How can you continue to treat every British citizen as though they face a very high risk of being hospitalised or even dying as a result of exposure to Covid, when this patently is not true? And why pretend the NHS is overwhelmed when the Nightingale hospitals lie empty? And how, this weekend, could you have bought into and sold the public such a dodgy Covid deaths dossier, your so-called ‘realistic worst case’ scenarios that lack any credibility an excuse for lockdown?
How can you justify failing to subject lockdown to a detailed cost benefits exercise? And yet you are going down the same un-costed route again.
How can you justify outsourcing the entire educational, economic, mental and social wellbeing of the nation to ever more secretive and unaccountable NHS quangos with their own political and vested interests all supposedly under the control of Matt Hancock at the Department of Health?
Lastly, how can you, an economic liberal, be part of a government which has needlessly wrecked Britain’s economy? You and colleagues may be shielded from the onslaught that the nation is about to experience thanks to your publicly-funded salary and pension, but most others – particularly the self-employed, the sole traders and those who run small businesses – face a very different future, one that is genuinely frightening. Irresponsible doesn’t begin to describe the national economic and political catastrophe your latest lockdown decision is leading us to.
An excellent article by Kathy who along with Laura Perrins made Conservative Woman such a breath of fresh air when it started.
Sadly as time passed some unpleasant views were allowed in the comments and I decided to stop visiting.
Seeing this maybe a careful return is in order, it is the season of forgiveness after all!
Here’s what our Parliament of Whores came up with:
“how can you, an economic liberal”
Maybe he is nothing more than a poser.
All this maneuvering – bankrupting people so you can buy their property cheap, wrecking cities so you can buy the property cheap, printing ridiculous amounts of money to hand around to the global aristocracy: This seems preparatory to some sort of currency crash. I think they know the global economy is wrecked, and they want to be holding the hard assets when hyperinflation takes off. The ownership of our nations in the Western world, once broadly distributed among the people, is now being concentrated into a minute fraction of hands. Unlike a nation with broad ownership, there are only so many bootlickers an aristocrat needs. Since only people who have something to offer can “demand”, there isn’t any demand for citizens anymore. We aren’t needed.
Why these sociopaths think free men fleeing their burned-out cities because they lost the livelihood they owned will return to work among the ruins as slaves, I have no idea. Absent coercion, all these aristocrats now own are abandoned burned-out skeletons of once-great cities. I’ll die starving in the woods before returning to California.
The latest argument for lockdowns I have heard about – via Stephen Davies of the Institute of Economic Affairs (he gives it more in sorry than anger, etc) is that the building of the Nightingale hospitals was nothing more than political theatre. What the real issue is ICU bed and specialist staff capacity. Building new wards full of beds is relatively easy to do; but getting thousands of staff who can work in an ICU and handle the situation is more difficult.
That is, at any rate, the most plausible reason I have yet seen for why the NHS and for that matter, other healthcare systems, hit a wall. Even in Germany, lauded for its supposed superior response, has locked folk down over the holidays.
Here is a website giving lots of data: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/united-kingdom?country=~GBR
Back to the Nightingale hospital point, what has pissed me off so much throughout is that the justifications for various actions seem to be based too much on chasing short-term shifts in opinion, or because of media hysteria, etc, and not cold, hard evidence. And I totally echo the OP’s author in saying that a massive failure of government is not being honest and open about the cost/benefit equation here, and explaining the costs.
None of the persons making these judgement calls is likely to lose out financially from this, although in fairness the Prime Minister got very ill from Covid, so I cut him a limited amount of slack.
Allegedly.
I would point out that Boris recently thought he may have been infected “again”.
I’m afraid I have reached the point where I simply don’t believe anything they say.
Exasperated:
$900 Billion divided by 330 Million Americans = $2,727.
Actual amount sent to Americans = $600.
Who is getting the other $2,127?
This is not difficult information to find. https://i.redd.it/f1q7c9xbcv661.png is a good simple visualization, for example. The top section, “Direct Payments”, is the $600 per American. (There’s income caps, which is why it’s $166B instead of the ~$200B it’d be if it were truly universal). Similarly, the foreign aid you discuss wasn’t in that bill. It was in a different bill, which happened to be passed at the same time. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Congress is finally trying to move fast when they have less than two weeks left before their terms of office end.)
You don’t have to like these bills, but it does help to know what they are.
Jonathan: That sounds quite plausible. Governments have screwed this up a fair bit, as should surprise nobody here. Some of that was because it wasn’t possible to know (e.g., most things they did wrong in January-March), some was because they didn’t prioritize learning enough (e.g., the lack of challenge trials), some was well-intentioned idiocy (e.g., telling us to avoid masks so that doctors could get enough), and some was just really goddamn stupid (e.g., telling people to avoid family gatherings, as you fly your kids home for the holidays). I cut them progressively less slack as we go down that list.
I have presented to a few nurses and NHS-ward-aware people the suggestion that, since that the typical ward involves a certain amount of unskilled labour, and has busy and slack times (a fact I know from other nurses), you could assign every second manager in the NHS to work as unskilled ward labour, doing whatever bedpan-emptying, trolly-pushing, lunch-getting tasks their assigned nurse told them to do, for the next three to six months – just till the vaccine kicks in – and thus have enough skilled and unskilled staff to operate many a nightingale hospital.
This idea has had a very positive response from the very small sample who heard it from me. (One also said it would have long-term benefits for the quality of NHS management when the reassigned managers return to their ordinary jobs – at which many are also pretty unskilled, according to most NHSers I know.)
Doubtless some declaration-of-emergency and parliamentary interpreting of manager employment contracts would be necessary, but, hey, it’s an emergency, right? We all have to sacrifice some of the comfort and predictability of our prior lifestyles, right?
The difficulty is that now people in politics face a very different environment from that which existed only a few years ago.
Then in a political party a wide rage of opinions was allowed – today it is NOT. The normal response to arguments in the past was counter arguments – then there would be debate. Now if a member of a political party believes that policy and they explain why – they are likely to be PUNISHED (expelled – whatever).
Members of Parliament have some protection – but below that level there is no protection, even if your own Member of Parliament tries to protect you they find they CAN NOT (not will not – CAN not).
“Then leave politics” – fair enough, but then policy also remains UNCHANGED.
It should also be remembered that policy is NOT made by minister and the Prime Minister.
Prime Minister Alexander Johnson did not wake up one morning saying “Build Back Better!” (an international slogan) “Let us have a lockdown!”
Policy is made by “experts” who are loyal to an INTERNATIONAL not a national agenda.
Both the broad outlines of “Sustainable Development” and “Inclusive Capitalism” and the detailed “Agenda 21 – Agenda 2030” policies are thought out by “experts” and officials – and passed down, international level, to national level, national level to local level.
Someone like Prime Minister Johnson does not MAKE these policies, he ANNOUNCES them – not the same thing at all.
Yes it is possible for a political leader to go to “Davos” and mock the assembled powers of this world and tell them to their faces that he is not going to go along with their polices of “Sustainable Development” and “Inclusive Capitalism” (the Corporate State – crushing free competition and freedom generally).
President Trump did that in January of this year – he went to Davos and he rejected their policies, the policies the American Civil Service have been dedicated to enacting since at 1east 1992 – when President Bush (41) agreed the “legally nonbinding” Agenda 21 from the United Nations, every country agreed, it was all part of a long standing consensus of GRADUAL Collectivism, right down to the LOCAL level (oh yes I mean local – it even reaches my level, and it is not really up for debate (it is POLICY – capital letters).
Well Perry will Donald John Trump still be President after January 20th? The answer is NO – and other political leaders take note. You do not defy the international establishment – not if you want to retain your position.