has more.
Over 6,000 teachers were asked whether they agree with the Government’s plan to keep children in the classroom during the national shut down.
Headteachers were more likely to back schools staying open, with 69% in favour compared to 42% of classroom teachers.
The Prime Minister has insisted that schools will remain open throughout the November lockdown, saying: “We will not allow this virus to do any further damage to the future of our children.”
But the National Education Union (NEU) has demanded that schools close as they claim both staff and students are at risk.
The union is lobbying MPs for schools to be included in the lockdown, arguing that their analysis of data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) “confirms the role of schools in the transmission of the virus”.
The teaching unions have not had a good crisis. Let’s hope their members wake up to the fact that they care more about scoring political points than children’s welfare.
Worth reading in full.
Manchester Student Fence Was Erected to “Protect” Them
A reader has pointed out the remarkable similarity in the claim made by Manchester University’s Vice-Chancellor about the fence that was built around the Fallowfield halls of residence – it was built to “protect” students from non-university visitors – and the excuse made by the East German authorities for building the Berlin Wall.
The GDR authorities called the barrier the “Antifaschistischer Schutzwall” (“Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart”) and claimed that it served to keep fascists away from East Germany.
“No one should think we are in love with the Wall; that is by no means the case… The anti-fascist protective rampart was necessary to stand up to the military adventurers,” East German leader Walter Ulbrecht said in a speech shortly after the Wall’s erection.
Britain under Boris is becoming a Lidl version of the GDR.
Londoners Flout Lockdown
People weren’t paying much attention to the new lockdown restrictions yesterday. On the contrary, the capital looked much like it does on a normal Saturday. The MailOnline has more.
Britons flouted lockdown in their hundreds of thousands in London today as a market was packed with visitors helping themselves to takeaway beer on the first weekend of new coronavirus lockdown restrictions.
Londoners flocked to Broadway Market for drinks and food this afternoon, despite the new guidance to stay at home as much as possible.
People were pictured queuing up for pints outside street food restaurants and packing the streets, with many not wearing face masks.
Takeaway alcohol were originally going to be banned under the new lockdown restrictions but a Government U-turn allowed pubs, bars and hospitality venues to serve them.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Sun says it was the same story in England’s parks, markets and seafronts, which were all packed on Saturday.
More on Army Testing at Liverpool School
A reader has got in touch to flag up some of the problems with the Army-administered, whole-school testing that’s due to take place at Broadgreen international School in Liverpool on Monday (see here for the letter parents received about this on Friday).
The letter from the school and the Army testing within school appears to breach child protection requirements.
A school cannot have outsiders working with children without school staff supervising unless the school has completed its own DBS checks on those coming in (even then, it is not good practice for outsiders to be given access to children without school staff supervision – this is to protect both the adult from unfounded allegations and the child). From the letter, it is not clear that this would be covered.
Broadgreen School is rated by Ofsted as inadequate, including inadequate leadership and management. It currently appears to be in special measures. See here for the latest full Ofsted report and here for a more recent monitoring letter.
It is disturbing that the Government feels it is acceptable to use a school in such dire straits to trial a test programme.
Hunt For Downing Street’s “Chatty Rat”
As Fraser Nelson reminded us in his Telegraph column on Friday, Boris was bounced into a second lockdown by a leak. He originally wanted to spend last weekend mulling over the decision about whether to impose a second lockdown, but was forced to adopt the policy after someone in Downing Street leaked the plan to the press. Now, according to today’s Mail on Sunday front page, the mole hunt is underway as security experts entered the homes of Cabinet Ministers to examine their personal mobile phones.
Senior figures, including Matt Hancock and Michael Gove, were told to surrender their phones as No 10 hunted for the mole whose secret briefings forced the Prime Minister to make an early announcement of the new lockdown.
In the bid to unmask the “chatty rat”, as Government sources have dubbed him in the Cabinet.
The Ministers’ personal messages were examined under the investigation, ordered by a furious Mr Johnson after he was rushed into announcing the English lockdown at a hastily convened press conference last Saturday.
Hawks believe that pro-lockdown ‘doves’ leaked details of the so-called ‘quad’ meeting of Johnson, Sunak, Gove and Hancock the previous day to stop the Prime Minister from watering down the shutdown plans.
It also led to the rushed presentation of dubious predictions, with the projection of up to 4,000 Covid deaths a day by Christmas comprehensively discredited in the days after it was revealed to millions of television viewers.
Last night, Health Secretary Mr Hancock categorically denied any involvement in the leak, but declined to comment on the investigation.
Mr Gove’s allies said the Cabinet Office Minister and his advisers were happy to hand over their phones because they had “nothing to hide”. Anti-lockdown Tory rebels, led by former party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, called for the mole to apologise personally to the Commons if caught.
Worth reading in full.
500 Scientists, Doctors and Academics Tell Boris Covid Risk Exaggerated
The children and parents’ campaign group UsForThem and the new anti-lockdown group Recovery organised a joint letter to the Prime Minister yesterday signed by a coalition of almost 500 senior doctors and scientists. The Telegraph has more.
In a joint letter to Boris Johnson, the medics and academics say the Government’s approach to the pandemic has become “disproportionate” and is “causing more harm than good”.
They warn that mass testing is “distorting the current risk” from the virus, with tests likely to be producing high numbers of “false positive” results and providing a poor indication of whether someone is infectious, and say the Government must do more to place increasing infection and deaths “in the context of the normal seasonal illness/death rate”.
The intervention comes as the Archbishop of York, the Rt Rev Stephen Cottrell, warned in the Telegraph that worship is not a “leisure pursuit”, urging the Government not to treat churches “like bingo halls and cinemas” amid criticism of the ban on congregational services brought in by lockdown.
Mr Johnson is understood to be considering plans pushed by Robert Jenrick, the Communities Secretary, for a “review point” next week after which places of worship could reopen for communal prayer if infection data suggests the move would not lead to a significant rise in Covid cases.
The open letter to the Prime Minister was signed by 469 medics and scientists including Ellen Townsend, a professor of psychology at Nottingham University, David Paton, an economics professor, and a series of senior medics including Anthony Hinton, Lasantha Wijesinghe, and Paul Sanderson, consultant surgeons in London, Dorset and Newcastle.
Worth reading in full.
Help Pay For Helene Guldberg’s Cancer Operation
Helene Guldberg requires surgery urgently to remove her bladder. Cancer was diagnosed two years ago but her doctors believed that chemotherapy would be sufficient. It wasn’t. In May of this year – during the lockdown – abnormal cells were again identified and Helene has had an agonising six months of delays in her cancer treatment. She has been advised that the NHS do not have the capacity to operate on her until January 2021 due to the coronavirus. Helene simply cannot wait that long. Every doctor Helene has consulted has said the same thing: “Time is of the essence.”
Even finding a private hospital which has the capacity to treat her has proved very difficult. But Helene has finally found one – The Royal Marsden in London. She is scheduled to undergo surgery on November 23rd.
Please contribute to this fundraiser to help her pay for the treatment the NHS can’t provide.
The Lockdown Archipelago
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions…
Ideology – that is what gives the evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Round-Up
- “Mr President, I have a Mr Johnson on the line… will you accept the call?” – The Sunday Times‘s Tim Shipman reveals that a member of Biden’s campaign team has accused Johnson of making “racist comments” in the past, compared Britain’s immigration policies to Trump’s and criticised British ministers’ stance towards Black Lives Matter
- Collateral Global – This is the website Lockdown Sceptics have been waiting for – an audit of all the collateral damage caused by the lockdowns
- “CRUCIAL Viral Update! *The Bottom Lines on this Issue* UK Revelations a Plenty!” – Latest update from Ivor Cummins
- “Liberté! An open letter by 200 French lawyers protesting against lockdown” – A heartfelt plea to President Macron to lift the lockdown in France
- “How a full-scale lockdown rebellion by Tory MPs was called off” – Good piece in the Guardian about the machinations Number 10 used to browbeat the new intake of Tory MPs into voting with the Government on Wednesday
- “Lockdown socialism has ushered in a dangerous new approach to the state” – Dan Hannan says the spiralling cost of the Covid response is inuring us to the true scale of what is happening
- Police Clamp Down on Million Mask March – Watch the TSG over-react to anti-lockdown protestors marching through London on Thursday night
- “We are being TERRIFIED into obeying by these Orwellian announcements” – Annabelle Sanderson in the Express on SAGE’s dodgy dossier
- “Lockdown sceptics give scepticism a bad name” – Dr Simon Clarke strikes again in the Spectator with his most infantile, personal attack yet. You know you’re over the target when you start taking flak.
- “The Mystery of Taiwan” – Amelia Janaskie on what Taiwan got right in the AIER blog
- “Thousands protest lockdown in Leipzig” – Thousands of people gathered in the German city of Lepizig to protest new lockdown restrictions
- “In pictures – Stroud Freedom Rally” – Gloucestershire Live has some pictures from yesterdays freedom rally in Stratford Park, Stroud
- “More experts say peak of second wave ‘has already PASSED’” – Professor Tim Spector, from King’s College London, said yesterday that the data suggested the second wave had ‘peaked’, while Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter said it was clear that the worst hit areas were seeing infections fall
- “Vitamin D to be delivered to millions of vulnerable people to help protect them from Covid” – Ministers are drawing up plans for four-month supplies to go to care home residents
- “I’m A Celebrity ‘thrown into chaos as A.J. Pritchard tests POSITIVE for COVID-19 eight days before the new series begins’” – The former Strictly star, 26, had a routine test along with the other contestants ahead of the new series, which stars on Sunday November 15th, and was found to be positive
- “We’re not going to take it any more” – Richard Littlejohn echoes Peter Finch in Network in the Mail
- “Nightingale hospitals grounded by staff shortage” – The Sunday Times reveals that England’s seven Nightingale hospitals cost £220 million to build and have so far only treated 200 people
- “Was the virus engineered?” – Peter Franklin in UnHerd says there no longer seems to be the same consensus within the scientific community that the virus wasn’t made in a lab
- “Helena Morrissey: A CEO Wouldn’t Get Away With This” – Helena Morrissey says a FTSE CEO announcing a major change in strategy would need better evidence than Boris produced last Saturday, as well as a full impact assessment
- “Coronavirus Fact-Check #8: ‘New daily cases’ and the second wave” – Off-Guardian is sceptical about the ‘second wave’
- “The revolt against lockdown” – The editors of Spiked take comfort from the fact that students and young people protested on the first night of Lockdown 2.0
- “The infantilism of locking down to ‘save Christmas’” – Rod Liddle doesn’t have much time for Lockdown 2.0 in the Spectator
- “Universities are a criminal enterprise” – Hard-hitting piece by Laura Perrins in the Conservative Woman
- “Covid has proved China right about the weakness of the West” – Iain Duncan Smith in the Telegraph says the failure of liberal democracies to cope with the virus is a gift to the Communist Party of China
- “The Autopsy Is on Life Support” – Slate reveals that the number of autopsies has declined dramatically over the past few years, but autopsies are crucial to understanding COVID-19
- Psychology Counts – Open letter written by a group of psychologists about the psychological harm caused by lockdowns. Anyone can sign
- “Smoking Gun: Fauci States COVID Test Has Fatal Flaw; Confession From the ‘Beloved’ Expert of Experts” – Jon Rapppoport writing on LeeRockwell.com has discovered a podcast in which Anthony Fauci says that the PRC test is useless and misleading when the test is run at “35 cycles or higher”. In the UK, it’s typically run at 45 cycles
- “Testing Slovakia” – Good blog post by Skepteco on the recent attempt to test the entire population of Slovakia in one weekend
- “NHS output stays low” – John Redwood, one of the Conservative MPs who voted against Lockdown 2.0, has written a blog post about the fact that the NHS is still not providing an adequate service to non-Covid patients
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Three today: “Moonshine Sally” by Mud, “Alive and Kicking” by Simple Minds and “Symphony of Destruction” by Megadeth.
Love in the Time of Covid
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums, including a dating forum called “Love in a Covid Climate” that has attracted a bit of attention. We have a team of moderators in place to remove spam and deal with the trolls, but sometimes it takes a little while so please bear with us. You have to register to use the Forums, but that should just be a one-time thing. Any problems, email the Lockdown Sceptics webmaster Ian Rons here.
Sharing stories: Some of you have asked how to link to particular stories on Lockdown Sceptics. The answer used to be to first click on “Latest News”, then click on the links that came up beside the headline of each story. But we’ve changed that so the link now comes up beside the headline whether you’ve clicked on “Latest News” or you’re just on the Lockdown Sceptics home page. Please do share the stories with your friends and on social media.
Woke Gobbledegook
We’ve decided to create a permanent slot down here for woke gobbledegook. Today, it’s the turn of the Imperial War Museum which is reviewing Churchill’s legacy and his views on “sensitive topics” in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. The Telegraph has more.
Internal documents, seen by the newspaper, reveal discussions are taking place at the institution, which is home to the Churchill War Rooms complex where Britain’s wartime leader directed our country’s fight against Nazi Germany.
Senior staff called for a fresh look at “Churchill’s views” in relation to “sensitive topics” as his usually revered reputation came under scrutiny this summer as marches on Parliament Square resulted in his statue being defaced with graffiti claiming he “was a racist”.
Last night the institution said that while it is always considering “complex subject matter”, it had no current plans to reinterpret his legacy. Work is ongoing, it is understood.
Curators began discussions in the days after Churchill’s statue on Parliament Square was defaced by protesters, which was sparked by Black Lives Matter supporters marching on London.
“We must continue to have conversations around sensitive and difficult issues,” Museum staff were told in an email. “We must have conversations in which we reflect upon and examine our own biases and preconceptions.”
Other emails, obtained under freedom of information laws, show staff explicitly discuss Churchill. One said: “We should chat further about how we can look at Churchill’s views re: tackling sensitive topics too.
“This is one I’m very keen to get ahead of.”
Campaigners have criticised Churchill on topics including racism, colonialism, and his handling of the Bengal Famine which left millions dead, much to the dismay of his supporters.
The debate over the former Prime Minister’s views comes amid widespread reappraisal of Britain’s revered historical figures, including Admiral Lord Nelson, after the statue of Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Tim Parker, Chair of the National Trust, has praised Black Lives Matter as a “human rights movement with no party-political affiliations”. This was days before BLM applied to the Electoral Commission to register as a political party.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
We’ve created a one-stop shop down here for people who want to buy (or make) a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and it has the advantage of not explicitly claiming you have a disability. But if you have no qualms about that (or you are disabled), you can buy a lanyard from Amazon saying you do have a disability/medical exemption here (takes a while to arrive). The Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. You can get a “Hidden Disability” tag from ebay here and an “exempt” card with lanyard for just £1.99 from Etsy here. And, finally, if you feel obliged to wear a mask but want to signal your disapproval of having to do so, you can get a “sexy world” mask with the Swedish flag on it here.
Don’t forget to sign the petition on the UK Government’s petitions website calling for an end to mandatory face masks in shops here.
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption.
And here’s an excellent piece about the ineffectiveness of masks by a Roger W. Koops, who has a doctorate in organic chemistry.
Mask Censorship: A group of American researchers have withdrawn their paper claiming mandatory masking reduces SARS-CoV-2 transmission after further research revealed that… it didn’t. Details here.
The Great Barrington Declaration
The Great Barrington Declaration, a petition started by Professor Martin Kulldorff, Professor Sunetra Gupta and Professor Jay Bhattacharya calling for a strategy of “Focused Protection” (protect the elderly and the vulnerable and let everyone else get on with life), was launched last month and the lockdown zealots have been doing their best to discredit it. If you Googled it a week after launch, the top hits were three smear pieces from the Guardian, including: “Herd immunity letter signed by fake experts including ‘Dr Johnny Bananas’.” (Freddie Sayers at UnHerd warned us about this hit job the day before it appeared.) On the bright side, Google UK has stopped shadow banning it, so the actual Declaration now tops the search results – and my Spectator piece about the attempt to suppress it is among the top hits – although discussion of it has been censored by Reddit. The reason the zealots hate it, of course, is that it gives the lie to their claim that “the science” only supports their strategy. These three scientists are every bit as eminent – more eminent – than the pro-lockdown fanatics so expect no let up in the attacks. (Wikipedia has also done a smear job.)
You can find it here. Please sign it. Now over 650,000 signatures.
Update: The authors of the GDB have expanded the FAQs to deal with some of the arguments and smears that have been made against their proposal. Worth reading in full.
Update 2: Many of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration are involved with new UK anti-lockdown campaign Recovery. Find out more and join here.
Update 3: Professor Sunetra Gupta sets out the case for “Focused Protection” in a YouTube video for Co-Immunity.
Judicial Reviews Against the Government
There are now so many JRs being brought against the Government and its ministers, we thought we’d include them all in one place down here.
First, there’s the Simon Dolan case. You can see all the latest updates and contribute to that cause here.
Then there’s the Robin Tilbrook case. You can read about that and contribute here.
Then there’s John’s Campaign which is focused specifically on care homes. Find out more about that here.
There’s the GoodLawProject’s Judicial Review of the Government’s award of lucrative PPE contracts to various private companies. You can find out more about that here and contribute to the crowdfunder here.
The Night Time Industries Association has instructed lawyers to JR any further restrictions on restaurants, pubs and bars.
Christian Concern is JR-ing the Government over its insistence on closing churches during the lockdowns. Read about it here.
And last but not least there’s the Free Speech Union‘s challenge to Ofcom over its ‘coronavirus guidance’. You can read about that and make a donation here.
Samaritans
If you are struggling to cope, please call Samaritans for free on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email jo@samaritans.org or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch. Samaritans is available round the clock, every single day of the year, providing a safe place for anyone struggling to cope, whoever they are, however they feel, whatever life has done to them.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the past 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. Doing these daily updates is hard work (although we have help from lots of people, mainly in the form of readers sending us stories and links). If you feel like donating, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links we should include in future updates, email us here. (Don’t assume we’ll pick them up in the comments.)
And Finally…
A reader has kindly answered our call to create a Downfall parody of the pickle Boris has got himself into. Pretty darn good. More please.
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.
1st
Well done!
Veteran assaulted by police on Remembrance Sunday
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3iXXZTjF2E
A National Disgrace 😞 Please Watch & Share – Game Over
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZV7tIq-ph0
Interesting. Police in masks cannot be identified! Watch how they are filming themselves. Why? To make arrests via facial recognition? What is going on?!
If people want to actually do something useful please email the head of the Liverpool school that is proposing to have the army test pupils for coronavirus without parental consent.
The people carrying out these unethical and illegal actions have names and (email) addresses and we need to advise them.
Non medically qualified squaddies shoving stuff up the nose of kids without informed consent is assault. Law and medical ethics do not get thrown out of the window because covid.
Please send a short, polite email to the head. It might make her stop and think whether she could be liable.
enquiries@BroadgreenInternationalSchool.com
They cannot do this it must violate the ECHR another reason to rid ourselves of the LibLabConSNP and create a written constitution
This is a potential minefield as it covers three different age groups. The youngest age but largest group are 11-15 year olds The middle group are 16/17 year olds The oldest group are the few 18 year olds in the final year. Starting with the smallest group, as these are adults they don’t need any involvement of their parents and can consent/decline as they wish. The middle group are deemed to have capacity and can consent if they wish, this cannot be overruled by their parents. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/consent-to-treatment/children/. It is the youngest group that causes the biggest headache. Under the mental capacity act they are deemed NOT to have capacity to consent/decline. The next step has to be undertaken on an individual basis. Each child has to be assessed as to whether they are “Gillick” competent. This involves ensuring that they understand the procedure, able to retain the information and understand the risks. If the answer to all of these questions is yes then they can consent or decline, however this could be overruled by a person with parental responsibility. If the answer to any question is no then a person with parental responsibility MUST be asked. The government has said… Read more »
It’s plainly obvious to anyone with a brain cell it’s immoral and against the very core of what human rights stand for.
Lawyers should place an injunction on such proposals immediately.
Further to my earlier comment. Consent can never be inferred as in the email, it has to be explicitly stated consent or decline. If decline then that’s the end of the story, no test can be done as that would be assault and battery. If consent then according to the test manufacturer “This method is to be utilised as a screening test to identify samples from patients likely to have current SARS-CoV-2 infection.” “This product is intended for use by professional users only, such as laboratory or health professionals and technicians, trained in molecular biological techniques. Individuals should be trained to perform the procedures in this booklet and analyse results by a competent user.“ “Testing for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA should be performed in an appropriately equipped facility and by trained staff.” With regards to taking the swab, this is an in vitro sample taking like taking blood and should be undertaken by a healthcare professional (this includes trained non-registered personnel such as HCAs). I can hear them say it’s only a nose swab and a throat swab. My answer would be one of two questions The throat is the top of the gastrointestinal tract would they be happy… Read more »
Totally agree – what is this head thinking…. I would be very worried if my child was at a school with such a person in charge.
Memo to Toby. Biden has not won. The votes are not counted and many lawsuits are being filed. 2000 – Bush v Gore – was a dispute over one county in one state and Gore did not concede until Dec 13th . This dispute involves many counties in each of a number of states.The media don’t decide the election any more than the media tells us that there’s a need for a lockdown.
Give it up, it’s embarrassing.
Aye, I think he/she be whistling in the dark. Boring Joe got four million more votes, and counting, bain’t that be enough?
Probably being done more in desperation than hope, yes, but the total number of votes isn’t important
How do you explain all those votes for Joe when it was a disaster for all the other Democrats and Pelosi is fighting for survival?
Joe must have more charisma.
Yep – for Biden.
https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/1325138315964682246
Bill Gates.The eminent Public Health expert on virus
“I look forward to working with the new administration and leaders on both sides in Congress on getting the surging pandemic under control, engaging partners around the world on issues like poverty and climate change, and addressing issues of inequality and opportunity at home.”
Interesting contrast between the Conservative Boris Johnson and the left wing socialist president of Mexico Lopez Obrador
https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1325133262075940864
“With regard to the US election, we are going to wait until all the legal matters have been resolved,” López Obrador, commonly known as Amlo, said at a news conference.
“I can’t congratulate one candidate or the other. I want to wait until the electoral process is over.”
Joe was probaably wondering why Al Johnson wasn’t singing Mammy in blackface.
Funny old world when the Latin American leader is the cool headed one lol.
Bill Gates, would-be president of the world.
What a p…k!
The smugness of the offhand put-down is siding with a mask of mind control against the fact.
Gallo announced his discovery of HIV to the Media – without any published study or peer review. His fraud has not been given the publicity given his ‘discovery’ of a novel virus.
When narrative control is given priority over the fact, the lie is enforced and imposed upon the living. This is the meaning of sin – and spiritual death is the hollowing out of Life to the demands and dictates of the mask.
You have your reward.
It looks like you’ve won the embarrassing vote and no recount required.
If I wanted to be popular, I wouldn’t be a sceptic. Now I’m unpopular amongst sceptics too. How will I cope?
For a self-titled skeptic you are awfully eager to swallow anything the media tells you.
Splendid performance Tom. I was aiming for the most thumbs down today but you beat me using just five words.
The Democrats learned the power of the postal vote. Learned from the Labour Party.
One state alone “dug up” 13000 votes registered to dead people.
All elections are simply who can rig the votes the most and this time the Democrats figures it out.
Joe Biden on TV admiring to the vote rigging.
Don’t worry Joe is on the case.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MA8a2g6tTp0
I don’t know if there has been more skulduggery than usual but I find it bizarre that you can “correct” your vote after having mailed it in.
“Hi, is that the voter centre? Yeah, cool, look, I mailed in a vote for Trump. Yes, honest I did. Yeah, my first vote was for Trump. But I want to change it. So can you knock one vote off Trump and add 1 to Biden please? Cool, thanks!”
Even here they have not managed that yet.
The voting machine system in use in 30 states. All swing states started “playing up” after the manufactures “uploaded an software update”
The night before.
You have to hand it to the brass neck of the people area using it. And the idiots who actually believe people would be daft enough to to vote for a guy with dementia to lead them!
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/04/georgia-election-machine-glitch-434065
Which state?
I think you can do this in Michigan and Wisconsin, two states that went for Biden on a knife edge.
Could be fake news, it’s getting increasingly difficult to tell. The MSM won’t publish this kind of information at all any more, even though it is either fact or not.
“Here is 1.3k names out of the long list of 14k dead people whose ballots were received. It has months of birth, you don’t need to guess it “
https://mobile.twitter.com/FcffAZ/status/1324561518084550657
US Covid policy would’ve been better under the Donald, but he lost and that’s clear so for god’s sake accept it
It’s not clear though, not by a long way.
Like it was so clear when he won? Or when we brexited?
The Brexit vote was called AFTER counting all the votes and settling all (if any) legal challenges.
As far as i know there have not been any calls for widespread election fraud during the 2016 election, at least none aimed at Trump. The only major complaint was of supposed Russian interference, swinging the popular opinion. As far as both parties were concerned, everyone got to vote correctly in 2016. But now there are claims of widespread election fraud and there seems to be quite a lot of evidence that points to impropriety.
What are you talking about? Those two events were beyond settled. They’re still counting the votes for this election and lawsuits are dropping on Monday. Stop reading the BBC or The Guardian if you’re not capable of critical thinking.
You listen to MSM, you have the infection!
How come it’s only rigged when you lose? Was it rigged when trump won, narrowly (not even the popular vote) and against the entire political and media establishment?
Or when we brexited? Narrowly and against the entire… you get the idea.
Do they sound like corrupt systems to you?
You’re just babies screaming when things don’t go your way.
No it wasn’t rigged for Brexit as has been demonstrated several times.
And it wasn’t even that close.
How come there were so many “glitches” found, and all in favour of Biden? Can you point to Trump suddenly getting 150,000 votes out of nowhere in any state, with Biden getting 0? Can you point to any software “glitch” taking votes from Biden and giving them to Trump? Can you point to Biden votes being found in the trash? Can you point to any electoral center blocking Biden campaign observers? Can you point to any electoral center where Trump made a miraculous resurgence blocking their windows so no one can see what they’re doing? And finally, can you point to any rule in the election process that was changed by Trump in the past month or two?
Does this sound like a corrupt system to you? As far as i’m concerned, anyone looking at this as claiming there is no need to look into it further is anti-democracy and pro voter disenfranchisement.
Mind Virus – Mark Windows.
Thank you for your verdict, we can all go home now.
He also won the second most votes in US history, which means he won’t be going out just yet. His influence will be evident. Also, the Reps performance in the Senate means they’ll be still somewhat happy with the result.
Back in the george bush days they rigged the vote with a new voting machine manufactured by a company with close political ties and the usual tried and tested techniques.
Huge lines From “broken” machines in areas where they know will vote for X.
The west’s voting system is just as corrupt as west Africa. Just we have a better PR team
The whole vote rigging was detailed in a book by a journalist at the time
Armed Madhouse: Undercover Dispatches from a Dying Regime
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0141018275
It’s not who votes that counts. It who counts the votes. – Joseph Stalin.
The UK system is not broken. Once the votes are received its not feasible that they are not correctly counted if the rules are followed and that can be observed by all parties. Postal vote fraud is possible but not after the vote is received.
Peterborough anyone
Tower hamlets
Yes but postal vote fraud is MASSIVE
Nearly always in labour controlled areas. As an ex landlord you want to see how many ballot papers arrived at the apartment block we owned.
Multiple papers with many “misspellings” of a common religious prophets name.
We would send the back to the council “not known at this address”
Back they came the next week…..
As we’ve seen in the US election, voter fraud is still possible after the vote is received. Either the vote is not counted properly, or safety features are ignored (signatures, etc), or votes arrive past closing time and they are backdated to make it seem like they arrived in time. All of these things have been uncovered during this election.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1325135291791839232.html
That is quite the thread…
I agree Londo. If you don’t have a legal process for peacefully resolving disputes over the count, then you are living in a banana republic. The USA has credible processes, so let them play out. If you can get past the online censorship you will find many concerning examples. One where after a computer “glitch” was supposedly discovered, thousands of votes were returned to Trump from Biden – but how many other “glitches” might’ve happened and not been corrected? There are many other examples: dead voters, an on air moment when votes suddenly switched from Trump to Biden (significant as that was a live feed from the count computer and you saw Trump’s cumulative vote actually go down!), counting taking place away from the formal count area, count observers being denied access and the ability to observe the count, unprecedented failure of Biden voters to vote Democrats down the line (suggesting computer manipulation of the Presidential count), suspicious suspension of the count in swing states once it became clear how well Trump was doing and suspicious overnights appeatance of Biden votes overnight while the count was a supppsed to be suspended. The US is not the UK. There has always… Read more »
If
A. You are the Good Guys.
B. The lie undermines the Bad Guys.
then
C. The lie replaces truth.
This is how lies corrupt the minds of those who MASK in virtue while protecting the mask of narrative identity against disclosure.
Truth is not affected by lies, but our capacity to recognise and align in truth – and therefore function, is.
The replacement of life with lies is delivering us to insanity, because we cannot and will not look within.Or allow anything of self-honesty to undermine our defence against the Bad Guys – who always were the necessary evil against which to set a mind apart, distanced, locked down and masked over.
Have you read Bion, Binra? Your posts remind me of his work.
Your posts are a highlight of this site for me.
What happened when Trump won then? They just ‘forgot’ to rig it? Or maybe they just didn’t rig it quite enough.
Help us out with the online censorship – cite some credible references for your claims.
Likeliest scenario is that they weren’t expecting quite so many people to vote for Trump, and they didn’t have everything in place to beat him. Also, at the time, a Trump win wasn’t seen as quite so dangerous. Everyone was expecting Trump to just be a meme and do an extremely poor job. But it turns out that, despite still being a meme, Trump actually did a lot of good. And what’s worse for the democrats, he showed that reducing taxation and reducing the size of government does lead to an increase in quality of life. As such, this election was all or nothing for the democrats. If Trump wins again (especially if it was by a large margin) then he would continue to reduce taxation, bring jobs back to the US, reduce illegal immigration, and increase the quality of life. If all that were to happen, and there’s a good possibility of that, then the democratic party would be finished. It would be undeniable. They wouldn’t be able to blame Trump’s economy on Obama. They wouldn’t be able to say that people would be better off voting for them when the people already are much better off than under… Read more »
Excepting that in effect the Media are being used to dictate narratives to which others then comply in – including captured ‘opposition’ that sets up a self-censored kettle for protest to make noise in.
Check out Steve Bannon’s latest site summarising all the issues with the result
https://populist.press/
The math article is intriguing.
Allegedly:
Election Summary Report for Gwinnet County, Georgia
Total Population: 936,250
Total Adult Population: 687,207
Total Registered Voters: 581,467
Total Ballots Cast?
811,836
Toby is a shill for not exposing this election fraud. His handlers are writing Boris’s script too.
He sits on the fence in fear of being labelled a conspiracy theorist. It might make sense because if you go too extreme your entire message can be discredited.
Biden is so charismatic that he got more votes than Barrack Obama? Hmmm.
Just ignore the lockdown
I see that with people
Roads are busy
Next door has people coming and going
Been keeping an eye on the next door neighbour have we?
John,
No I am not spying on them. From my front window I can see people coming and going.
Two days ago they had a big and I mean big firework display (the ones you have at a display!)
I mentioned to him 4-6 months that I have noticed people are coming and going AND I am NOT going to say anything to anyone.
He told me that he had been to peoples houses sometimes upto 15 in May!
He tells everyone and does not care.
Good on him
Had various deliveries yesterday. All said they are more than p1ssed off with things. Some working in spaces with 300 others. All said they are having big family Christmas parties. If proof were needed that no one is listening to Govt, scientists and others.
I fully intend to and support anyone who does in any way.
Biden hasn’t won yet. There are investigations ongoing and the Trump campaign is going to file lawsuits on Monday.
Agreed! This is going to go on for a while.
But Toby has to cover his arse.
Media delivered mind vaccines are safe and effective.
(sic)
Good, make my day. 80 million votes for Biden? I don’t think so.
Trump took a dig at Biden by calling himself the president with the highest number of LEGAL votes in history.
Is Biden’s Win Bad News For Sceptics? I suspect not and this is why I think so. During the last few years we have all been governed by populists whose only interest was to be popular in the media and especially the social media. This is why Boris followed ‘the science’ because he is not smart enough to be able to challenge ‘the science” or the social media or anything else. Donald followed the views of his mates at the golf club because he is too dim to look at the real facts and challenge ‘the science ‘ or anything else. Joe Biden is another populist. He is kind of soft and squishy and popular but he again does not have the nous to think through issues and make decisions which are not popular, but immediately behind him is his VP Kamala. Kamala Harris has an incisive, questioning mind and she is strong enough to question the political status quo, analyse the real situation, challenge the academics and make the right decisions which we clearly need. She can think her way out of this pandemic nonsense and may also end up as President. If so, I think she will make… Read more »
Not sure how you think the pro-lockdown lunatic squad winning and the anti-lockdown skeptic losing would be a good thing for the anti-lockdown skeptics…
OK. Lets agree to disagree and wait until we see who moves into the white house in January.
The presidency has never been decided by the popular vote.
I understand that. But is it right that millions of people are disenfranchised when they are in the majority?
Yes. It is a fairer election system than the majority, because in a purely democratic system the majority can vote to oppress the minority. The electoral college tries to level the playing field between the states with large cities and the states with lots of farmland, because otherwise the farmers would never have a say at all.
But is it right to disenfranchise the entire country by meddling in the elections? By inventing hundreds of thousands of votes, all in favour on one candidate? By ignoring accusations of electoral fraud? Shouldn’t all these irregularities be investigated before declaring a winner? Isn’t ensuring the ideal of “one man one vote” by the highest priority?
Yay same for Brexit. Electoral college based on distance from Dover?
I am disenfranchised because my labour MP is so popular he would retain his seat if he stood for the Monster Raving Loony Party (second thoughts I might actually vote for him then).
I vote for The Blob. It will clean up the Westminster swamp.
Bob, abolish the Electoral College and Los Angeles County could control elections. How fair would that be to much of the rest of the country ? Personally, I’m okay with an amicable breakup. Been advocating for it for a decadel
New York, California, New Jersey. Take away their Biden votes and you have a Trump landslide.
Bob, their system is not different to ours. Every election here the government is formed by the people which the lowest “popular vote”
The vast majority of people in this country did not vote for the government. They voted for other parties or didn’t vote at all because they think that it really doesn’t matter who you vote for. The same shower of self serving, disingenuous sh!t€s will get in.
Yes whoever you vote for the government always gets in!
Well that’s often true.
The system and rules determine the way the votes are weighted.
The ability to rig the system, by changing rules or breaking them, is the ability to achieve a selection regardless the election.
It was created by the Founding Fathers for a reason. They were mostly legal men who understand mob rule and human nature. The process of confirming a president is also the same irrespective of landslides or close calls. It gets approved by electors in December.
Again, made for a reason.
America is an idea above all. The Constitution is what people swear to, not to party or figurehead.
You could have saved time and written number 4 as the totality of your first post, as that is what you meant anyway.
The popular vote is irrelevant. And I won’t be reading your post because you clearly know f’all about US politics.Educate yourself before shooting off your mouth.
And of course they want mandatory vaccinations.
The elected puppets of the West will do as they’re told and nothing will change for the good of all.
And yes maybe Kamala Harris will save us all. The way you describe her makes me forget she dropped out of the Dem nominee race pretty early.
Tulsi Gabbard spanked her bare bottom in earlier debates.
Yep – she dropped out with support in the low single digits, had trouble even competing in her own State, and claimed ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ were at fault – this was in Democrat primaries, not a national election. Therefore all of those “racist sexist” voters would be Democrats, would they not?! 🙂
What planet are you living on? You hit the nail on the head in your own statement
“He is kind of soft and squishy” in other words easily manipulated by the ‘Global Elite’.
‘Should’ Joe Biden win, it will be the end of western democracy as we know it.
Harris refused to prosecute Mnuchin’s 2008 mortgage crimes as California AG; she also prosecuted poor Black parents for truancy. Even better, she refused a CA Supreme Court order to ease prison crowding because of the slave labour that CA got out of its inmates. Let’s see, what else, oh YES, she pandered to the RC Church by not prosecuting a paedophile priest. She is the epitome of the status quo that vomited up Trump, and lionizing her is a rinse, repeat act of the disaster that the Third Way, corporatist Democratic party produced.
Just to throw a couple more on the pile re: Harris; she voted against allowing surgery for trans inmates; she fought against legislation which wanted in-depth investigations into Police shootings – this inc. African-American & Hispanic victims.
Oh and there was the Kern County case: Harris was verbally admonished for “gross misconduct” after she put a falsified confession into evidence, for a defendant who was on charges of attacking a child. Harris was destroyed in court & again in an Appeals court, she said the whole thing was intended as a bit of a joke. The defendant, obviously, immediately went free – where he promptly viciously attacked a minor child.
Here’s a bombshell. Four families have been running the State of California for the past eighty years:
https://www.newswars.com/renegade-state-the-four-families-of-california-the-private-company-that-controls-the-internet/
A despicable, phony, dangerous politician.
I’m as disappointed as the next sceptic but Biden HAS won. Simon Dolan is embarrassing himself by failing to accept this As are many posters on this site.
This is weird. I’m not going to get worked up about it, but as a true sceptic, it seems to me obvious that the combined forces of establishment and media have decided to pronounce Biden the winner regardless of the democratic process. You may be right that this is sufficient to railroad Biden into office, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to raise our eyebrows slightly at this. If they do it once, they can presumably do it again.
I’m getting crybaby remoaner vibes
Good for you. I hope you enjoy them!
The media trumps the electoral and legal systems ? Go for it, Tom.
Not a single state has certified a single vote, but you say that Biden has won.
Just because the Democratic Party’s propaganda arm, i.e. the MSM, have ‘called it’ for Sleepy Joe doesn’t mean that he’s won. Fraud has been committed on a giant scale and you can bet Trump won’t let that go.
How can you make that claim with recounts going on in all swing states, evidence of mass electoral fraud coming out, and lawsuits dropping on Monday? Have you looked at this beyond reading BBC, CNN, Guardian, etc headlines?
Biden is fully and openly bought into the coronapanic:
““First, I’ll go to every governor and urge them to mandate mask-wearing in their states,” he said on Oct. 23. “And if they refuse, I’ll go to the mayors and county executives and get local masking requirements in place nationwide.”
https://qz.com/1929107/how-joe-biden-could-issue-a-national-mask-mandate/
“Joe Biden plans Monday to name a 12-member task force to combat and contain the spread of the coronavirus, sources tell Axios.”
https://www.axios.com/biden-to-announce-covid-19-task-force-monday-23b353bd-863b-4e0f-bb64-c6da4a5758b2.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic&utm_content=1100
Another nutcase who thinks the virus can be defeated.
Trump by contrast said people should not worry about it unduly and compared it to flu.
Yes. Utterly depressing. Build back better, my ar$E
Biden and Harris will become unpopular and eventually will be kicked out of office both are owned by big tech and Bankers
Nope, she’s even scarier than creepy Joe. . . Agenda 2030 here we come.
Kamala is one HORRIBLE woman. Despicable. Laughing about how she has locked up more young people for being in possession of cannabis than any other state governor after admitting that she has smoked it herself.
Interesting …
She makes Hillary look sane in comparison, or the truly awful pelosi
She’s Woke, Politically Correct and got only one per cent of the votes during the Democrat primaries. A Nobody. A Mole. The perfect puppet. Like Boris.
Psycho. Path.
When Trump eventually prevails, a lot more people are going to wake up to the fact that “reality” is manufactured by the lying mass media. This is what will be good for sceptics. Good night all.
Let’s hope so, the more people exposed to the ever growing corrupt socialist system the better
Wishful thinking.
Reality
I hope you’re right, Londo. That Biden cheated is pretty obvious. That Trump is right to fight is equally clear: the old rules of ‘losers’ consent’ no longer apply, after the behaviour of the Democrats over the last four years. But is the media pile on, added to the power of Silicon Valley, and allied with much of the Republican Party, sufficient to crush Trump anyway?
I don’t know. But if I had shares in big tech, I might be seeing now as a good moment to balance away slightly. If Trump does come out of this, social media and Google will have reason to be fearful.
I’m dubious: there are just too many lefties in influential positions. BUT, heavens, if Trump were to prevail, the tears at the BBC would be champagne for the nation!
For all Trump was right about Hydroxychloroquine and has achieved more in four years, diplomatically, than Obama, loving the sound of his own voice, managed in eight, Trump did advocate injecting people with bleach.
This is a British based Lockdown Sceptics forum, can we please not give the zealots cheap and easy to use ammunition by banging on about something, the Presidential election, which is largely irrelevant. Instead please can we focus on ONS surveys and falling rates of hospitalisations that strongly suggest we have been right all along and the UK has achieved effective herd immunity.
The post above the line discusses the presidential election. In that context, it is odd to question its relevance below the line.
That it is mentioned above the line is why I have posted below the line that I think it is irrelevant and a distraction. Toby is entitled to post what he wants on his forum but I am also entitled to question the extent to which it helps the LS cause.
We have our own problems let America tear itself apart We have idiot Johnson to deal with
Trump never did such a thing. Go look at the video of what he actually said, then come back here and apologise for being so naive and impressionable.
Trump’s presidency is important because he is one of the few anti-establishment leaders of the Western world. Another prominent name is Viktor Orban, but the EU press has managed to shut him up. I haven’t heard anything about him in quite a long time. But they can’t shut down Trump. So he is the last leader we have that goes against the mainstream narrative. If he goes, the globalist narrative will reign supreme and you will never see another anti-globalist, pro-freedom leader again.
The U.S.A. Presidential election was not irrelevant. Who do you think Boris was rooting for? Merkel, Macron, Sturgeon, that bastard in China? They were rooting for Biden-Harris.
Remember this is the same lying whore media that spent four years spreading the conspiracy theory that Trump was put into power by Russia and is Putin’s stooge with not a shred of evidence and yet not once were CNN , BBC and the rest censored by social media the for spreading false and dangerous conspiracy theories .
Well, many people have called it. “Let’s save Christmas” translates to “there will be no Christmas”. These people belong in prison.
Do they know it’s lockdown 2 at all..
(blahh bla blah bla,. blahh blah blah blah blaaaah, bla bla bla bla baaaarg)
Brainwash the worl-oorld
Make them forget christmas time….
Might sleep now…
I just realised what my comment actually reads like. Should have been clearer. By “these people belong in prison” i meant the government.
Bar the pubs being shut, the restrictions don’t really affect me so those calling for tighter kerbs can carry on cutting their noses off to spite their faces. Once you are able to separate law from guidance, you can do whatever you want.
Tighter curbs, not kerbs.
Kerbs come alongside pavements.
I wish I had a proof reader like you for my writing! Would save me a lot of unnoticed mistakes I reckon. I’m not sure you can proof read your own work.
You can if you leave it a couple of days and then come back to it.
Yes, that helps – although for me isn’t infallible.
One of my methods for ensuring reasonably decent prose is to have a few stiff drinks and then speed read sections at random, to get the feeling of what it is like. Haven’t seen that recommended in any text books though.
No, with the amount I write, I think I would have developed a pretty bad alcohol addiction by now!
Got to give credit to Leemc23 for posting this late last night before we changed to a new page. Make sure you read it as it’s starting to disappear down the Mail’s page under all the Biden crap.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8924191/Coronavirus-thousands-died-Covid-19-caught-hospitals.html
Go Private – Shut the NHS – Save Lives!
Nice report from the Mail but hospital staff were telling me that at the time.
I recently asked here whether it was too cynical to suggest that the reason my main regional hospital has suddenly reverted to pre-covid normal busy is to get as many immune suppressed non-covid people in the place to give them a nice high viral load and thus bump up the covid deaths and so try to justify johnsons’ criminally insane lockdown 2.
Well that sounds all too probable. Undermine people’s health in every possible way, and then give them a large viral load.
Please inform Toby.
We should replace the NHS with a Swiss style medical system. It is based on affordable insurance premiums, but the Government pay the premiums for the less well-off. Service and treatment are exceptional, on-time, based on prevention instead of disease management.
Currently with the NHS it is like throwing bundles of cash into a deep dark hole, it is badly run with lots of excess staff and poor outcomes – just ask the people who lost family members due to bad care.
You repeatedly advocate this. But the Swiss system ministers to only 10M citizens, some of whom are the wealthiest people on earth and for whom Switzerland is only one of their many homes.
This shit is never going to work, go for the “Sweden” or “Japan’ model…
No, sort of shut down bits of the entire world economy is the way forward. No hidden motives going on here, nothing to see here people, move along…
🙂
It was fun telling that prat to do one though 🙂
Everyone needs to tell the prats to do one…I take great pleasure in it. Fortunately I am big enough to deal with any possible come back……unless they are terminator!
On Saturday about 2/3 cars in the surrounding residential streets were away for part of the day, dunno what the occupants were doing because the supermarkets were not busy.
There were again a lot of people in the pedestrianised city high street despite only Tesco Metro, M+S and a couple of take-away coffee bars being open.
A large majority were maskless so probably doubters using window shopping for exercise as their ‘reasonable excuse’ for not being at home. They will all know that they are being spied on by CCTV so possibly an
‘up yours boris’ display of disapproval.
Police still notably absent for the third day.
The chap in the apartment opposite mine had his mum over as usual and the girl downstairs was coming and going with her boyfriend who does not live here so all fairly normal for a Saturday.
Feeling a bit down tonight as they’ve banned me from playing basketball for two weeks minimum but at least the gym doesn’t close. Compared to the closing you face in the UK I really am lucky still.
Anyway, just had some gut busting laughter watching the Hitler as Boris clip…absolutely gold it was! “They’re so scared they wear masks alone in their cars…”
Best to you all this Sunday and remember those who died for us all
Lovely lady told me yesterday that what moved her to tears was the sight of a young boy waving a placard at a TV camera
“What did we do wrong ?
My dad’s a wedding photographer
He’s got no work we’ve got no money”
I asked ‘what channel, surely not the BBC?’
“No, it was Al Jazeera”
‘So this was in the Middle East?’
“No, here in England and let me tell you I’m from Zimbabwe (black lady) and used to worship the BBC but now it is just full of lies, bullshit and propaganda. . .”
A splendid Sceptic on Sceptic conversation ensued.
I’ve always had a lot of time for Al Jazeera ( Europe)
“I will never forgive the clowns who cancelled Remembrance Sunday”
Peter Hitchins, Mail on Sunday.
I have never visited my medieval Parish Church but it has a War Memorial and I will be there at 11am this morning.
Yep, screw the churches in my town, I’m off with my 4yo to the war memorial this morning.
us too
Very late yesterday Arnie posted the link to Ivor Cummings’ latest YouTube.
Todays page was already up before I posted my reply.
Thanks Arnie, well worth watching.
The first part covering the course of the first wave and not-second wave was predicted as far back as the first week in June when ONS showed that in that week there were fewer (all) deaths in London than in the five year average.
Everything else has flowed from that on the basis that you ‘cannot die of covid in March and then die again of what was going to kill you in the first week of June’.
It was also predicted that total annual mortality would be much the same as usual but that did not take into consideration the NHS more or less ceasing to function and resultant excess deaths from strokes, cancer and lockdown induced suicides as also explored in Ivors excellent latest vid.
Thought I’d mention my deflating visit with friends earlier today. Met them at a store for some shopping and both were masked including child. I love these friends dearly but I found it a struggle to truly enjoy the visit. I felt so disconnected in our conversations.
We had a meal and they came by my place with faces and smiles so that was nice in the end. But darn I am starting to dislike being in public. I’m the walking merchant of death to some people and it’s just because there’s no piece of cloth covering my facial orifices.
Loved the Reggie Perrin reference in the Boris Downfall video linked above: “Plague City, Arizona”. 🙂
😀🤣❤Downfall😅
I noticed the little dig at Brexit toward the end but johnson was always sly about that, only choosing Leave as the surest way of becoming PM.
World leaders react to Biden’s victory over Trump: ‘Welcome back America’
Some fellow co-conspirators (bunch of wankers)
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/World-leaders-react-to-Joe-Biden-victory-15709740.php
He has won nothing yet.
Fully agreed but look at the band wagon of ‘usual suspects’ already cheering him on.
REMEMBRANCE DAY CANCELLED – GOOD
Does anyone want to remember the sacrifices our soldiers have made, now in 2020.
Has it all been in vain. There’s nothing to celebrate this year.
Hopefully next year !
As regards the bulk of the population, it may well seem as if the sacrifices were in vain. Dying to save zombies who want nothing except living death? They aren’t worth it.
But there’s us. Let us continue to conduct ourselves in a way that DOES justify that sacrifice.
I can see your point, and to some extent agree. But it’s so difficult to celebrate a victory for freedom in the current situation.
Not celebrating. Affirming.
Protecting. Resurrecting.
They died to free us of tyranny, don’t let that sacrifice be in vain.
Remembrance Day is not a celebration (in the usual use of that word) it is an Honouring by Remembering.
My grandfather fought for freedom, in North Africa and Italy. He lived to tell the tale, but I will think of the hardships he went through, I will think of those who did lose their lives or suffer long-term consequences in their fight to overcome tyranny. I will also pray for freedom today, and, I hope, that I will be praying those prayers at the same time and with the same fervency as many, many other people.
My dad was in the Navy alongside your grandfather in the media and also the Murmansk and Atlantic convoys.
bozo will not stop me remembering his fellow Servicemen and women who did not survive.
In the MED.
That is a fair point well made.
Also, the behaviour of the government this year is a huge insult to our memories of people who died defending us.
Agreed.
i take all your points and accept that this day still has a very strong message. I can see that the point was not a fair one and that we must remember despite the current situation.
Kudos
(I wouldn’t argue with Annie either- although that is mainly because shes always right 🙂 )
I only claim Annial Infallibility when speaking Ex iPad. Can be wrong at other times. (Ask Stephanos about Beginners’ Greek).
Er yes. My husband is military. He has friends who have died for our country. You may not agree with some of the conflicts he has fought in (I don’t and neither does he) but he doesn’t get a choice to pick & choose.
We will be going to our war memorial.
https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-to-announce-a-new-coronavirus-task-force-on-monday-2020-11?amp&r=US&IR=T&r=US&IR=T&__twitter_impression=true
Atlas gone for sure
He is not President yet, so why is he announcing a task force? Jumping the gun Joe. Did he win back his Senate seat? Has he congragulated President Bush yet on a well fought campaign?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8925171/PETER-HITCHENS-never-forgive-clowns-cancelled-Remembrance-Sunday.html
Good old Peter.
Apologies in advance but my Dad did used to work for the News of the World (printer) and this is a Sunday morning. When the British public see cute looking animals (Mink are vicious but don’t look it) being slaughtered for the sake of public health they smell a rat. As well as the scientific implications of the Mink story it adds a sort of ‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’ type of element to the whole story. This coupled with deranged Dr Strangelove type scientists appearing on TV and giving lurid completely of the wall predictions of impending Apocalypse is starting to make the whole thing look the the script for a B grade Sunday afternoon disaster movie. Then Boris Johnson looks worse every-time you see him, he seems to be morphing into Father Jack Hackett from the Father Ted programmes. At the same time, try as they might the media cannot drum up the same apocalyptic stories as they managed in April/May. As Peter Hitches talks about; back in Spring they manage to achieve power by distilling fear. But the drama that was employed to gain support for this fiasco seems to be turning to farce and comedy and… Read more »
There was an article on this site early on about how people reacted to the plague. It was about how people were petrified at the start and tried to hide but then gradually grew weary of it and returned back to normal. This seems to be happening now.
Hopefully.
I was thinking exactly that on a long walk yesterday afternoon. Loads of relaxed people out and about maskless – a completely different atmosphere from Lockdown 1.
The dissenting voices in the tabloids have been getting louder and louder. The PM is now the man who wants to ban Christmas, and the dissenting voices in the tabloids offer an alternative route, bolstered by official admissions of exaggerated statistics – if it has happened once, it could have been like that all along.
I do hope this is how it ends.
The damage has been done Barney, Sir Patrick Vaccine put up a very sobering video about the state of Covent Garden a week before lockdown 2.
It’s right at the beginning of yesterdays posts.
Here is the link again. It’s an incredible watch. London is totally broken.
It’s staggering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd2-VY6roL0
Not just Covent Garden,the whole of the West End and the City.The economic devastation is huge.Only a matter of time before systematic collapse.
Johnson is on borrowed time I can’t see him in office this time next year
Make sure that he doesn’t continue in office next year.
With every false prophecy, they sow another seed of doubt. Overheard two old boys standing outside my house yesterday, talking about the great reset lol!
When the stats were exposed as fraudulent another reason had to be found. Enter the mink. Remember when this started they were blaming the innocent pangolin. Just more of the same old “not me guv”.
One has to be sceptical about the mink story. It’d be more credible with a llamacorn
Haven’t pavements tested pcr positive?
CULL KEYBOARDS!!!
Not sure what your apology is for but apart from that I agree entirely.
I was part of the vast majority who surrenderd power to Our Boris at the start of lockdown and would have wrapped an old towel over my head if told it would help.
Johnson and his gang have squandered that goodwill and need to go, message the Police around here seem to understand as they remain conspicuous by their absence.
https:/www.remove-the-tory-government.org
re furry mutant rodents: does this mean mink masks are out?
i miss the News of the World!
It’s all very convenient. Just as the public opinion is about to become explosively against lockdowns, here comes along a convenient mutation, right here in the heart of Europe so we can’t blame others and we can’t hide from it, one that not only happens to invalidate most vaccines being worked on, but also seemingly bypasses the idea of herd immunity. It’s not even two birds with one stone. It’s three minks with one stone: promote lockdowns, beat down the idea of herd immunity, and give big pharma an excuse to stop working on vaccines that are probably proving to be massively expensive failures.
As a teacher, within this last week I have become acutely aware that my own freedom hangs on a knife edge, regardless of whether I take part in track n trace etc.
Every day, the teenagers I teach are bombarded with orders to download the app, and to get tested if they have even a cold. Given this, we are starting to see positive results, nothing wrong with them. Not sick. But positive results.
But when that happens to one in my class, I too will be locked up for two weeks, along with my young daughter who would be utterly devastated to miss yet more school.
Every email is really unnerving now, as by the law of averages, that will happen soon.
I had a circular from Devon Council yesterday it described how the virus was spreading, or at least how they thought it was spreading and to me it seemed like they were describing the normal progress of the common cold in a normal British autumn/winter. We have never been able to stop the common cold anymore than we can stop the rain or the wind rustling through the trees.
80% of people are immune/resistant to serious hospital level covid, that is 53.3 million, so all the actions we are taking are solely to protect the 13.3 million who are susceptible to serious covid. There has to be a better way to protect those 13.3 million than to test & isolate children and scare the living daylights out of them?
Our weekly Council newsletter this week was all about the cold…lagging pipes, using a hot water bottle etc. Only a tiny bit about Covid and in the context of winter illnesses. It’s as if someone clicked on the wrong PDF and took us back to November 2018.
Ditto. We passed one of those electronic signs on our local A road yesterday and instead of usual nhs propaganda it said ‘is your car ready for winter?’.
The ones here said ‘Essential travel only’…so I travelled unessentially!
How many of that 13.3 million have at some point this year been exposed to it?
Yes, this has happened to my daughter. She is now off school for two weeks because someone on the school bus who had a cold has tested positive. The ridiculous thing is i sent her to school when she had a cold, coughing and blowing her nose all over the place. Now that she is perfectly well, no symptoms at all she has to sit at home because of someone else. Why can’t these people just take a lemsip and get on with it.
Hemlock would be better.
At least the Telegraph poll showing most teachers want to keep the schools open shows that most of your profession care about education, unlike the unions.
The teacher unions have never cared about the kids. When I was a teacher in the late 1980s all they cared about was going on strike…I refused to join them.
Schools here in Northern Ireland went back after a two week Lockdown. Just completed their first week back and already an entire secondary school has closed again and gone online for two weeks.
We’ve created this mess for ourselves. Teachers I speak to here are too self absorbed to think critically about what is happening
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-54848392
Is the default result a positive one? A friend (81 and doesn’t really go anywhere) had one of the at home testing kits sent. Told her not to but she said why not? Tried sticking it up her nose but it hurt, didn’t bother with the throat and just sent it off. Positive. Daughter-in-law, a nurse, is tested regularly as nurses are. A nurse friend of hers went for her, by appointment, test. They were running late so she rearranged it for another day. Before she went for that test she had a positive result back from the test she didn’t take.
I spoke to T&T about this the other week as the whole family had to be tested because one of my children had a fever. We only received the results from 4 of the 5 tests, they had lost the 5th and as such that member of the family was designated as Positive and thus had to self isolate for 14 days.
So the default is Positive otherwise they would be taking a chance that someone would be spreading it. Therefore, untested, binned, not received, not registered, and inconclusive results are all classed as Positive.
My theory for a long time is that we don’t have capacity for all these tests which is why the number of Positive suddenly changed to around 20,000+. Even Hancock admitted that tests were just being binned when questioned in Parliament.
I’ve heard/read about so many positive results from tests never taken, the whole thing is a joke.
If the virus is so powerful that you need a nappy to stop it leaping off your face and eating your six-feet-away neighbour, how come you need to ram a twig so far up your nose in order to find it?
Of the gang-of-four Quadroceptors, I fancy Grovel as the source of the leak that bounced Boris into the latest lockdown lunacy.
Grovel has form.
I am inclined to agree. It’s not going to be Sunak. Possibly Wanksock.
HIGNFY – heavily suggesting it was Hancock
If the ONS is down again this week and “admissions” continue to fall I think Hancock will be sacked, Vallance and Whitty will be gone as well.
Why on earth would Johnson sack Hancock?
Please do Boris
They should sack each other.
No one is getting sacked.They all know where the bodies are buried.
Such a great camera angle at the key moment — jump to about 16:02.
https://youtu.be/gVolcHUWzDI
Most prob, but the idea that he would be dull enough to use his own phone is ludicrous
This is Hancock we are talking about….
…The most technology-obsessed of them all, so he would know that his phone could incriminate him.
It’s a tragedy, to say the least, that he didn’t just stay working for his daddy’s software company, an industry where there’s a role for people who have had a humanity-bypass at birth.
‘humanity by-pass at birth’ – very well put. Judging by the number of zombies surrounding us just now, that operation must be carried out on the majority of newborns.
Via the delectable Sarah perhaps?
Maybe it was a plot hatched by all four of them in conjunction Dominic Machiavelli himself. The Speaker had previously torn Hancock and Johnson a strip for their contemptuous attitude to the House, so maybe they were just striking back and circumventing the House and Speaker again. And the rest is theatre.
Or maybe my imagination is running riot.
I’m fancy witless or unbalanced acting on inside information.
Do you really believe he was “bounced” into it? Whoever leaked the dodgy data did us all a favour because we had more time to scrutinise it and it was rubbished pretty quickly. Johnson had every intention of doing this – any explanation to the contrary is a pathetic attempt at spin to divert attention.
I would lay odds that is was Handoncock.
HandJob CockUp.
Off on full pay to sit at home eating biscuits! Whatever happened to personal responsibility?
They are not vulnerable. They must get back to work
Trump was a rubbish President and Biden will be a rubbish President but I am not an American so I don’t really care. Let’s focus on moving on from this ruinous lockdown in the UK and returning OUR country to normal. Let’s concentrate our efforts on highlighting the falling infections according to the ONS and KCL, let’s start championing the effective herd immunity we are seeing throughout the UK…
Hear, hear!!! I’ve been irritated at people who have been following this election and talking about it non-stop whilst at the same time ignoring the real problems we have in this country.
But remember: when America sneezes, the world catches a
coldcovid!If the rest of the world stop gormlessly clinging to America the better it would be
And saddened that today’s update and comments seem to be largely about Biden. Choice between the devil and the deep blue sea as far as I can see.
Well I agree we have to accept what happens, move on, and fight our own battles here, but I think the result of the election especially what it means to our cause is a legitimate subject for discussion. I know Trump is a divisive figure and I don’t think we should let him divide us, but there’s a debate to had regarding the impact on the anti-coronapanic campaign.
Sadly, I think that what happens in the US will be on its way here very soon – including the media superseding the democratic process..
Every day this lockdown is further exposed as completely unnecessary the hold the MSM have over the country is diminishing. When we win this fight for Lockdown Scepticism it will also herald a victory against media orthodoxy and groupthink.
They already have superseded the democratic process. Overrun it, overtaken it and subverted it.
It does impact us, I’m afraid. Example: Big tech getting bigger and more censorious vs being checked. That is/was at stake, and it impacts us all.
Yes you’re right, let’s all be so narrow minded that we believe the elected president of the most powerful democracy in the world deserves “really no care”.
Infections, figures, graphs, studies and statistics are all pretty much pointless at this stage, they prove only what we have all known all along.
Anyone still believing this “deadly virus” shit deserves what will come.
USA is in terminal decline
Agree with you there Will !
Dear President Trump, the freedom loving people of the world are behind you. The swamp and fake news cannot be allowed to declare Biden as President, it is evident through many reports that fraud was committed on an industrial scale -this will go on for a while yet.
If Christmas is to be shifted to mid-Summer, why not Remembrance Day also?
The Waterloo victory is still celebrated in June by dinner off solid gold plate at Buckingham Palance and a combined remembrance of all Britain’s war dead going back over two hundred years would have a certain resonance.
And we can hang the Quad to be beaten to death like the piñata they are
There’s out of touch and then there is OUT OF TOUCH!!!
SAGE and this apology of a government can fuck off if they are suggesting Christmas in June
1000% sure he US election result was fiddled, Trump probably won. , I dont know what the BBC told everyone (I dont watch it) but there was widespread fiddling which is going to be challenged in law courts
I really believe Trump was our only hope against the criminal bunch who are holding the world to ransom, We’re screwed now
It’s not over until it’s over.
Yogi Berra.
Relying on Trump to restore sanity is surely the very definition of madness? By the time Biden takes over in Feb not even the most dedicated covid fanatics will be able to argue that the pandemic isn’t over. And with the Republicans in control in the senate and the supreme Court its no wonder that senior Republican party figures are quietly satisfied with the results.
“By the time Biden takes over in Feb not even the most dedicated covid fanatics will be able to argue that the pandemic isn’t over. “
I wish I could believe that to be the case, but it has been obvious for a while that the “pandemic” is over (in fact it never really started, in the sense that it was never what is was cracked up to be).
Broadway Market
I take it this is an open air market? Well in my small balliwick here up North we didn’t have one. Who decided that I wonder? No opportunity yesterday then to buy fruit and veg from the lass with the lovely Geordie twang.
Hexham?
No. I’m on t’other side o’t Pennines.
The clue is probably in the name, the roadway broadens out to accommodate an animal market and has been that way since early Anglo Saxon times.
POPPY DAY Beyond sickened to think that our and allied WW2 soldiers died in blazing tanks and planes so thatba little runt like Hancock and his like could live in a free country.
In regards to Hancock I wonder if any veterans still have their service weapons
Not allowed any more. I was one of the last generation of officers who were expected to, or legally-able, to buy their own service weapons.
I counted three pensioners using their bus passes yesterday just to go for a joy ride on the bus to view the autumn colours.
Three may not sound many but it amounts to more than a quarter of the passengers I saw yesterday.
It probably didn’t cross their minds they were breaching the lockdown diktat.