What Do You Think Today?

[peter]

To return quickly to the school situation, Neil Oliver was saying the other day (and I absolutely agree with him) that thinking you can simply throw all of these kids back into school with their classrooms of thirty and forty kids after a years virtual absence from the routine is simply nuts (let alone pile on extra work in a misguided attempt to repair the damage that has been done). It will, he said, take the best part of a year simply to reintroduce them to the system, to institutionalise them as it were to the regular routine of learning. We already know how much stress the pandemic has placed them under - to simply heave them all back into class as though nothing has happened will simply be to multiply this.

And a further thought occurs to me; what of the effect of all of the Government fear propoganda on the developing minds of the kids who have been exposed to it? God alone knows what damage this will have done - and simply to think that it won't have done any because they are not talking about it is to pull yourself into a fools paradise. Kids might not speak out about what they are seeing, what it is doing to them, but they internalise it; inside they are quite as cognisant as adults of the messaging that is put out - and we are certainly beginning to see the damage that this use of fear as a tool of manipulation has done to the older generations. Think then, what it has likely done to the children.

[peter]

In June of this year the G7 summit meeting is due to be held close to where I live. I was in Peru one year when the US President met with other Pacific Rim leaders prior to TPP. The entire city of Lima was essentially closed off with thousands of attendees (the heads of state plus their various entourages and media personnel) and I assume that much will be the case in Carbis Bay this year as well. Later in the year Glasgow hosts the COP 26 (I think it is) summit where again we may expect attendees in their thousands to flock in.

Are we to believe that all of these people, from all corners of the globe, presidents and pressmen alike, will be following the same quarantining rules that apply to the rest of us, including eleven day stays in the registered quarantine hotels for those travelling from red-zone countries? I think not.

Surely given the danger we are being told that we are all under, it would behove the countries involved to follow the example of the Middle Eastern leaders last year, who held their summit entirely remotely by video-link, and were completely successful in so doing while putting not a single person at risk? Is it just me, or would this not make more sense?

[peter]

So in a short while we will be able to see out families again. We'll be able to meet up with our friends for a drink or a meal (outside) and a few of our shuttered shops will reopen their doors. Probably.

The media seems to be recieving this news with a fawning gratitude redolent of a whipped hound-dog given a pat in a brief moment of respite. But we all know that when we emerge from our forced incarceration it will have, not the feel of a nation that has come through the murk and mist to emerge into the sunlight, but rather that of the boy sent home from his boarding school for his exeat, a prisoner allowed home on day release. For what the Government gives, the Government takes away. Already Tory Minister of State James Cleverly has said as much, reported in yesterday's press as saying that "We cannot promise that this will be the last lockdown". No - but I bet you could sure as hell promise it won't be!

And if you believe that, having tested out it's newly acquired powers of detaining us all in our homes under effective house arrest, this Government or successive ones are going to relinquish the power, put it back in it's box and carry it to the dump, you are living in cloud cukoo land. For the Government gathered the people to their homes and called it lockdown, and it was so. And the Government saw that it was good. So rest assured, we're not going to see the end of lockdowns. Rather they are going to be the order of the day from hereon in. With periodic frequency, they will be brought out of the box, dusted down and reintroduced, just to make sure they are still working. The necessary propoganda will be spun out in increasingly lazy fashion, with Governments hardly bothering to conceal the fact that the measures are being used for its own purposes, rather than the stated crisis of the day.

Not for no reason did Nietzsche describe the State as "the coldest of cold monsters". Once having tasted a power, having drawn it to its bosom - it does not hand it back, but rather like Gollum with his ring, takes it out and lovingly caresses it now and again. For it is precious........."My precious!"

[peter]

So today's the day. Boris Johnson will later on, deliver his 'roadmap out of lockdown' which will, we have been warned, be a slow and tortuous one rather than a throwing off of the shackles we have laboured under for the past God knows how long.

Well there's a suprise. I have always said that the restrictions we have had placed on us will never be fully lifted and that they will forever and a day remain hanging over our heads like the sword of Damocles, ready to be reimplemented at the Government's whim and under the flimsiest of excuse. Power such as this over a population is not quickly returned by the voracious animal which is the collective state and were it to be so in this case it would be running against the historical grain that has come down to us through the recordings of ages past.

But it's interesting to see how the (oh so very reasonable) reasoning goes in order to justify this. On Android Marr yesterday he was keen to get across how it was that the restrictions could be justifiably maintained when the vast bulk of the vulnerable age groups and individuals of the country had been given by immunity via vaccination. This was, he said, because if you let people mix freely, spreading the virus amongst themselves, you gave greater opportunity for the virus to mutate into a form that the vaccination could not deal with. Well, yes Android - but under this reasoning you will never lift the restrictions........ which (hang on) is just what I've been saying isn't it?

Another guy, who in fairness was calling for a more wide ranging lifting of restrictions, said that we had to be prepared however, to go back into the whackamole strategy of swift and ruthless regional lockdowns whenever the virus was seen to pop up in a given area. This will absolutely feature in Johnson's pronouncements later on today. It's exactly the kind of taking out and buffing up of the lockdown capabilities that the Government would relish maintaining once the generalized application of the policy is lifted. It keeps people aware that it is in the Government arsenal, never far from the surface, and makes any future general ones easier to implement at short notice and without parliamentary consent.

Who would have believed it? The Tories, the party of minimal state and freedom - of decentralisation and personal responsibility. Well we put that lie to bed didn't we!



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Oh - and I can't tell you how pleased I am with the revelation that Boris Johnson's dog apparently used to piss Dominic Cummings off big time because every time it saw him it made a beeline for his leg and started humping it for all it was worth. Yes, I can see that that would be annoying - I hope he does it to the queen if ever he gets the chance as well. Certainly sounds like a chip off the old block if you get me!

[peter]

Why do our Government tell us in one breath that they have "no intention of introducing a vaccine passport" (Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi on Android Marr the other day) and in the next that they are looking into their use (euphemistically called Covid Status Certificates) with Michael Gove charged with leading the review on the same. In fact the preparation for their introduction is longstanding with the companies involved in the software development necessary for their rollout already instructed to proceed (See the Big Brother Watch posting on YouTube "5 Things that you should know about the Current UK Lockdown" for the details of these companies).

On the basis of this route of introduction, as simple a thing as not being a smart phone user will deny you the opportunity to obtain one of these 'passports', let alone the numerous other perfectly legitimate reasons why individuals may not be able to carry them (think health reasons, religious reasons, reasons of ethical and safety origin). The Government is absolutely adamant that "we in the UK do not mandate such things as vaccination" (Zahawi again) - but coercion is clearly absolutely within their remit (and what is coercion if not 'mandation' by another route). To not hold the document will in all likelihood deny you the ability to engage in anything like a fully functional life in our society. Quite possibly pub visits, restaurant visits and larger scale gatherings such as rock concerts and sporting events will be off limits. International or even domestic flights will definitely be off the cards and it may even be the case that your employer will decide that as a non-holder you must leave your job. Under legislation introduced by the Tories some while ago, if employed for under two years by the firm in question you would have no recourse to the option of pursuing a case of unfair dismissal. Even if employed for over this time it is unlikely that such a case would succeed at tribunal, especially given the statement by Zahawi that employers may follow their own discretion in deciding whether employees must be vaccinated in order to continue working or not. So no, we don't mandate such things as vaccination..... we're to upright and democratic a nation for that. Instead we simply crush your life underfoot and kick it into the dirt if you elect not to have it (or even if for the other reasons mentioned above can't have it).

Nice. I saw a posting the other day from a person in Finland who said that lockdown restrictions in that country were virtually absent and expressed the view that the UK was spearheading the move in Europe toward fascism. Time was when I'd have thought the poster crazy - now I'm no longer so sure.

And I'm staggered - absolutely staggered - by the complacency exhibited by people in the face of what is happening, what is being done on the back of 'dealing with the pandemic'. Every time I hear someone accepting of the things that are being done in respect of lockdown, before long they say, "Well in actual fact it hasn't been to bad for me." It turns out that they like working from home or that they are not people who travel etc. For huge numbers of people the lockdown has been devastating - devastating! It has destroyed lives, businesses, thrown people into poverty, loneliness and despair, and now threatens to oversee the introduction of authoritarianism of forms that would have been unthinkable but a short while ago.

And in the papers all the talk is of lockdown ending, of people booking their holidays and returning to the pub, and all couched in a fawning gratitude that makes me sick to my stomach to witness. For the complacent, the fawning and the excited I post the following quote from a magazine which in turn quotes from the Financial Times;

It is a comforting thought in these cheerless times (that we are nearing the endgame), although the reality is that the recovery is likely to be cruelly uneven. While many are better off as a result of working from home, the Covid crisis has cost many others their savings, their jobs and worse. If and when the good times do come back, the worry is that much of society will be too broken to come to the party.

[peter]

How much damage can you heap on a society and not expect a reaction. This is a question that predominates in my mind as this saga unfolds - and it is one that I fear that the advocates of lockdown policy and its continuance fail to grasp.

But I'm absolutely sure that it is one of which our Government is fully cognisant and I believe much of what we now see and hear is reflective of their very real fear of what the answer might be. The damage wrought by the successive policies of national followed by regional, then returning to national lockdown, that have dominated our lives for the last twelve months has been huge; staggeringly huge. Far greater than any that could have resulted had a purely medical approach to the pandemic been adopted - and we have not begun - not even in the slightest of ways - to pay the price for that. It is the form in which the payback might be exacted when that damage begins to percolate into the mass public awareness that the Government must if they have any sense at all, live in fear of, and the evidence of the communication they send out is that they are very afraid indeed.

All of the shoring up actions, the continuance of the furlough scheme, the introduction of high street and business support schemes are desperate attempts to delay of the inevitable collapse that will occur the moment these schemes are withdrawn; the tsunami of failure and wreckage that will wash across our society and could easily threaten to level all in its wake - this is what the Government has precipitated and what it lives in fear of. For make no mistake - despite what the Government minister's keep saying, "the damage that the pandemic has done to our economy", it is not the Covid virus that has leveled the future hopes of millions of people, it is the Government policy in dealing with it. The economic toll of the actual virus itself would have been minimal in comparison to the effects of twelve months of lockdown.

What will happen when the realisation hits, that this isn't going away, that there is no normal to go back to. That the businesses ruined are not coming back - the jobs lost are gone forever; the glib comments that "there is huge potential for development of new business and industry" mean shit to the man whose life's work lies in ruins at his feet, whose home is gone and future blown away like smoke in the wind and are so much meaningless drivel. What then? What when the people en masse begin to realise that despite the glossy ads on television and assurances of ministers that their holidays will be restored to them, they won't. That increased prices and quarantine stipulations, that testing requirements and destination restrictions mean that those glossy adverts are no longer meant for them, but are directed at a different layer of society that they no longer belong to, that they merely represent a desperate attempt to pretend that the life they remember still exists, when in reality it is gone forever.

What happens, at a population level when this degree of damage is inflicted on a society. The answer is that no-one knows because it has never been done before - at least not to a population that was not already reduced to a point where reaction was all but impossible. This is the problem that our Governments now face and I imagine they are frightened. If not I think they should be. For what monsters this reaction might throw up, if such a reaction were to occur, is anybody's guess. It is not an accident that the quote I'm going to finish with is a fictional one, from a fictional book - because this is very much what I hope this post is. A fiction spawned in a mind too much given to thinking and not enough to just putting one foot in front of the other. The alternative is too horrific to contemplate.

Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves?

(The First History Man)

[I'm Murrin]

Why is this thread even a sticky?

[Avatar]

Well, it used to be much more generic...but clearly Pete is thinking about this daily.

(This is NOT a subtle hint to tone it down Peter, you just keep right on. )

--A

[peter]

Why is this thread even a sticky?

Answer's in the first two posts of the thread Murrin. If you don't like it speak to Ali. (shrug)

HaHa! Have no fear Av - 'toned down' ain't my style!

[peter]

Let's just be clear about this. I don't care about how many people have been vaccinated in the UK. What I care about is that I have not been able to sit down with my collective family for a year now.

I'm sick to the back teeth of watching the regular Covid updates from Number 10 Downing Street being used as a vehicle for the Government to say "Look how good we are!", of Johnathan Van Tam's veiled implications that if this all goes tits up it will be all our fault and of Matt Hancock's patting himself on the back saying "Didn't I do well!" I'm sick of the meaningless 'data' on Covid deaths (that aren't), of the infection rates that go wherever the Government need them to at any given time and the scientific nobodies made into unlikely stars by the pandemic and loving every minute of it.

I'm not a rich man - there is precious little I've been able to do to help the upcoming members of my family to ascend the greasy pole of life - but one thing I have been able to do, and have loved, is to get us all together intermittently to sit down in a restaurant and enjoy our own company as a family. In such gatherings we connect - we say, "This is us." To be clear, I married into my wife's family when the children were young, their father having died previously. They accepted me into their family without question or complaint and I love them to pieces. Both children are now married and we have a granddaughter from my stepson's first relationship. It is of great importance to me to be able to demonstrate that they are (along with my wife, it goes without saying) the center of my world, the sole value of my being. I do this via our meals out together.

For a year I have been denied this. What I want to know is when I will be able to sit down with my whole family again? It seems like madness to me to even have to be asking this question but I'm going to repeat it. When will I be able to sit down with my family again! If any Minister who is leading this pandemic response, any scientist whose advice is driving this forward cannot answer this question then I take it as tacit evidence that the Government has exceeded its authority, gone beyond the bounds of it's remit, and strayed way too far into the corridors of our personal lives. This has moved beyond the point where our democratic system should have allowed the Government to go and into the realms where their actions render them a danger to our wellbeing rather than a protector of it.

[Avatar]

Not a question any of us can answer I fear, but I feel certain that it will be possible at some point in the not too distant future. Unless things go pear shaped again.

--A

[peter]

Here's some interesting data Av.

This pertains to the four counties that constitute the South West region of the UK. We are talking total deaths here - ie of all causes including Covid, over the twelve month period since the first Covid case was announced in the region about a year ago. The combined population of the four counties was about was about 3.5 million at the last census in 2019.

In the twelve month period of 20/21 covering the time of the Covid outbreak there were 29,354 deaths in total.

The rolling average for the five years previous to the pandemic was 27,942

In the year covering the winter of 2017/18 when there was a particularly severe flu season in the UK, the South West had a total deaths from all causes figure of 28,861

This is 493 more deaths in the Covid year than in the severe flu outbreak year of three years previously, for a population of three and a half million. This figure will include deaths for reasons other than Covid and one could assume could be based on a marginally larger population.

Every single death is a tragedy, every single one a candle blown out that can never be reignited. But this notwithstanding, I think that the figures help us put the actual risk levels of Covid, (pertinent to our particular age range obviously) into context.

[I'm Murrin]

(The number would be higher, of course, if we weren't doing anything to mitigate the risk.)

[peter]

This is a spurious argument, based on the belief in the efficacy of lockdown and social distancing etc. The data is what the data is - resorting to speculation as to 'what might have been' had this or that been done/not been done does not impact upon what is.

The data is what it is.

[I'm Murrin]

Are you seriously going to suggest the lockdowns aren't working?

[peter]

Where did you get that Murrin - out of The Beano?

There is ample debate out there on the actual efficiency of lockdown if you choose to look for it. A case in point is the differing strategies operated in respect of this policy by differing US states and the minimal difference seen in infection rates in those States. There are so many other factors that influence the passage of a virus between individuals that attribution of cause and effect is virtually impossible. If you don't understand this then you are bound to take the simplistic view of "because A - then B". Even in the different areas of the UK the infection figures do not support the idea that lockdown alone is responsible for the varying levels of infection that have pertained over the course of the year. Even if they do have some effect on infection rates (and yes, I'm sure that they do - just not to the same degree perhaps that you do) Professor Gupta who holds the Chair of Epidemiology at Oxford has argued that lockdown might actually result in more deaths rather than less because of its interference with the way in which virus travels and evolves as it moves through a population in the normal manner, establishing the balances that we have been coming to with viruses over hundreds of millennia.

The arguments on this go on and on but in the context of the actual post I have made they are simply 'straw men'. I repeat - the figures are what they are. That you will draw different inference from them than perhaps I would is neither here nor there and to be expected. But I would bet one thing - that never having seen data presented in the media or Government briefings in this hard numbers fashion before, the actual low numbers of increased deaths over the 17/18 flu season numbers is surprising to you. It certainly was to me. With all of the pictures of weeping nurses and bodies being wheeled into morgues on the evening news broadcasts I would have expected them to be in the thousands per three and a half million people - not under 500!

But let's just try an interesting thought experiment (for want of a better term). Saying that the lockdown policy has been really successful and without them deaths in the South West counties would be increased tenfold. That would be a figure of 4930 deaths over and above the severe flu season of 17/18, but spread over a population of 3.5 million people over a twelve month period. This equates to about three deaths per day per million people spread over the 138 South West hospitals. And this is the figure assuming lockdown has reduced the deaths by a factor of ten. And no accounting is taken that this figure includes non-covid deaths. And no adjustment is made for changes in population size. And for this our entire economy has been reduced to rubble, people's lives and livelihoods and businesses have been destroyed, our hospital waiting lists (of people waiting for life-saving cancer and heart therapies) have been increased a hundred fold..........

And this is proportionate

And this figure is ten times the actual figure that we have experienced.


-----------------------------0----------------------------

And here's another aspect to all of this that lockdown proponents have not grasped. That the final and long-term effects of this policy will absolutely change the society we live in most probably to what they would consider their detriment. And I mean absolutely. The people who have so readily taken to home working, by and large the affluent middle classes, have failed to grasp that they have effectively signed their own death warrant in so doing. Because the bosses who have discovered that they can run businesses without the need for staff to be trudging into and back from expensive to run and maintain premises are not going to be slow to realise that this represents a better deal for them. And once having established their 'working from home' workforces, it will only be a matter of time before they start to question the validity of paying people to be at home when they are not needed all day every day - and their eyes and minds will move into gear thinking about how to better manage this. Which will be by effectively moving their workforce into the gig-economy and rather than payment for all day, every day, half of which time is unnecessary and wasted, they will move towards payment for what actual work is done. And in one fell swoop the 'middle class' (that effectively only came into being in the mid twentieth century) will be wiped away. And suddenly all of that complacency about working from home won't seem such a clever thing after all.

Make no mistake; lockdown policy will have had a lot of people thinking about how things may be done to their greater interest and it is the middle classes that will pay a disproportionate share of the cost of it.

[I'm Murrin]

Peter, can you provide any sources for all this stuff about the economy being ruined and businesses destroyed and everything? So far you seem to be taking it as a given but I'm not sure I've seen any actual data put to it. Since you're so caught up on looking at the numbers on the covid side.

[peter]

No I can't and I make no apologies for this; the Government has neglected to carry out the necessary cost-benefit analysis of the policy which would allow for it. But I do watch the news each day, read the papers, listen to what leading economists and commentators have to say (and to a degree use my common sense) as to the predictable effects of what we have done. Only time will tell the toll that the lockdown policy will have taken on our economy (and the collateral damage on society therefrom).......... probably decades, and it will be for history to decide if wick was worth the candle.

Like Peter Hitchins I accept that I am on the loosing side of this debate, not because I'm necessarily wrong but because public opinion seems to be much in favour of the opposition camp position. As I say, time will tell and I ardently hope to find myself on the wrong side of said history.

[peter]

Take a trip over to YouTube and watch the vid 'Lord Sumption; "Mass Civil Disobedience has Begun"'.

It isn't about mass civil disobedience, it's about the long-term implications of what has been done here from a legal and constitutional/conventional basis. His main point is that our freedoms (for want of a better word) are not freedoms in law so much as freedoms of convention. The unspoken understanding (if you like) that we would not be locked into our homes in anything other than the most extraordinary of situations - that this simply was not the way things were done in this country - and that this was the understanding accepted from the highest to the lowest in the land.

But this convention was fragile (and this is where those who believe that things will go back even broadly to where we were before all of this started are mistaken) and once broken it was like a burst bubble, impossible to re-establish. Such conventions take a great deal of time to establish, but no time at all to be lost. And Governments he said, do not forget.

Sumption, an ex High Court Judge (on of the most senior judges in the land when practicing in fact) is by no means a believer that freedom is paramount under all circumstances. He simply does not believe that the criteria have been fulfilled in terms of the generalized danger of the Covid virus, for it to have been sacrificed in the way that it has. A virus in which 99.9 percent of the population would survive, that quantifies to (in statistical terms) an additional sixty days of normal risk to the average lifespan (falling to two additional days of normal risk for a young person), cannot, he said, be of the order of magnitude such that the convention that the people of this country are not locked up in their houses, be broken.

It is too late now of course; the bubble has burst and the damage is done. The greater majority of the population who have undoubtedly taken to the policy with open arms, sometimes even welcoming it, will be slower in the realisation of what has been lost than the small group of dissenters to which I (and Lord Sumption) belong - but be in no doubt, that realisation will come.

[peter]

I think that our democratic batteries in the so called free West are in imminent and pressing need of recharging. Across whole swathes of Europe Governments have been elected (our in the UK being a prime example) that exemplify the very dangers that Socrates saw in the democratic system - namely that it inexorably led to the election of demagogues spouting populist mantras and making promises that they had no intention of keeping simply in order to get into power. Once so ensconced, there would be very little (he warned) to stop such administrations moving into the realms of tyranny, from which it would be virtually impossible for the people to escape.

Now clearly we are not at this point yet (I would not be posting this if we were) - but the signs are all there that we are moving further and further away from a place where the parties that purport to serve us actually do so, and toward a place where they look to the interest of the masters who, from behind the scenes, provide the money and coverage necessary for them to secure power.

This is by no means limited to the Tory Party in the UK - the Labour Party are similarly in the grip of the corporate masters who provide them with the wherewithal to pursue power - and we are now in a position where it is of little significance to these masters which party is actually in power, for their best interests are served equally by both.

The moment this nice little balancing act was briefly threatened by the emergence of a Party leader who actually did have the interest of the people at heart, they pulled out every stop to bring him down, supported by the very people who stood next to him on the podium and who behind his back, were briefing the press against him and acting as fifth columnists within his very leadership. And while all this was going on, the Marxist Corbyn was doing what? Nothing. He did nothing to root out the people who were stabbing him in the back - not one of them was expelled by this reported tyrant who led a Stalinist style dictatorship at the top of his Party. And now, when he has indeed been unseated, to the relief of the business burghers who once again can rest easy, what has happened to him - well, he has been denied the whip by the very people who stood next to him on those podiums.

So next time you get a chance to speak to Sir Kier Stamer or the Right Honourable Angela Rayner ask them this. Were they lying when they stood next to Jeremy Corbyn and told us he was the best person to be the Prime Minister of this country - or are they lying now, when they tell us that this man who served as an MP without let for thirty years in not fit to represent his constituents in the commons?

We are firmly back to business as usual in this country and we are not being served well by either of the two parties who dominate our Parliament. We need a fresh injection of democracy into our system - but God knows where it's going to come from.