Tuesday 13 October: Lockdown should not be the primary method to control coronavirus

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/10/12/letterslockdown-should-not-primary-method-control-coronavirus/

692 thoughts on “Tuesday 13 October: Lockdown should not be the primary method to control coronavirus”

  2. ‘Morning Peeps.

    Another distinguished serviceman is no more; today it’s a sailor:

    Vice-Admiral Sir Geoffrey Dalton, who has died aged 89, led a dramatic international rescue at sea, and as president of the Royal British Legion oversaw the reintroduction of the nationwide two-minute silence.

    In the early hours of February 15 1979 off Cape St Vincent, on the south-west tip of Portugal, Dalton was in command of the frigate Jupiter on passage from Devonport to Gibraltar through heavy weather when he heard a distress call from the Greek cargo ship Iris.

    Several days of gale-force winds from the south-west had veered to the north-west, raising a heavy, jumbled sea: Iris was shedding her cargo as she broke up, and was sinking. She could transmit Mayday calls, but was unable to receive radio messages and was unsure of her position.

    In the dark and confusion, Dalton took charge of several British, French, German, Liberian and Russian merchant ships who made contradictory reports, and Jupiter reversed course several times, rolling violently.

    At dawn Dalton heard from the Russian Rusa that she had sighted Iris, whose weather deck was almost submerged, but it was too rough to launch lifeboats, and a few minutes later he heard that Iris was on her beam ends and her crew in the water.

    Line squalls with heavy rain and gusts of wind up to 45 knots blew through, but the gale moderated to Force 8 as scrambling nets, throwing lines and swimmers were prepared. Dalton manoeuvred Jupiter into a patch of flotsam, but could not hold her head to sea (with her bows into her wind) because as she slowed the bows paid off from the wind and she rolled through 90 degrees.

    Nevertheless, two survivors were rescued when they climbed a scrambling net unaided, but as others held on grimly, they were submerged with each roll. One man was swept under Jupiter and rescued on the other side, while Jupiter’s sailors climbed down the nets to heave others upwards.

    Meanwhile, a relay of swimmers, who had to wait until there was clear space between floating wreckage, jumped into the water with strops (short pieces of rope) to rescue men too weak to swim to the ship’s side. For three hours Dalton manoeuvred his ship in conditions which demanded constant and highly professional seamanship to ensure the safety of his own people in the water and on deck, and to avoid endangering the survivors.

    By 11:45 only one man was unaccounted for, the chief engineer of Iris who had been seen going below before she capsized. Jupiter had recovered 10 survivors and seven dead; six more were in the German Kehdingerland and four in Rusa, ships who had done well, reported Dalton, despite their lack of manoeuvrability.

    In the afternoon the weather moderated, and Dalton was able to launch his helicopter to collect a doctor and urgently needed drugs from the newly arrived destroyer Hampshire. Making a best speed of 22 knots, Jupiter berthed in Gibraltar at 04:00 on February 16.

    On Dalton’s recommendation, swimmer-of-the-watch Able Seaman Terry Loftus, who had made seven jumps into the perilous seas, was awarded the George Medal, three other Jupiters were awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal, and two more the Queen’s Commendation for Brave Conduct for their skill, selfless dedication, courage and endurance in the greatest traditions of the service.

    Dalton himself was awarded a commander-in-chief’s commendation.

    Geoffrey Thomas James Oliver Dalton was born on April 14 1931 in Kuala Lumpur, where his father was a rubber planter in Selangor. He was educated at Wick and Parkfield prep, and Reigate Grammar School, and joined the Navy as a special-entry engineer cadet in 1949. Having passed out top of his entry he was allowed to transfer to the seaman branch.

    After the training cruiser Devonshire, he served as a midshipman in the carrier Illustrious in 1950. Highlights of Dalton’s early career included: the search by the frigate Loch Alvie for the missing submarine Affray which had been run down in the Channel in 1951; operations off Korea at the end of the war there; and patrols, in the destroyer Cockade, in the Formosa Straits to prevent Chinese Nationalist gunboats from interfering with merchant ships trading into the Chinese mainland; as a lieutenant in command of the minesweeper Maryton patrolling off Cyprus to prevent gun-running by EOKA terrorists; and as first lieutenant of the frigate Murray, on fishery protection off Iceland, where he made his initial acquaintance with bad weather.

    As a lieutenant-commander and first lieutenant of the frigate Dido, Dalton’s operational experience was expanded during the opening stages of Konfrontasi, the irregular war with Indonesia, and attempts by guerrillas to cross the Malacca Strait.

    Dalton enjoyed three frigate commands: Relentless in 1966-67, when he enforced the blockade of Beria, the naval operation to enforce an oil embargo on Ian Smith’s Southern Rhodesia after UDI; Nubian in the Persian Gulf in 1969-71; and Jupiter in 1977-79. When Jupiter was delayed in refit in Devonport and Dalton exerted himself to get her out of the dockyard’s hands, a wag on-board spread the rumour that his initials (GTJO) stood for “Get The Jupiter Out!”

    Dalton was a student on the staff course at Greenwich in 1962, and at the Royal College of Defence Studies in 1975. Two prominent and unusual shore appointments were his too: commanding officer of the School of Physical Training and Sport, and Captain, Royal Naval Presentation Team, when he spoke to invited audiences in towns and cities, universities and industry about the importance of defence and the role of the Royal Navy.

    However, it was his appointment as assistant director of naval plans, working on the future size and shape of the fleet, which prepared him for becoming Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (Policy) in 1981. This appointment was remarkable too: he spent his early months implementing the planned reductions to the Navy mandated by the Nott Defence Review, and the later months reinstating many of those cuts after the “lessons learned” from the Falklands War.

    His last appointment was as Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic, in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1984-87; he was knighted KCB in 1986.

    Dalton: unflamboyant
    Dalton: unflamboyant
    On leaving the Navy, Dalton decided that he had more to offer in the world of charities than business, and he succeeded Brian Rix as secretary-general of Mencap. Other charities in which he was active included the Regular Forces Employment Bureau, the Ex-Service Fellowship, and Combat Stress.

    In 1993 he became the first admiral to be president of the Royal British Legion since Lord Jellicoe in the 1920s: he recalled his four years in office, covering the 50th anniversary of D-Day and the reintroduction of the two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day, as “truly inspiring”.

    Many generations of Dalton’s family had been members of the Drapers’ Company, one of the 12 great livery companies in the city of London, including two former masters, and Dalton became master in 1996. A final rare appointment became his when he was made honorary colonel of the 71st (Yeomanry) Signals Regiment.

    Despite his wide operational experience and senior rank, Dalton remained diffident and unflamboyant, therefore it was a surprise when in his 80s he took to wearing a full suit of black leathers and arriving at the Rowlands Castle Tennis club (where he was president) astride a 1,000cc Triumph motorcycle.

    He married, in 1957, Jane Baynes, a WRNS officer who he met when he was flag-lieutenant to the Commander-in-Chief Nore. She survives him with their four sons.

    Vice-Admiral Sir Geoffrey Dalton, born April 14 1931, died September 26 2020

  3. ‘Apples and pears’: Rising case numbers ignore the fact we had no idea of true Covid scale in March. 12 october 2020.

    Health officials presented a grim picture. The very first slide, at Monday’s briefing from Number 10, showed soaring levels of Covid-19 across the population – seemingly now at three times the level they reached at the peak of the pandemic.

    While statistics showing around 15,000 positive cases a day appeared to compare badly with highs of around 5,000 a day back in April and May, in fact, “this is an apples and pears comparison”, the medic said.

    In the spring, of course, there was no routine testing for suspected Covid-19 cases, meaning any infections which were detected were only the tip of the iceberg.

    Two weeks ago, Prof Patrick Vallance, the country’s chief scientific advisor, admitted the real daily figure at the height of the first wave was more likely to have been around 100,000 a day, a figure which would dwarf current numbers.

    Morning everyone. The number of cases is utterly irrelevant, since we know only one certain thing about them and that is by deduction; this is that they bear no resemblance to fatalities. The numbers are in no way proportionate. One might as well test everyone for high blood pressure and shut everything down because some minute proportion of them are suffering strokes or dropping dead from heart attacks! Whether this panic is due to incompetence or something more sinister is a moot point but the solution is not. A successful and irrefutable response to the virus already exists in the form of Sweden!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/12/apples-pears-rising-case-numbers-ignore-fact-had-no-idea-true/

  4. ‘Apples and pears’: Rising case numbers ignore the fact we had no idea of true Covid scale in March. 12 october 2020.

    Health officials presented a grim picture. The very first slide, at Monday’s briefing from Number 10, showed soaring levels of Covid-19 across the population – seemingly now at three times the level they reached at the peak of the pandemic.

    While statistics showing around 15,000 positive cases a day appeared to compare badly with highs of around 5,000 a day back in April and May, in fact, “this is an apples and pears comparison”, the medic said.

    In the spring, of course, there was no routine testing for suspected Covid-19 cases, meaning any infections which were detected were only the tip of the iceberg.

    Two weeks ago, Prof Patrick Vallance, the country’s chief scientific advisor, admitted the real daily figure at the height of the first wave was more likely to have been around 100,000 a day, a figure which would dwarf current numbers.

    Morning everyone. The number of cases is utterly irrelevant, since we know only one certain thing about them and that is by deduction; this is that they bear no resemblance to fatalities. The numbers are in no way proportionate. One might as well test everyone for high blood pressure and shut everything down because some minute proportion of them are suffering strokes or dropping dead from heart attacks! Whether this panic is due to incompetence or something more sinister is a moot point but the solution is not. A successful and irrefutable response to the virus already exists in the form of Sweden!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/12/apples-pears-rising-case-numbers-ignore-fact-had-no-idea-true/

  7. Morning all

    Here are the Covid letters…..

    SIR – Dr David Nabarro of the World Health Organisation has appealed for governments to stop making lockdown the primary control method for coronavirus. All lockdowns produce is more poverty affecting the poorest.

    Liz Crussell

    Towcester, Northamptonshire

    SIR – On recent breaks in Oxford and York, we found hotels, restaurants, shops and museums all well organised, with social distancing and the wearing of face-coverings enforced and sanitiser available.

    It would seem much less likely to be infected with Covid-19 in any of these venues than during a visit to hospital.

    Perhaps it is time for a drastic rethink from the Government.

    Caroline Reavell

    Wilden, Bedfordshire

    SIR – There are howls of complaint about lockdown decisions. People seem to think the virus will go away because we want it to. However, every nation on earth is fighting to contain it.

    Everyone wants freedom; we are accustomed to it. But unless someone can come up with an efficient new idea about how to stop the virus, we will have to struggle on until a vaccine arrives.

    Lockdown is a version of tough love, and we must all get on with it.

    Mick Ferrie

    Mawnan Smith, Cornwall

    SIR – Timothy Morgan-Owen (Letters, October 2) quoted an account by Kitchener of a Great War cabinet meeting as a parallel to decision-making on coronavirus. Max Hastings (in Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord) quotes Harold Macmillan during the Second World War, when he became British minister in the Mediterranean. He could have been describing the events of recent weeks.

    “The trouble … is that no one really has any idea as to the future course of the war. One minute people rush to an extreme of pessimism – and think it will never end. The next they become so excited by a favourable battle that they regard it as more or less over. And the experts cannot give us any guidance. The better they are, the less willing I find them (I mean men like Cunningham, Tedder and Alexander) to express a view.”

    Rev Ian Browne

    Oundle, Northamptonshire

    SIR – Nick Timothy (Comment, October 12) berates the Government for its handling of the coronavirus. Mistakes have been made, but out of 20 European countries we have the 10th highest number of Covid-19 cases per million of population (as of October 1).

    For Covid-19 deaths per million of population, we are third, but of these 20 countries, we have the highest level of obesity, the second-highest levels of respiratory deaths, population density and Bame populations, and the fourth-lowest levels of vitamin D in our bodies – all factors known to affect the spread and lethality of the coronavirus. None of these is down to government handling of the pandemic.

    Professor John Dearden

    Helsby, Cheshire

  8. SIR – Inquiring at the post office why I had received no post for a few days, I was told the Covid crisis and difficulty recruiting staff were causing a backlog.

    So, despite the cost of first-class post, Royal Mail cannot uphold its contract.

    Stella Mildenhall

    Twyford, Berkshire

  9. SIR – An elderly neighbour had his blood-pressure medicine changed by his GP, but there was no follow- up to see if the new dose was correct, or if there were side effects.

    As a retired physician, I dusted off my old machine and have been checking his blood pressure. It has been mutually beneficial as it has eased my isolation (I live alone).

    Fortunately, the dose was correct and there have been no side effects.

    Dr S P Gibson

    Aldcliffe, Lancashireter

      1. 324536+ up ticks,
        Morning Ptv,
        By the same token could very well save a life
        more power to his concern.

        1. & your medical qualification is… ?

          if the Dr is retired & his name is off the medical register, he could be done for practising without a licence. To perform a neighbourly act or offer advice sub rosa is one thing; to write to a newspaper & tell all is infra dig.

          1. 324536+ up ticks,
            Ptv,
            Along with his, what I consider to be good works, putting a good works story into the MsM is deserving of praise, and royal recognition for how a human common sense unit can operate.
            Maybe next year.
            By the by,
            Ogga1
            Industrial pipework Doctor extraordinaire.

          2. Well, Americans look at people lying in the road after being knocked down by a car. They do not touch them, or help, for fear of being sued.

  13. SIR – The inspiration that came to Sir Roger Penrose in 1964 while crossing the road (Leading Article, October 7) brings to mind the Hungarian theoretical physicist Leo Szilard.

    On September 12 1933, he had just read an account of a speech by Lord Rutherford dismissing nuclear energy as a practical objective. Stepping off the kerb in Southampton Row, he saw in a flash how to create a nuclear chain reaction.

    He became a key physicist on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atom bomb.

    Bryan McGee

    Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire

  14. Morning again

    Hours of phone calls and still no flu injection

    SIR – My husband and I, both very elderly, have tried in vain to arrange flu injections. The GP’s website told us to phone reception. After an hour on hold I was told that none was available and to phone back the next day or try the chemist. The chemist also said that there was none available.

    After years of looking after our health, should we now abandon hope, and drink and eat ourselves to death? 
A healthy lifestyle is now pointless.

    M L Rees

    Leigh-on-Sea, Essex

    SIR – Whom am I supposed to believe, our local Lloyds chemist, who telephoned to cancel our appointments for flu injections because he has no vaccine, or the Department of Health and Social Care spokesman (report, September 30), who said: “There is no national shortage of the flu vaccine – it is currently available in pharmacies and GPs across England and it is wrong to suggest otherwise”?

    Mike Penberth

    Soham, Cambridgeshire

    1. Call me a cynic, but does anyone want to bet that there isn’t a flourishing black-market in ‘flu jabs this year?

      3. Some years ago there was a similar shortage of ‘flu jabs, but we found a company at Gatwick that would do it for £12- a head.

        Strangely they didn’t have any shortage of vaccines.

    1. 324536+ up ticks,
      Morning JN,
      Has not changed a lot since I posted it 14 hours ago but well worth a re-post.

  16. Driven by fear and dodgy science, this was bound to end in tiers. 13 October 2020.

    Scaremongering and dissembling is the order of the day. Take his Three Tier ‘traffic light’ lockdown system. The categories are ‘Medium’, ‘High’ and ‘Very High’. What’s wrong with Low, Medium and High, unless he’s trying to pretend the problem is more serious that it really is?

    I must admit I did spot this piece of manipulation stolen from countless Public Opinion Polls. The rest of the article is well worth reading as Littlejohn trashes almost every aspect of government policy. It has to be said that the virus as much dictates government policy as they do themselves. They have hitched themselves to the present narrative and there is no exit short of resignation and an election. We are thus to be dragged along with them to the end of this tragedy.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8832693/RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN-Driven-fear-dodgy-science-bound-end-tiers.html

    1. Likewise. Reminded me of “large”, “jumbo” and “giant” for, er, small, medium and large,

      1. “New and improved”. You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

    2. Matt Hancock has confirmed that the strategy has shifted from the initial ‘flatten the curve’ to ‘suppress the virus until there is a vaccine.’ When exactly was this ‘mission creep’ decided upon? What debate or discussion was there?

      Johnson noted that after 18 years there is no vaccine for SARS. He has admitted that we are waiting for a vaccine which may come years from now or never. So the big question is – when does this nightmare end? I suspect that the answer is – never.

      1. I have come to the sad conclusion that all this is nothing to do with Covid now.

        It is all about the golden opportunity offered to completely change our way of life and how we are to be controlled.

        1. I agree. A short 3/4 weeks lockdown to stop the NHS being overwhelmed would have made some kind of sense. After that short timescale, we would all have gone back to normal. But to keep this thing going for months, introducing more measures so long after the peak of infections in March, suggests an agenda, an intention to fundamentally change our whole way of life. I believe that the intention is to keep this panic going so that the population is so frightened of the virus and so grateful for the restoration of any of their basic freedoms that they will accept a level of government control not achieved by any tyrant in human history.

          During the Brexit Wars there were a lot of spurious comparisons made to 1930’s Germany. But Hitler was democratically elected and then simply removed all the checks and balances to his power. We need to be very concerned that this is not about controlling a virus, but controlling the population.

          1. When the Australian PM, of all people, suggests that travel to the US and Europe my be curtailed until 2022 one instinctively knows this is no longer just about the virus.

          2. I agree, apart from the second sentence. So what if the NHS were overwhelmed? It is there for us, not the other way round. The NHS was not even stretched. The sensible extra “Nightingale” facilities were not used. Hospital wards have been empty for months. Normal stuff, such as minor operations, major operations, radiology etc have been pushed into the future. Waiting lists, already hopelessly long now stretch into years.

          3. Clearly the NHS should be there to protect us, not the other way around.

            The policies of this government appear to be to kill off the elderly and sick and to leave the rest of us terrified and willing to submit to anything if only the government will ‘save’ us.

          1. Courtesy of the Davos plutocrats, the UN and the WHO; aided and abetted by the malignant left.

    3. Or maybe, “Safeish”, “Sure to Catch It” , and “Have You Arranged Your Funeral?”

      1. No one has yet explained one of the great mysteries of the British response to Covid-19: why during March, April and May the UK was the only country in the world to maintain a normal international airport regime, as if the crisis were not happening. Not only were there no restrictions on flights from China, Iran, Austria and other early hotspots, but no monitoring of any kind. Britons returning on flights from northern Italy in March and April, some of whom had contracted Covid-19, told the newspapers how astonished they were that there were no officials taking down names and contact details to aid in tracing those who might be importing the illness. This was while countries such as Singapore and Taiwan with experience of SARS were testing and staying in touch with all new arrivals.

        Not to say dinghy channel crossings!

  19. James Johnson
    Is Britain really a nation of lockdown-lovers?
    13 October 2020, 6:30am

    Aquick read of the polls, and you would be forgiven for thinking we are a nation of lockdown-lovers, clamouring for stricter measures, eager to obey and accept any and all restrictions given to us.

    An Ipsos-MORI poll over the weekend showed 45 per cent of the public think current measures are not strict enough, three times the amount who said they go too far. YouGov has shown majority support for a ‘circuit-breaker’ lockdown. And a survey by J.L. Partners found that, although only one in four thought the wider public would follow a potential ban on household mixing, three in four said they personally would.

    Focus groups — moderated conversations between a group of 8 to 10 people — often reinforce the polls. The latter is a way of digging deeper into the former, understanding why people answer polls in the way they do. But sometimes focus groups — of which I have run many in the last few weeks and months — unearth different perspectives. These cannot be a substitute of representative polls, but where findings are consistent they can shine a light on a side to public opinion that quantitative polling might not always pick up.

    Rather than a picture of happy obedience, focus groups reveal a mood of fatigue, frustration, and confusion. Participants, from across parts of England, say they are growing tired of restrictions. They talk about being unsure whether they can take ‘another six months of this’. Whereas in March and April it would have been close to heresy, they now talk much more openly about how they may take liberties with the rules, whether seeing friends in the pub in places that are already locked down, or sneaking that seventh person into their house for lunch.

    What’s more, though people do not squarely blame the government for a rise in cases, there is growing frustration with the test and trace system. With comparisons to other countries that have better-functioning systems often lumped into the same breath as ‘that chap who went to the castle’, people increasingly wonder whether restrictions might have been avoidable if different actions had been taken earlier in the year. And confusion over what the rules actually are, whether genuine or not, is eroding levels of trust and compliance — the viral Matt Lucas video has been mentioned in every focus group on coronavirus my firm has run since May.

    These different elements do not mean we are due a total breakdown of obedience now that the latest tiered system has been announced. But all of these components together certainly do cast doubt on the idea that Lockdown 2.0 is going to see anything near the same levels of compliance as the first, where the mood was one of unity, clarity, and high levels of trust in government.

    If the polls are showing us an inflated picture, why is this? They generate what is called social desirability bias — we want to look like and feel like we are doing the right thing. But polls are anonymous, so this cannot explain everything. More than this, we actually believe that we are following the rules even if we are not — focus group respondents explain away any shortcuts they have taken as a necessity, as something minor, as something that could not possibly make much of a difference to the spread of the disease.

    A closer investigation of the polls also shows these shifting trends. In the latest edition of Kekst CNC’s global opinion tracker, the gap between those wanting government to prioritise limiting the spread of the virus and those wanting government to prioritise protecting the economy has more than halved, from 61 points in April to 25 points today — with older people and Conservative voters swinging towards the economy. The same survey shows that concern about the impact of the virus on people’s health is still high, but is significantly lower than in April, with the percentage of those very concerned falling from 70 per cent then to 54 per cent now. And Ipsos-MORI shows a move away from stricter lockdown measures in the last month alone — from net +17 support for closing non-essential shops in September to -3 this month.

    The thrust of these findings do not mean lockdown sceptics have been vindicated. Many have been staying in since March, have been cautious throughout the pandemic, and have an acute fear of the virus. Protecting the NHS is still an enormously powerful motivating factor. If further restrictions are brought in, the response will be more resignation then revolution, and the public will expect them to be applied evenly and fairly — including over the Christmas period.

    But the picture that the British public are eagerly and happily skipping into another lockdown is misleading. Notwithstanding the difficulties and divisions posed by the geographically uneven nature of further lockdown areas, as well as a slimmer version of furlough and financial support, the public mood is very different to the one we saw in April. Back then, after that first lockdown, the reaction from behavioural scientists and the government was one of surprise at how readily the British public complied. Despite what a glimpse of the polls might suggest, this time it is not going to be anywhere near as straightforward.

    *******************************************************************

    BTL:

    A real liberal • an hour ago • edited
    Looking around the world at national responses to COVID it is pretty clear that we have become a lazy, frightened, ignorant people. I have been amazed. We have lost touch completely with the realism of making a national living. We think we can stop working and it doesn’t matter. We don’t understand what difficulty decisions are: every decision is an easy decision for us, We don’t know how to demand leadership. We worship pre-enlightenment, black magic, evidence-free, shroud waving, wealthy, entitled ‘scientists’. We are prepared to be terrified by Marxist political activists masquerading as journalists and union officers. We have no idea just how bad the future we have designed is going to be. In all this wanton self-destruction we still find time to ‘take the knee’ to vile, racist, anti-law, anti-police, anti-market, anti-democracy, rioting, looting gangsters. Shame on us. How are the mighty fallen.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-britain-really-a-nation-of-lockdown-lovers-

    1. If the polls are showing us an inflated picture, why is this?

      Polls are fixed! This is as certain as the activities of bears in the woods or the religion of the Pope in the Vatican!

      2. I have to say that when one considers the present occupant of the Seat of Peter, the usurper Jorge Bergoglio, the latter part of your analogy is no longer is as certain as once it was.

        (‘Morning BTW)

        1. Rather in the way that if the Yanks vote Biden they will get something completely different and even more malign put in place.

        2. The latest encyclical, “Fratelli Tutti” was written with help from the Grand Imam Ahmed Mohamed Ahmed El-Tayeb.

          Edit: Yes, really. The Imam is mentioned at least twice.

    5. Has there been a recent table showing the percentage of people employed by the state who are in favour of lockdown as opposed to those working in the private sector or who are self-employed?

    1. And violently if necessary.
      Actually let’s do it violently anyway to discourage dissent.

      1. 324536+ up ticks,
        S,
        To obvious, having not recognised flu as lockdown material over the decades.
        What I would find more worrying is that these “political bastards”
        have a future along with this name rustling party.

    2. The green light has been given for a constant game of cat and mouse.
      We will function according to our masters’ whims.

      1. 324536+ up ticks,
        Morning Anne,
        I do that already but only within the boundaries of the house.

        Their rulings they are trying to enforce is inclusive of submissive
        pcism & appeasement and a far more sinister plague than any
        coronervirus ever invented.

      1. 324536+ up ticks,
        Morning PM,
        Regarding this political batch of p heasant pluckers and their actions I do believe that it is to late to bring them to heel, it really was to late post 24/6/2016.

        I believe they have gone through a political non return valve as in
        there is no comeback.

        The question is, what is their next move ?
        Answer I believe is coming shortly.

    4. Morning all.

      I am now trying very hard to just let this all go on around me without getting het up about it as it was doing my BP no good at all.

      Nice cheerful day today after a pretty dreary one yesterday. We’re taking our son and family out for dinner tonight at one of our local pubs as it’s daughter in law’s (ssh, whisper it) 50th birthday. Should be very nice, great atmosphere at the Red Lion, looking forward to it.

      1. 324536+ up ticks,
        Morning VW,
        Same as that, plagues come in different forms,a major one we are suffering currently is a plague of deceit dealing politico’s.
        They WILL use a plague type malady to cover up their treacherous
        inept, morally illegal other type far more dangerous plagues, as in
        The Dover invasion plague, the mass paedophilia covered up for years ( rotherham ect) plague, the knife/acid plague, ongoing.
        Enjoy the evening & company.

  24. First we saw the plethora of new laws, enacted by the Blair Government, and since then the game has picked up speed. Gradually, we have been subjected to laws, not clearly defined in statute, which are then interpreted or made up on the hoof, in different ways, by different police forces. The chaotic, ever-shifting plandemic rules and regulations, imposed by Government diktat would seem to be following the pattern. I find it difficult to believe this is not deliberate policy.

    There is a quote that springs to mind, although I can’t for the life of me remember who said it ….

    “The best systems of control involve making it impossible for Man to live within the law. At any point the authorities are then able to charge any dissident with a crime. the political prisoner becomes a common criminal.”

    1. They move the goalposts, and when we cry “Foul”, we get sent off. The beautiful game.

  25. So speaks the Thunderer.

    SAM BOWMAN AND RYAN BOURNE
    Pay people £200 to take a Covid vaccine
    Tuesday October 13 2020, 12.01am, The Times

    Even when a Covid-19 vaccine is approved as safe and effective after rigorous trials, many may be reluctant to take it. Some will believe they don’t need to if others do, and some may fall for anti-vaccine scaremongering.

    That would be a problem for everyone…..

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/pay-people-200-to-take-a-covid-vaccine-dz6mhl5sw

          2. My doctor’s surgery just stopped my medication, telling my pharmacist that I had to ring them for a “medical review”. They didn’t bother to contact me themselves.

            So I rang and had a telephone appointment. Basically nothing was said except that the tablets do actually help me. I asked them to contact my pharmacist and reinstate my repeat prescription (after all he had done all the work so far, and had had to ring me to tell me to ring them).

            At the end the doctor said “and we want you to come in for a blood test”. Why? He didn’t say but was very insistent. If my medication is going to be dependent on me coming in for a blood test, I’m not happy. I don’t mind a test as such, but I didn’t ask for one and find it rather intrusive.

            While I’m at it, my pharmacist was open every day since the pandemic closures in March. He is losing a lot of income and – I asked him – apparently is getting very little help from the government. “Sometimes they treat us as if we are NHS and sometimes they don’t” he told me rather bitterly. “And while I was open every day, the surgery weren’t even answering the telephone”. Makes you think…

    2. My spine’s now a seething mass of undead viruses and I can no longer walk or sit comfortably, but hey – I’m £200 better off.

      1. ‘Morning, Anne, and I now have a chip so small but one that allows any government agent to ‘Track and Trace’ me wherever I am and whatever mischief I’m up to

    1. Unfortunately our western political classes will never learn the lesson until one of them or more are knocked off their perches by the imported terrorists.
      The police are not powerless, they have legal weapons, these trouble makers could be shot on sight or locked away for life.

      A few years ago in the UK nothing was done about dodgy wired electrical installations until a politicians wife was electrocuted in her kitchen.

      1. Weird, your uptick count says 3 but I can see 4 listed. Apropos the need for a a high-ranking political idiot to suffer at the hands of BAME, Jihadis and/or Antifa – the sooner the better.

        Your analogy with dodgy electrical installations, illustrates it perfectly.

        1. It is not uncommon for the number of names listed not to tally with the number of upvotes indicated.

    2. I’m still standing. I’ve not been shot, grenaded, bombed, stabbed, beheaded or otherwise executed yet.

      3. We apologise for this off message posting, facts will not be allowed to interfere with media scaremongering.

    3. But will Britain learn anything from this – or is it also now already to late for the UK to avoid the same fate?

      1. I heard about the grenade being thrown through a ground floor window killing a 16 boy. I heard more when Katie Hopkins went to visit and pointed out all the burnt out cars a groups of migrants hanging out on street corners.

        Our media and the BBC in particular obviously don’t feel that 257 bombings in a 12 month period is newsworthy.

        In 5 or 10 years this will be us.

        Good morning.

        1. Why wait so long? There was a little note somewhere very recently that the muslim Mayor of someplace had left the Labour Party.
          A straw in the wind? How will it be if there is a “muslim party”?

          1. I suspect that there are now sufficient Muslims, concentrated within many constituencies, that if a Muslim Party of Great Britain was formed that it could achieve what UKIP failed to do and get a significant number of MPs elected.

            Certainly enough that if there was a hung Parliament they, like the LibDems, could and most certainly would, demand concessions out of all proportion to their electoral mandate.

          3. Indeed, but imagine them in Parliament controlling whether it was a Labour or Conservative administration and agreeing to sit with the highest bidder and threatening to side with the opposition if they didn’t get their own way.

          4. ‘Afternoon, Sos, what you posit is my biggest fear – and I don’t think it will be too long before it happens.

          6. I didn’t think eligibility to vote was a prerequisite for partaking in the census. What about all the under 18s?

          7. It isn’t, but what non participation of eligible voters in the census will do is mask the true number of potential supporters of a Muslim Party.

          10. We already have the Muslin Council. Also in authority in many areas. They don’t do so well as politicians though because they are under closer scrutiny and keep getting found out. Doesn’t appear to have done any harm to Keith Vaz though.

          11. We already have the Muslin Council. Do the Calico, the Seersucker, the Gingham, the Denim and the Cheesecloth also have councils?

          18. I was just about to write that!
            Portuguese/Goan descent. His name “Vas” is, I believe, actually from the Portuguese side of his family.

          20. Islington Mayor Rakhia Ismail. I posted this on the VERY impressive Obit of her fellow countrywoman, Hawa Abdi, doctor who saved thousands of lives in wartorn Somalia.
            https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2020/10/12/hawa-abdi-doctor-saved-thousands-lives-wartorn-somalia-obituary/#comment

            Robert Spowart
            13 Oct 2020 9:19AM
            The marvelously lived life of a brave woman who worked tirelessly to improve conditions in her country when so many others who could have helped ran away.

            Perhaps Islington Mayor Rakhia Ismail could please note?

            https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/rakhia-ismail-islington-labour-racism-islamophobia-b963658.html

          21. I can’t read anything on the so-called ‘Independent’ ‘cos they don’t like my ad-blocker. Well, up-theirs.

          23. Here you are.
            Ungrateful bloody cow should Foxtrot off back to Somalia.

            UK’s first hijab-wearing mayor resigns from Labour citing racism
            Rakhia Ismail left the post of Islington mayor in September attacking system that ‘allows white men to have what they want, when they want’

            The UK’s first hijab-wearing mayor has resigned from the Labour Party saying she felt “as a BME woman that I had no voice”.

            Rakhia Ismail accused the local leadership in her north London council of “discrimination” when she stepped down as mayor of Islington in September and has now resigned as a councillor after eight years.

            “I’m saddened deeply that the party I thought was for justice and fairness and ‘for the many’ is the opposite, from my personal experience,” she told The Guardian.

            “Therefore, I find it hard to represent Holloway Ward as a Labour councillor because I was battling with a party system that simply allows white men to have what they want, when they want.”

            Ms Ismail alleged Islamophobia among some colleagues was behind the decision by the council not to organise an event to mark the Muslim festival of Eid in 2019 and highlighted an incident in which a letter inviting her to Labour’s first national women’s conference had the word “Somalia” printed beneath her address.

            “What has my birthplace got to do with this invite? I was shocked,” she said.

            She also alleged a Labour colleague shouted at her for damaging the reputation of the area after she raised the issue of knife crime in the media.

            “It felt like me as a BME woman that I had no voice. In the end, I thought what’s the point?” she said.

            A Labour spokesperson told The Guardian: “Cllr Ismail’s decision to resign is disappointing especially coming so soon after her term as mayor of Islington, having served the borough admirably through an incredibly challenging time.

            “Islington Labour has a diverse and talented group of councillors serving their community.

            “The Labour Party takes any allegations of discrimination received extremely seriously, which are fully investigated in line with our rules and procedures.”

      2. Not only are the advertisements 40-50% bame, if not more, the bames are always presented first in the ad, or prominently in the middle leading, as it were, with the indigenous whites appearing as an oh-and-by-the-way.

        1. Oops, more underreadery. Yes, I’ve noted that (comment above). It is to help us get used to having black bosses.

          1. ‘Afternoon, Horace, “It is to help us get used to having black bosses.” Whether they are qualified or not.

    3. Every sodding advert has a BAME in it as if it’s law to have this – why don’t people stand up to this and tell the PTB to sod off

      1. It is also quite subtle, apart from the overt presence of BAMES. If you look at what is happening one might note that the BAME is in the “superior” position, as in black customer, and thE white is the “subordinate”, as in white waiter/salesgirl. There are one or two “boardroom” and workplace scenes where this is very evident.

        1. I have a “black list”. If I spot an advert with BAMEs in it, the company goes on the list and I try to avoid them.

          1. Me too. Until I realised that there is hardly anyone left. I’ve written to Yorkshire Tea, although there has been no response. Sainsbury’s are on the cusp with their support for BLM, but Tesco are no better with their BAME ads.

        2. Exactly right.

          In advertising the overrepresentation is not as important as the parts they play.

          Who is the incompetent fool who can’t put up a shelf? The white male (dad). Possibly a tad overweight, balding, glasses, ageing.

          Who is the tech savvy genius? The young, fit, charming black boy or girl.

          Who has a single, misbehaving kid? The white family. Or often the lone white parent.

          Who has a brace of angelic, well behaved, perfect children? The beaming black or mixed race family.

          See, exactly like real life!

          Of course these rules apply across drama, comedy, kids TV, advertising etc and it doesn’t matter whether its the BBC or ITV. Amazon or Netflix. All networks and channels. You cannot choose to avoid all this other than a partial escape to the past like Talking Pictures or just not watching the TV at all. This is where I think complaining about the BBC and nothing else is pretty redundant.. The Long March through the institutions really does mean all of them.

          https://uniformpattern.blogspot.com

      2. We can almost infer that there are official advertising guidelines but it may just be that the servile commies/woke who inhabit every corner of broadcast media merely know what to do without being told. They have internalised the rules of The Agenda™

  29. Fine sunny day here .

    We are still sniffling and snufflingly horrible at the moment . Coping with it though.

    One of those seasonal things, though we haven’t had a cold since January.

    1. Cloudy here just up the coast from you.

      Keep warm. My nose won’t stop running. I’ve shoved tissues up both nostrils.

      1. Morning Phizzee ,

        What a nuisance for you, paper hankies won’t help either , because they are full fibre and dust and will make you sneeze and sniffle even more.

        Perhaps you need something from the chemist to dry you up.

        I hope the sun stays out for a while , need some brightness in these gloomy times.

        1. I quite often get a runny nose – it’s not a cold, more an allergic reaction to some irritant – especially dust. I never use paper tissues as they are the best thing to make your nose sore. Always a soft, cotton, washable hankie for me!

          1. That’s what we use .. I have a proper hankie drawer, as does Moh , buying proper replacement cotton hankies is becoming a problem these days ,

          2. They last quite a few years, but eventually wear out…….and new ones are so stiff! My current half-dozen are nice and soft.

          3. Hemming squares of white lawn to make hankies used to be a genteel way for a lady to fill her time. Don’t think I have the patience, though it could be done while watching telly I suppose.

          4. M & S have them in packets of 10 Maggie – I get a packet every Xmas from a well meaning neighbour

          5. Charity shops occasionally have an unopened packet of three… Irish handkerchiefs, left over from the 1970s.

          7. Good quality re-usable cotton handkerchiefs are not easily obtainable; modern people prefer to cut down trees and scatter their paper hankies into landfill.

    2. One of those each year is par for the course – keeps your immune system working. Hiding away and not meeting other people and their germs is not a healthy way to live. This is what has been imposed on us.

    3. Come on, hand over your details, as I am obliged to snitch on you for disguising your covid symptoms.

  30. Just out of curiosity , how would we be now , post WW2, if we hadn’t imported and allowed BAME into Britain , would we be confronted by the disgusting mindless violence we are hearing about every day.

    Or does society have a half life , and the destruction of Britain is inevitable , because of its own indigenous feral tribes ?

    1. From a count of 20 countries, for Covid-19 deaths per million of population, we are third.
      But of
      these 20 countries, we have –
      The Highest level of obesity.
      The Second Highest levels of respiratory deaths.
      The Second Highest population density and BAME POPULATION.
      “QED” – I rest my Case!

      1. Our country per land area is number 22 as being one of the most densely populated on the planet.

          1. Is it, i don’t have the time today. I know there are more people living greater London than the whole of New south Wales. I’ve been on sheep stations with a larger area than greater London.

          2. Just checked it again for England.

            As of 2019, the population density for the United Kingdom was 275 people per square kilometre. Of the countries which make up the United Kingdom, England is by far the most densely populated at 432 people per square kilometre.

            Statistawww.statista.com › Society › Demographics

    2. TB, With all due respect, that is a specious argument (or question).
      The vast majority of people, including Bames, are law abiding. The problem lies with poor and inadequate governance; Singapore is crammed with ethnic people, but has a low crime rate, ditto the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Sadly, my conclusion is that multiculturalism leads inexorably towards a police state.

      1. If the vast majority of multi culti people are law-abiding, why does “multiculturalism lead(s) inexorably towards a police state”? Surely no need with all these law abiding immigrants?

      2. Is Singapore crammed with Africans and people from the middle East/Pakistan, out of interest?

    1. The headline is quite right. It is already ending in tiers. A three tier lockdown. To be followed by a three tier personal status. 1. Immune. 2. Vaccinated. 3. Non-person.

      1. No certificate of proof of an administered vaccine, no insurance, no driving licence renewal, no passport, no bank account, doubled council tax ? No access to shopping, No NHS access what happens next ?

        1. No burials, cremations only and they will carry a fifty percent dangerous material surcharge plus a £100 carbon tax.

          1. I am getting seriously worried by these predictions – if the bastards read them they’ll take them up (assuming they haven’t already thought of them all).

          2. Which is why I’ve opted to donate my body for medical science.

            Well someone has to give them something to laugh at.

      2. It’s noticeable that there is no “Low”, only Medium, High and Very High. We can’t have people thinking they could go about their lives without the imminent risk of death, can we? Even during the war, life carried on despite the risk of being machine-gunned or blown to pieces.

      1. I’ve still got loads Bill it runs in the family.
        I feel sorry for some of the old boys who don’t have much hair at all, but pay as much as i do…..well not really 😉

        1. Basically, Bill, it means the genetic markers being used in the RT PCR search for the Wuhan Virus are common to more than a few related, but less harmful, corona type viruses.

  32. Volunteer nurse
    SIR – An elderly neighbour had his blood-pressure medicine changed by his GP, but there was no follow- up to see if the new dose was correct, or if there were side effects.

    As a retired physician, I dusted off my old machine and have been checking his blood pressure. It has been mutually beneficial as it has eased my isolation (I live alone).

    Fortunately, the dose was correct and there have been no side effects.

    Dr S P Gibson
    Aldcliffe, Lancashireter

    Oh dear me , what age are the DT proof readers?

    There are several real boobies on DTL .

      1. Since there are no problems it would seem highly likely that it was changed for the benefit of the patient. That is usually why changes are made.

          1. No, that is not usually why changes are made. The usual reason, as I stated, is to benefit the patient.

      2. Good afternoon, Bill

        As a lover of puns are you an aficionado of Thomas Hood? For example:

        Ben Battle was a soldier bold
        And used to war’s alarms
        But a a cannon ball took off his legs
        So he laid down his arms.

      4. Good afternoon, Bill

        I’m having to use another compute and I am making too many key stroke errors. Sorry.

        The other Thomas Hood poem that my father used to recite to me was about another young man called Ben who was in love with Sally Brown. He was seized by a press-gang crew and when he returned from years at sea Sally had been faithless and found ‘another Ben whose Christian name was John’. (Proving, of course, the point that Hamlet made when he said: Frailty, thy name is woman!)

        His death, which happen’d in his berth,
        At forty-odd befell:
        They went and told the sexton, and
        The sexton toll’d the bell.

    3. I should have thought Nelson ticked all the disability boxes – and he wanted Hardy to kiss him 🙂

  34. Has anyone noticed that the Remainers are still going on about how bad a trade deal will be with the evil USA because of their terrible food standards but in the next breath supporting Biden for President and Obama in the past, they did nothing about food standards as far as I’m aware. Edited i hope before anyone noticed.

    2. Maybe Biden is a terrible warning against chowing down on chicken washed with clean water.

  35. 324536+ up ticks,
    May one ask while it is still permitted,
    Will these new nightingale hospitals have appropriate ward names appertaining to the treatment as in eichmann, himmler,heydrich ?

    UK Begins Investigation into Blanket ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ Orders After Claims Elderly Targeted

      1. 324536+ up ticks,
        Anne,
        Not a great deal of difference,I suppose it could be considered to be on par with, drowned whilst having a blanket bath also.

      2. No. It’s simply an acknowledgement of the facts. Most elderly and very ill patients are 99.9999% unlikely to be revivable – so why attempt it.

        The decision to resuscitate is, in all cases, in the hands of the medics unless you have specifically requested that they shouldn’t do so.

  36. Oh well luv you and leave you, I’m back to painting, now the utility room, then showing my neighbour how to bake bread.
    I must remember to wash my hands eh !

          1. My God, George, you still rely upon a ‘Hi-Fi’ and not, with your slavish adherence to Apple, an i-Pod?

          2. You need to get down and get with it, Tom. I-pods are SO last decade (“noughties”).

            I have a Pro-Ject Debut II turntable with Ortofon cartridge; a Pioneer integrated amplifier; a Pioneer cassette-player; a Sony DVD/CD-player; a tiny Chinese-make bluetooth unit for picking up Spotify from my iPhone; and Mission 700 speakers. [A true Hi-Fi audiophile would call my set-up “Mid-Fi”.]

            I also have an iMac desktop with iTunes and Spotify which I play through Acoustic Energy speakers (and/or large floor-mounted Orca speakers if I need a little more oomph!).

          9. Blimey Grizz he’s 76 years old now, i remember first hearing him when we lived in Oz in the mid 70s.

    2. Making and kneading dough is better than just washing your hands with soap and water. It gets the grit out from under the nails nicely.

      3. A story from on of HM’s Submarines in the last war has it that a water shortage meant the washing of hands was banned.
        One day the skipper queried of one particular rating why he had clean hands.
        “Well, Sir,” came the response, “I’ve been mixing the dough for the bread ration.”

    1. Never experienced racism before coming to England, apparently. He must have missed the tribalism that exists in all African countries. These days its added to by the slammers killing Christians because they are not considered to have the correct god.

      1. Pity he doesn’t f*ck off back to that African paradise from whence he came, where all is sweet and light and all men dwell peacefully in brotherly love.

      2. But that’s black on black, so it doesn’t count. The same as blacks selling other blacks into slavery, hundreds of years before whitey set foot in Africa.

    3. Called to the independent Bar in 1996, Mr Idan joined the CPS as a specialist domestic abuse and rape prosecutor in 2005.
      He didn’t spend any time helping out in Rochdale then.

    1. He is obnoxious. He says “four years later we’re still trying to make a trade deal with the USA” or words to that effect. IIR the U.K. was prohibited from attempting trade deals with any other country until we have left the EU.

      I do think we will end up being tied to the EU some way or other, not what I voted for at all, but these Remainiacs are such sore losers and still Refuse to really accept the vote. We shall see. And of course it will coincide with “the great reset”. Interesting times ahead.

      1. It’s just so fascinating that these various people are so anxious to deny the popular vote.

        What’s in it for them?

        Certainly not Democracy.

        1. Loadsa money they hope. And maybe some small input as to what happens next. But they haven’t realised that the “them at the top” will be very few and very select in number.

    2. Poor old Osborne, someone handed him the keys to power and he blew it, and we all witnessed it. Now he’s lost that comforting thought that we poor mortals can always hold onto; if I were in Government, I wouldn’t fk up like they do!

    1. I scanned the Mail and Telegraph this morning, your media are certainly out to drum up fear and concern aren’t they . Nightingale hospitals, ICU near capacity, lockdown phase three not enough.

      I wonder what would happen if the instant gratification media was shut down and we reverted to getting our news through a trusted daily newspaper.

      1. They are loving it.

        Oddly enough, if one trawls through the on-line editions there are always some moderating pieces tucked away. I noted on one that covid deaths over a recent period were less than 3% of total deaths and another that only one person under30 had died since August.

        The reporting from Govt briefings is lying by both exaggeration and omission.

      2. It occurred to me that the media went downhill on the invention of 24-hour rolling news. After 5 minutes, what’s left to say? So, they big everything with even the tiniest drama in it up, blether on for hours about straightforward stuff, send teams to drum up stories to use as entertainment, step up the drama…
        I should have known, sitting in the airport hotel in Istanbul after a tense extraction from Azerbaijan 1990, that a report on CNN about sick building syndrome in the Sherriffs office in a village in the back of Bumfuck, Arizona, was the future – but I was too tired.

      3. To some extent the media are in a “heads you lose, tails you don’t win” situation. If they don’t report what the SAGE people are saying then it’s a “cover up”, if they do it’s “scaremongering”.

        Was there ever a truly trustworthy daily newspaper? I very much doubt it. They have all had editorial axes to grind since the very beginning.

    2. From the Spekkie:

      https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-curious-case-of-the-man-who-caught-covid-twice

      “The curious case of the man who caught Covid twice | The Spectator

      Does catching the SARS-CoV-2 virus give us immunity from further infection by the virus or can we catch it a second time? The question has been given extra poignancy this week following Donald Trump’s tweet on Sunday, quickly censured by Twitter, claiming that he was immune. Before that row has had a chance to die down, a paper emerges in the Lancet Infectious Diseases reporting the possible reinfection of a 25-year-old man in Washoe County, Nevada.

      The timeline reported in the paper, by the university of Nevada, is as follows. The patient first developed symptoms – sore throat, cough, headache, nausea, diarrhoea – on 25 March. He tested positive for the virus at a community testing facility on 18 April. By 27 April, his symptoms had disappeared. He then tested negative on 9 May and 26 May. On 28 May, however, he began to develop further symptoms: fever, headache, dizziness, cough, nausea and diarrhoea. This time his symptoms were more severe, and he was hospitalised. He was tested again on 5 and 6 June, and tested positive. He has since recovered.

      The university of Nevada team says it has used genetic sequencing and two different testing methodologies to prove that the virus really was present on two occasions, and that it used fragment analysis to prove that the samples – obtained via nasal swabs – really did come from the same patient. So is the assumption that exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus gains us at least short-term immunity wrong? That would have huge implications because if we can’t gain immunity it would render the multi-billion pound efforts to develop a vaccine pretty well useless. It would also undermine an awful lot of modelling on the virus, including, for example, the Imperial College paper of 16 March, which assumed that people who had had the virus were no longer susceptible.

      The Nevada team say that while they think they have reported the first documented case of reinfection in the US, they cannot be entirely sure. They state: ‘It is possible that we have reported a case of continuous infection entailing deactivation and reactivation’ – although adding that for this to be true the virus would have had to have mutated at a rate not yet recorded. One eyebrow-raiser is the short period – just two days – between the patient’s second negative test and the onset of symptoms for the second time. It is just about possible to develop symptoms so quickly after infection – according to the Centers for Disease Control, the gestation period for Covid 19 is between two and 14 days, with a median of five days. But it would have required the patient to have been infected almost immediately from walking away from his second test. Alternatively, it questions the efficacy of the negative tests the patient received during May.

      But even if this was a genuine case of reinfection it does not necessarily change very much – other than to say that reinfection might happen in very rare cases. To date, the World Health Organisation has recorded 38 million confirmed cases of Covid 19. In a search of medical literature, the Nevada team found five cases of documented reinfection. If infection with Covid 19 did not give the vast majority of us immunity from reinfection – at least for a few months – it is hard to believe that it would no be obvious by now, with vast numbers of cases being recorded.”

      3. Or was he infected by variety A first time round and then a mutated/close cousin variety B the second?

      1. That’ll be “harder lockdowns” “what do you mean, I’m a crook” Jenrick, will it?

  42. Bame “bird watchers”? Yeah right. Black drug-dealers using bird-watching as a cover, more like.

    1. Maybe they only watch Blackbirds . . ?
      Chefs? . Looking for ingredients . . . “Four and Twenty Blackbirds, baked in a Pie . . . .

  43. MINISTRY OF DEFENCE HIRING 20 DIVERSITY OFFICERS

    After Guido’s recruitment call for a foodbank’s £62,000 diversity director, one fed-up MoD staffer gets in touch to point out the department has just closed recruitment for a £110,000 director of diversity and inclusion, all while the defence budget is under constant threat and during sustained cuts to their conventional forces. It seems Ben Wallace has taken YMCA’s ‘In the Navy’ to heart…

    Far from this extortionate wage being a one-off, the Ministry of Defence has dozens of well-paid woke warriors responsible for diversity scattered around the country; and one of the responsibilities of the new £110,000 Westminster-based role is to “Complete recruitment of expanded Central [Diversity & Inclusion] team”. Guido’s source claims the team recruitment target is 20 highly-paid civil servants focusing on, amongst other things, increasing LGBT representation in the department…

    The MoD has been busy woking up behind the scenes without a diversity director, recently posting an internal diversity and inclusion blog that tells civil servants:

    “If we want to be the best Armed Forces, then the only way to go is Feminist… And there’s also stacks of writing about the importance of feminist thought and analysis when it comes to conflict and peace”

    It seems the first duty of the Government is to afford protection to its citizens promote the importance of feminist thought and analysis… I don’t know what effect they will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.

    4. Are they going to serve on the front line? If not, they’re a waste of space (not to mention money that could be spent on providing decent kit).

  44. And today’s schedule from the BBC

    Black people
    Black people
    Black people
    Racism
    Black people
    Black people
    Brexiteers are stupid
    Black people
    Black people
    the NHS relies on immigrants aren’t they wonderful (compared to the natives)
    Black people
    Nicola Sturgeon is great
    Black people
    Black people
    Colonialism
    Black people
    Black people
    Slavery
    Black people
    Black people
    Black people.

    1. Don’t forget the upcoming R3 In Concert … celebrating ” diversity ” … bah, so sick of this kerrap ….

    2. Each area Health Authority now has a BLACK NURSES ASSOCIATION .. .
      There are NO White Nurses Associations. . . .

      1. I would think that is included in every programme. It’s possible to shoe horn a two minute Trump hate session into every subject.

      1. In simple terms to my learned friend, from a Court Usher, we know what is going on outside the closed doors of the courtroom. ‘Twas ever thus. If they knew what we knew their sentencing would be mightily different.

      2. All summed up in the final sentence “Could pre-existing immunity be more protective than future vaccines? Without studying the question, we won’t know.”

        2. I’d like to see what studies are being done on positive test results to confirm or otherwise the number being obtained.

          1. There will, very likely, be a role for vaccines too. Because there will always be people with depleted immune systems – which is why flu vaccines are recommended for them as well as for people with problems like CF and for the old whose immune systems fail a little with the passing years. There have been a handful of cases of people recovering and falling ill again – so that it would seem that this Corona (like the others) doesn’t convey full immunity – but it does convey some immunity and the T-cell immunity also comes into it.

            But it also means that a fully functioning vaccine might be harder to achieve.

    2. “We have really shown that this is a true immune memory and it is derived in part from common cold viruses.”
      Hurrah for the common cold virus! It killed those blasted invading Martians too.

    3. That article is like dynamite and should blow up the the idiots in the government and the individuals who are orchestrating this.

    4. I saw a similar article – from one of the Skandi countries I think – earlier in the year. There has been a good deal of thinking along those lines for some time – but it all takes a while to get to the surface and the first article I read was really not user friendly to anyone who hadn’t already cut their teeth on scientific papers. That one is a lot more manageable …. I can read it, rather than having to decipher it (and I have had a lot of practise, though it was quite a long time ago).

        1. Yes, it is; unlike the one I read (I think in June) which was written like a lab report and which I had to “decipher”. Sorry if I was unclear last night – I’d had a very difficult day with a client.

    1. The doctor’s concluding words in this clip:

      More people have died this year of suicide than corona.

      If true, and I have no reason to doubt it, then this is truly horrific if there is a definite link between fear of covid and suicide.

      This fits into the conspiracy theory that the virus was created deliberately and those wishing to establish the New World Order are thinking: those who don’t die of corona virus will kill themselves and save us the trouble..

      1. Suicide has been a very significant cause of death worldwide since long before Covid.

        There can be little doubt that Covid will make matters worse.

        If the Covid deaths are 1million+ then his statistic is wrong, but if you believe, as I do, that the deaths caused by Covid are being grossly exaggerated then he’s right.

        1. Not only grossly exaggerated, but now having ‘flu death numbers added to them, presumably with the aim of keeping the whole thing on the boil.

          1. They deny that the two are being conflated, because they are identified separately even though within the same report.

            But I have little doubt that we will soon be hearing “combined deaths from ‘flu and whu’flu” which naturally be a scarier figure.

      2. A lass running her own florist business said on line t’other day that a year ago her main business was weddings.
        Now it’s funerals with an shockingly high proportion of suicides.

        2. But then again – most of the weddings have been cancelled.

          From the ONS – 2019 suicides for England = 5227. 2020 suicides for England = 2107 for quarters 1 & 2 – the rate for quarter one is roughly the same as last year. At 845 the rate for quarter is the lowest this century. But it comes with the proviso that as there are delays to inquests there will, undoubtedly, be additions to that number when the inquests have been completed. A death cannot be recorded as a suicide until after an inquest verdict to that effect.

          Anyway, though there may be an increase on previous years, it is nothing like the number attributable to SARS-CoV-2.

      3. Three people within my social circle are living with various forms of cancer.
        Fortunately, they were all diagnosed well before March 2020, otherwise I would have attended at least three funerals this year.

    3. He makes a poignant observation about the number of suicides being incurred during this pandemic by those who feel they are losing control over their health, their livelihood and their family who may be their last hope of a support network in a crisis.

      1. I can identify with that; my social life has virtually shut down (compared with what it was before lockdown), I feel depressed and imprisoned. I often now feel the way I did when I was working, but at least then I had the weekends and holidays to look forward to as a break. Now my duties are 24/7/365 and I am finding it hard to get a decent amount of respite. Add to that, no end in sight and the prospect of yet more lockdowns and the future becomes very bleak. KBO.

        1. One day at a time, Conway – don’t look any further ahead than that. Nothing lasts for ever, there is a beginning and an end to everything. The weather isn’t helping at the moment, either, it is so oppressive and gloomy. I was just thinking today, in a perverse sort of way, that actually I hope the Lord doesn’t call me yet because it is all getting rather interestIng and I would rather like to see how it all pans out! I really, really hope that many people involved in this crime against humanity get their come-uppance and are dealt with by the people.

          1. I am trying not to think too far ahead. Sufficient unto the day, and all that. I have paperwork I need to post off, but it’s wet, cold, miserable and dull so I just can’t muster the energy to get to the postbox! One of the questions on it wanted to know why, if the response was over a certain time limit, it hadn’t been sent before. I just wrote “Lockdown; Covid19 shielding” – two can play at that game 🙂

        2. Despite having spare rooms, the home where elderly chum now resides has been told not to take in anyone – either permanent or respite care. The county council is actually paying them to keep the beds free.

          1. I am not looking for respite care, to be honest. I don’t trust the local care homes. I just get so down at times that I understand why people seek to end it all.

          2. Do you have anyone you could trust to do a few hours or even a day or two to give you a break?
            Although this is no help to you directly, for example, we have a cleaner who I would trust to care for MB if he became a problem and I needed some time off.
            Do you have anyone around you like that?

          3. Yes, and I have taken advantage of a few hours’ break in the last week. I think the real problem is I am having to undertake tasks for which I have no aptitude and even less inclination. Still, needs must when the devil drives. TINA as Maggie T used to say.

      2. I assume those suicide numbers don’t include the old locked away in care homes or isolated in their own homes who have quite simply given up

        1. No, suicide numbers are only tallied up following inquests which have resulted in a verdict of suicide. If you can manage to muddy the waters enough to get an open verdict or “misadventure” then you won’t go on the list. Given up (as opposed to “stop the world I want to get off”) wouldn’t be suicide.

    4. 324536+ up ticks,
      Afternoon LD.
      I was just after telling JN who put the same up a couple of hours ago that it had not changed a great deal since I put it up 16 hours ago.

      1. And you are demonstrating the benefits of following the board with only, I presume, a break for the occasional bathroom visit.

        1. 324536+ up ticks,
          Evening LD.
          Tea breaks only, yesterday / today up a scaffold lead flashing & pebble-dash repairs.

  48. Heard Douglas Murray say this:

    Q: Where do you go when you die?

    A: You go into the hearts of those who loved you.

  49. Fifty more Covid dead yesterday – we must destroy the country – then there will be none. And Witless and Unbalanced will have WON.

  50. From a letter in today’s Telegraph –

    “For Covid-19 deaths per million of population, we are third, but of
    these 20 countries, we have the highest level of obesity.
    Second-Highest levels of respiratory deaths.
    Second-Highest level of population density.
    SECOND-HIGHEST BAME POPULATION ”

    “I rest my Case – “QED”

    1. I’m ashamed to say, Halfcock is related to an event rider who lives not far from me. He used to organise the treasure hunt for the Pony Club camp.

    2. ” the UK would become like Ceausescu’s Romania or late 20th century Albania” – you mean, it isn’t?? looks like it from here.

  52. Afternoon, all. An article in my local rag highlights that the pandemic has caused the biggest rise in unemployment for over a decade. Well, I never! Who’da thunk it? Stop people going to work, eating out, going to the pub, watching plays and not expecting the people who serve at tables or the bar, act on stage and actually produce stuff to be laid off is lunacy of the first order.

  53. Restaurant Removes ‘Racist’ Xi Jinping ‘Bat Man’ Art After Woke Backlash
    https://media.breitbart.com/media/2020/10/Xi-Jinping-640×479.png
    A portrait of Chinese communist leader Xi Jinping cast as ‘BAT MAN’ has been removed from a Swedish restaurant after users on social media complained that the satirical jab at Xi’s role in the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus was racist.
    *
    *
    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/10/13/restaurant-removes-racist-xi-jinping-bat-man-art/

    I am unable to copy the photograph of the complainant. He’s very special.

  54. Re: Great Barrington Declaration

    Delingpole: Big Tech Wants You to Stay Muzzled, Locked Down Forever

    Why has it been censored by Reddit and briefly shadowbanned by Google? And why is one of its authors the subject of a planned smear job by the left-wing Guardian newspaper?

    You won’t find an answer in the document itself, that’s for sure.

    The Great Barrington Declaration is a thoughtful, compassionate, science-driven petition calling for a more rational global response to the Covid-19 crisis.
    *
    *
    *
    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/10/13/big-tech-censors-the-great-barrington-declaration

    The ruddy Grauniad is at it again plus Google and the rest of them

      1. We must be really good sorts then? We have plenty of enemies: fascists, rentamob, XR, BLM, the Muslim Brotherhood, Soros, WHO, the UK Government. There must be others…*

        (*See “See “The Man Who would Be King”, for similar.)

  55. 324536+ up ticks,
    These politico’s are acting as if they have only a short time left in power by
    running a scorched constituency campaign.

    2. Last time someone was carried out of the senate in Italy was when he had several stab wounds. Let him go, you brute!

  57. ‘Jet fighter’ godwit breaks world record for non-stop bird flight

    Bar-tailed godwit flies more than 12,000km from Alaska to New Zealand in 11 days

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5b228441524e7af7b4085addf269b568b041c668/183_97_3259_1955/master/3259.jpg?width=620&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=ebfe09b55644e34409c6fb63db37ca85

    A bird said to have the aerodynamic build of a “jet fighter” has been tracked flying more than 12,000km (7,500 miles) from Alaska to New Zealand, setting a new world record for avian non-stop flight.

    The bar-tailed godwit set off from south-west Alaska on 16 September and arrived in a bay near Auckland 11 days later, having flown at speeds of up to 55mph.

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/13/jet-fighter-godwit-breaks-world-record-for-non-stop-bird-flight

    1. Eleven days? What held it back??

      Funny thing is, of course, the bird was simply doing what its instinct told it to do.

          1. Why is it stretching it? A Merlin is a small species of falcon. I bet that you were thinking of the Merlin engine!

          3. In 1968, I was stationed at Biggin Hill and went with a bunch of colleagues to the 50th Anniversary of the RAF at Hendon, then still an RAF station. I still have a vivid memory of quite a number of Hurricanes and Spitfires dog-fighting over the airfield. The roar of perhaps twenty Merlins takes some beating. Four Griffons in a Shackleton sound pretty good, too.

          4. Apart from having flown in two Spitfires (one from Biggin Hill), I well recall being at East Kirkby when Just Jane was fired up. The roar was fantastic (and the prop wash nearly blew us away!).

          6. Let’s hope that the Blue Merlin survives better than 15th Infantry Brigade (now merged with 4th Mechanised Brigade, I believe).

        1. I saw something on the TV last week that sickened me. Live cattle both from the UK and Australia being shipped to the middle east are treated so dreadfully cruelly by the barbaric slaughter yard recipients, it was almost as if they had a planned vendetta. As one person interviewed stated the obvious, why don’t we send them the frozen carcasses.
          Some animals had become ill and where just left to die on the waste ground out side the slaughter houses.

          1. Why?
            Probably because the savages Muslims won’t buy the frozen ones, because they don’t trust them to be genuinely halal.

            I was told recently by a New Zealander that all slaughter there is now halal. I didn’t believe her, but who knows.

          2. It should be noted that most of the NZ slaughter is pre-stunned. I don’t know exactly how it works but there is a workaround that allows for stunning and halal certification. This is also the case in some halal slaughterhouses in this country – but I don’t know the proportion.

          3. You are confirming what I thought, but the New Zealander is absolutely adamant on the matter, regarding it being halal, and given that she worked for several years “at the highest” level in Saudi, I have to assume she knows what she is talking about.

            I must admit that I still remain sceptical, particularly over the pork.

          4. I know that all the NZ lamb is halal – family connections have a big sheep run on the North Island. I can believe that the same applies to beef and poultry – so that it is all exportable to their main markets and they don’t have to keep it separate.

            I can’t believe that Muslims slaughter pigs, they wouldn’t want to touch them; and, by definition, pig-meat is haram. It cannot ever be halal – regardless of slaughter method.

          5. That’s why I find it very hard to believe, but presumably if the production lines are set up in a certain way it’s easier just to carry on, irrespective of what’s coming down the line.

            Perhaps there are other religions/cultural practices where pigs are not forbidden but the slaughter methods are similar.

          6. Possibly, though I wouldn’t know where. I’m not aware of any particular requirements in the Far East – but I’m not particularly clued up on that area either except to know that in many rural areas meat is still sold alive (esp poultry).

            Pigs are usually either electrically stunned, or gassed before being bled out – they also have to be scalded after slaughter (because they are not normally skinned) – so they don’t go down the same “line” anyway. A modern slaughterhouse (and NZ is pretty up to date on that front) would have separate live handling facilities because they all need something different systems and completely separate killing lines for cattle, sheep and pigs and there wouldn’t be any crossover. I can’t think that it would be halal even to slaughter pigs in the same plant, though there might be separate buildings on the the same site.

          8. What do you expect of that vacant totty posing as kiwi prime minister? The one who wears a dish towel to show “empathy” with the slammers.

          9. I stopped buying NZ lamb years ago for that very reason.
            We just buy less and make sure it’s British – preferably English.

          11. I use a local butcher, who actually had a notice on their counter stating that they did not use halal slaughter methods because a customer went ape after confusing with them with another local meat company.
            the notice disappeared, presumably after a visit from some local prodnose, but the message had got through.

          12. Mt father would eat only Welsh lamb. One time we tricked him with Dorset lamb & he was ‘converted’.

          13. #MeToo. I don’t think it tastes that good either. Welsh and English grass fed lamb is much more expensive but worth it.

            I buy a whole rack from a local family butcher and portion it into threes. Though i love mint sauce with it, cooking it Greek style with oregano also works and you can serve that with salad.

          14. All animals slaughtered in NZ must be pre-stunned.

            There is no exemption for the halal stuff for the Middle East markets.

          17. A lot of the slaughterhouses in the U.K are run by Muslims.
            Think that’s a tad more accurate, Phizzee!

          22. I knew that bit, it was her statement that all meat (including pork!) was halal slaughtered that made me doubtful.

          23. Good Point. Halal pork must just be for practice. Unless they can’t turn off the recorded prayers.

          27. All animals slaughtered in NZ must be pre-stunned. There is no exemption for the halal stuff.

          29. Halal slaughter can only be carried out by muslims so that would mean that every slaughterman in NZ is a muslim, which I doubt.

            Edit: this link appears to confirm that not all NZ slaughterhouses are halal: https://tinyurl.com/y449rl52

            “Some 26% of red meat exports are halal certified.”

          30. Thank you.

            Since your first reply, I’ve been doing some digging and I am now sure my New Zealand friend is talking from “down under”!

            She was absolutely adamant when I challenged her, particularly over the pork, where I couldn’t conceive how it could be halal except in the way it was being killed.

            What is now unclear is how any NZ meat can be certified as Halal !

            Are there differences in what is acceptible according to the degree of religious fervour?

          31. I’m not sure about your question, however, my interest stems from 1979 when I was on a four month exchange with the NZ Army. They were just setting up their markets to fulfil order from Iran for lamb. The issue of animal welfare was under much public discussion.

            I get the impression from the link I quoted that the animal only has to alive when it gets the chop, not necessarily conscious., and pre-stunning achieves both objectives of halal and animal welfare.

            An obvious question is why can’t all halal be pre-stunned, which would make it more acceptable to many of us?

            I think we can guess.

          32. You’ve probably answered my question.

            It depends on how much the perpetrators (used deliberately) want to show non believers how different they are.

          35. We don’t send any cattle to the middle east direct from the UK. They go from the UK to Belgium, France, Netherlands and Spain as calves, under the EU’s (mostly) properly managed and inspected movement rules (you need a licence to transport animals if you are going further than 40 km).

            They are reared in Europe and a small minority are sold on from Spain to the middle east – these are the ones you saw on film – they must keep their original numbers for the whole of their lives – hence UK tags. This has nothing to do with UK producers.

            You can only sell what the customer wants to buy. Most UK calves are reared in Europe for veal* and they want to rear it themselves rather than getting the finished product from us.

            *Regulations across the entire EU mean that veal calves must be reared in groups with access to roughage and room to move around. Veal crates were banished many years ago.

          36. You don’t actually trust people in the EU on animal welfare do you ?
            Pig farming in the EU is classic example of malpractice.

            hence UK tags. This has nothing to do with UK producers.

            If the cattle have UK tags, then it obviously does have something to do with the UK.

          37. Pig farming in the EU is nothing of the sort. But you clearly don’t want to know anything about facts – just the usual prejudices.

            No, it has nothing to do with UK farmers. They have no control over what happens to the calf after it is sold at auction. Most dairy farms simply don’t have the facilities, the space or the fodder to rear all their bull calves for beef. A very few do so, but most bull calves are either slaughtered just after birth (also regarded as unacceptable by the “animal rights” lobby) or sent to market, or sold direct to any one of a number of companies which deal in calves. Nothing to do with the producer at all.

          38. Farm girl, administrator, free thinker………..
            As per usual you seem to be missing the salient point. Animal welfare should be a global matter, free thinker, really ?

          39. As per usual you don’t seem to recognise a salient point when you see on. We have no control over what happens beyond our shores. Animal welfare will not be a global matter for a very, very, long time; if ever. We can’t even manage to get global co-ordination on human welfare… and we’ve been trying to do that for long enough.

            Yes, I’m a thinker, and very free of all the ridiculous nonsense spouted by both the conspiracy theorists and the powers that be.

          42. The most obvious thing is Conners, That Unless they are prepared to accept global regulations on animal welfare they should not be allowed to receive live produce.

          43. That trade is appalling. I had no idea it was going on, after all the fuss about live exports some years ago.

          44. Here is an extract from “Export of live animals and the Protection of Calves (Export) Bill [Bill 27, 1994/5] Research Paper 95/11
            24 January 1995

            The Export Ban from 1973 to 1975

            Research Paper 95/11

            The Conservative Government stopped issuing licences for the export of animals, except for breeding, on 13 July 1973 although a very few animals continued to be exported from licences issued before that date (HC Deb 29 January 1974 c.77w). The following statement was made on that day (MAFF Press Notice 13 July 1973).

            Following on the vote in the House of Commons last night after the debate on the export of live animals, the Rt Hon Joseph Godber MP Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, announced today that the Government will issue no new licences for the export of cattle or pigs. The existing licences are all due to expire within a matter of weeks. The Government will reconsider the whole question in the light of the report of the independent inquiry. In the meantime, the Government will continue to discuss with its European partners the improvements in standards of welfare in transit and avoidance of cruelty at slaughterhouses throughout the European Economic Community.

            The Government continues to believe that it is through joint action in the Community that the greatest safeguards against cruelty to animals can be achieved. Their terms of reference for Lord O’Brien and his Committee were (HC Deb 25 July 1973 c.481w) :

            To review the export trade in live animals destined for slaughter; to consider whether the welfare of such animals is properly safeguarded both in transit and at the place of slaughter; and to report with recommendations. The O’Brien Report was debated in the House of Commons on 16 January 1975 (cc 696-818). There was a Government motion but apparently a free vote. The motion paid tribute to the work of the Committee, and considers that, in view of the progress made in establishing international welfare safeguards and of other relevant considerations, the export trade in animals destined for slaughter should now be resumed under close control to member countries of the European Economic Community and to such other countries as can provide adequate safeguards for the animals in question. The Minister (Mr Peart) summed up the report (c.700) :The O’Brien Committee reached three main conclusions : first, that a permanent ban on the export of live animals for slaughter would be unjustified on either welfare or economic grounds; second, that the implementation of common European welfare regulations covering transport and slaughter

            conditions would be the most effective means of safeguarding the welfare of animals in intra-Community trade : third, that safeguards for non-EEC Research Paper 95/11 countries should be no less stringent if trade in food animals were to be permitted. The Government agree with each of those conclusions. The motion was carried by 232 votes to 191. The trade was then resumed.

            (d) Could the Government Stop the Trade under current EU law?

            The RSPCA has recently claimed that the Government could stop the export of live animals under Article 36 of the Treaty of Rome.
            Article 36 The provisions of Articles 30 to 34 shall not preclude prohibitions or restrictions on imports, exports or goods in transit justified on grounds of public morality, public policy or public security; the protection of health and life of humans, animals or plants; the protection of national treasures possessing artistic, historic or archaeological value; or the protection of industrial and commercial property. Such prohibitions or restrictions shall not, however, constitute a means of arbitrary discrimination or a disguised restriction on trade between Member States. On the face of it, this Article could only be used to stop the trade if the judges were willing to take a favourable interpretation of it. One would think that, in view of Continental public opinion, such a favourable view would not be forthcoming. In addition, the judges might be reluctant to interpret broadly an Article which might be used to restrict trade in the future. Any decision would be taken by the judges of the European Court of Justice. However, a general view came from the new Agriculture Commissioner, Franz Fischler, in his confirmation hearings at the European Parliament . Agra Europe (13 January 1995 E/2) reported : The new Commissioner expressed his determination to bring the long-running dispute over the welfare of animals in transport to some sort of speedy conclusion. “Animal transport is not simply a question of animal welfare, although that aspect does take priority for non-farmers. We must also look at what effect the problem is having on consumption.” Discussions at the farm

            Council on February 13/14 would hopefully “be the last discussion of the issue for some time.” On the specific question of veal crates, Fischler said that it would be impossible to ban trade in calves because of the large market for veal in the EU, but did press the need for standards. “This is not a political but a scientific question.” If minimum amounts of iron and roughage were to be Research Paper 95/11 required in calves’ diets, consumers might have to accept veal as red meat, he said. Alternatively, calves would have to be slaughtered before weaning to ensure that veal maintained its traditional white colour. A recent PQ (HC Deb 19 January 1995 c.626w) raised the possibility of using Article 36 of the Treaty of Rome to prevent the export of calves.

            Mrs. Browning : Legal advice is that recourse to article 36 would not be possible for this purpose. There is Community legislation occupying the field and a ban on the export of calves for veal production would not be justifiable as proportionate in relation to animal welfare objectives. It is worth noting that this part of the Treaty of Rome follows almost exactly the wording of Article XX of the Gatt. In other words, the EU rules that do not allow a ban on exports are free trade rules rather than a product of the common agricultural policy. The relevant part of the Gatt reads as follows.

            Article XX Subject to the requirement that such measures are not applied in a manner which would constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination between countries where the same conditions prevail, or a disguised restriction on international trade, nothing in this Agreement shall be construed to prevent the adoption or enforcement by any contracting party of measures :(a) necessary to protect public morals; (b) necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health; The chance of being taken to a Gatt panel on a ban on the export of animals is probably much less than the chance of being taken to the European Court.

            (e) Why could the UK ban the export of animals in 1973 but not now ?

            The 1973 ban was never challenged in the European Court of Justice, so we cannot be certain whether or not it was legal. The basic position of EC law remains the same as it was in 1973 and the Single European Market implemented in detail what had already been stated as aims in the 1957 Treaty of Rome. However, for many years, many of the Treaty provisions were openly flouted. For example, exchange controls were almost universal until the late 1970s.

            Governments act in all sorts of ways, and it is only really decided whether it is contrary to the Treaty of Rome if a case is brought before the European Court, which did not happen with the 1973 export ban. This issue was not seen as a priority and there was probably little Research Paper 95/11 pressure to challenge what was, in any case, likely to be a temporary ban. In those days, the European Court was less used to rule against Government practices in order to bring free internal trade. In addition, the ban related to an area where there was no EEC law in force. The conditions of rearing calves is now covered by EC law so it is harder to argue that it is contrary to public morality.

            Annex 1 to the report of the Committee on the Export of Animals for Slaughter (Cmnd 5566) of 1974 discusses the legality or otherwise of the ban, concluding that it could not be decided without a reference to the European Court, but included the following comments.

            13 It is thought that if any justification for a total ban can be found under Community law, it must come from Article 36 of the Rome Treaty…The words “the protection of health and life…of animals” may provide that justification, or may be intended merely to safeguard the right of Member States to take precautions to prevent the transmission of disease across frontiers. Alternatively, measures taken for the promotion of animal welfare and prevention of cruelty may be “justified on grounds of public morality…[or]
            public policy…” With regard to the interpretation of Article 35 generally, the following extracts are taken from the analysis of this Article in “Le Droit de la Communauté Economique Européene” by Mégret, Louis, Vignes and Waelbroeck (Brussels 1973) Volume 1 pages 114-120 : – “3 It is generally admitted that the concepts mentioned in Article 36 are to be interpreted according to the legal systems
            of the individual Member States. Ideas may differ from one Member State to another. Thus, it is possible that in one Member State, a ban on imports may appear necessary on grounds of public policy or public morality, whereas such a ban would not appear necessary on such grounds in another Member State…Nevertheless, Member States are not free to give an arbitrary extension to the concepts contained in Article 36. A State cannot, for instance, attempt to justify by considerations of public policy measures which are foreign to this concept, and in particular cannot attempt to justify by this means measures which have an economic aim. Accordingly it may be said that, if it is true that Article 36 remits to the legal systems of the Member States the determination of the content of the concepts
            which it enumerates, the limits of this remission are to be derived from Community Law or, more precisely, from the generally recognised interpretation of these concepts in the legal systems of the Member States.

            4 For a restrictive measure to be permissible under Article 36, it is not enough that it should be based upon a ground which is
            mentioned in that Article, it must also be justified by it.” Research Paper 95/11

            Whether that interpretation of EC law – with its cautious sympathy for a ban – would be repeated today is another question. Although this part of the Treaty has not been changed, a considerable body of case lawhas since built up, in which the Court of Justice ruled against attempts to use Article 36 in this way. Thus, the Encyclopedia of EC Law (B10-084) notes:It should, of course, be remembered that throughout Art 36 a proportionality test is applied. Thus in case 104/75, de Peijper, the Court of Justice said measures could not fall within this exception “if the health and life of humans can be as effectively protected by measures which do not restrict intra-
            Community trade so much”…The protection of animal health was considered in case 40/82, Commission v. United Kingdom [1982] E.C.R. 2793 which concerned the Newcastle Disease regulations. The British claims in justification of the regulations were treated with scant respect as it was evident that they were merely designed to protect the British chicken and turkey producers…The UHT milk case (case 124/81), Commission v. United Kingdom [1983] E.C.R. 203 is an excellent example of the use of the principle of proportionality to defeat alleged justifications under this heading.

            In addition, as noted, the introduction of EU standards for veal production – albeit weaker than in the UK – makes it even harder to justify a ban under EU law.Here is”

            My emphasis. The EC/EEC/EU making things difficult from the beginning.

    3. I bet Dick Head of the Yard is already studying video (etc) footage to see whether the butchers can be prosecuted.

      2. She wont have noticed one of the men in white was knocked over by one of her brave coppers.

  61. Stanley Johnson Turning the Tide 1994
    “This work recounts the successful story of national and international approaches to the population question from the 1960s to the present, and examines the progress made in reducing rapid rates of population growth and high levels of fertility. It describes the evolution of national population policies by governments, their aims, successes and shortcomings, and explores the emergence of international agencies seeking to reinforce and underpin those commitments. This study draws on documents and sources, and assesses the achievements of the 1974 Bucharest World Population Conference, the 1984 International Conference on Population in Mexico and the several major national and international initiatives that followed them, up to the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio. The book examines the prospects for a new international consensus in population, and considers the preparation for the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. The text is supplemented with annex materials.” Amazon

    Also:

    Stanley Johnson The Virus 1982
    “First published in 1982, Stanley Johnson’s The Virus is more than astonishingly prescient, with uncanny parallels to the current Covid-19 pandemic. It is also a fast-paced Cold War thriller that stands the test of time. Dr Lawrence Kaplan, one of the United States top epidemiologists, aided and abetted by the beautiful eco-warrior Stephanie Verusio, jets across the globe in a race to discover the secrets behind a deadly novel disease that threatens to wipe out half the world. A brilliant tale of geo-politics in the manner of Robert Ludlum. Funny, romantic, terrifying and totally relevant to today’s pandemic crisis, this is a dazzlingly deft page-turner.” Amazon

    Also Stanley Johnson….. author of books on population control. See Amazon.

  63. That’s me for a damp dreary day – enlivened by taking delivery of 18 bottles of wine – and then re-arranging what I laughingly call “the cellar”. All colour coded.

    So, time for a glass as a reward. I hope to join you another day.

    A demain.

      1. Mine takes longer. One 48 bottle wine rack and two wine fridges. Plus the odd boxes hidden in the corner.

        1. My wine on the racks in my cellar looks like a pea on a drum.

          On the side walls there is room for well over a 1,000 bottles, my current stock doesn’t go beyond a few dozen. Mostly, the cellar is used to store paint and butternut squash.

          1. Unfortunately i don’t live in a castle like you. But i do have an annexe to my kitchen where i have room for all the fridges x2, freezers x3 and wine fridges x2. Plus two sideboards to hold crockery and kitchenware.

          2. That’s a big disadvantage of the chateau. Compared with other parts, the kitchen bits are tiny.

            We have to put stuff like freezers and storage units into the pigeonnier, the dining room and the boiler house.

            Yer French, priorities:
            Wine and entertaining.

          4. We were eating in the kitchen and I was discussing this thread with HG.

            She pointed out that the cellar is actually bigger than the kitchen.

            Says it all really!

          5. That channel 4 program about Dick and Angel Strawbridge. They created a big kitchen in one of the underground spaces. I wouldn’t expect you to do the same but you could hang hams and get rid of the paint. Cheeses too, you could call them Dulux.

          9. Probably, but I hope the paint pots’ lids and the bottles’ corks keep anything out.

            And they are placed in different parts of the cellar.

          10. If you are laying down some of the wine you could always dip the neck of the bottle in molten wax to create an extra seal.

          11. Laying down?

            You must be joking. If it’s worth laying down I’ll be dead long before it’s drunk.

            To Hell with that for a game of soldiers, I never look more than a few years ahead.

        2. Grrr. I’m leaving two six-bottle wine racks and a six-bottle wine fridge behind.
          So I’ll just have to drink the stuff as it’s delivered. Hic!

        1. I doubt the truthfulness of that statement. He has just sold a second home so he must have some dosh stashed under the matress.

  66. I’ve had a day off today. I cleared out the shed – three car loads to the tip 🙂

    2. Well done. Sounds fairly busy but I expect it made a refreshing change from the day job – and you’ve got clean shed.

        3. Reviewing the stats for the attendance at the GUM clinic which served one third of the region’s populace I noticed that according to the stats there were no female attendances over the age of 45. I innocently asked “What does that tell us?” To which the swift answer came:

          “Sleep with older women….”

          2. A sad reflection on how times have changed, but least they are seeking, and getting, treatment.

            I was staggered to hear of a chemist/pharmacy, who does lots of business on Monday mornings for morning after, where the young women were little more than young girls.

          3. Our website gets its main peak of visits on Tuesdays. Probably a lot of itching around after weekend frolicks.

          4. They tend to be, sadly, too large a proportion of the ones who don’t organise their contraception before they get in the sack. On the other hand teenage pregnancies have come down a lot, so at least they are doing something.

            There’s a saying in South Wales: “Married, and not pregnant, there’s posh now” – because the standard for many years in many working class areas was “walked-out until they had to get wed” – particularly in the days when many jobs were closed to married women… just at the point when they need money to set up home. It was quite common not to marry until you were “showing”.

          6. No, not really. The shotgun wedding was when the couple had no plans for their own future and their parents enforced marriage. These were young people who fully intended to marry – but not until they had maximised their earnings.

            Ironically it was common amongst young women who had professional jobs – because those invariably (pre-WWII) insisted on resignation as soon as a wedding ring appeared.

          7. Even in my youth, if a woman worked for a bank, she had to leave when when she got married.
            They were given a £200 pay-off.

          8. The first married women teachers were sanctioned in 1940. There was quite a big lobby to ban them again in 1945, but the numbers didn’t stack up.

            My grandmother worked for the GPO and was, therefore, a civil servant; another group which only allowed wedding rings when wartime shortages drove them to do so. She had to resign in 1924.

          9. So are you saying, Annie, (© Cathy Newman) that in your youth you were a bank nurse?

            :-))

          10. One of my early jobs in the mid-70s) saw me working as a computer operator in a large bank. Had I wished to get married, I would have had to undergo a strict examination of my and my fiance’s finances and would have to get my manager’s approval to marry and keep my job. Attitudes relaxed in the early 80s.

        3. Sorry SIADC! That sounded as though I was stalking! It’s just that your avatar is very striking and I was going to comment then!

    1. ha ha I once had a student job reading pub quizzes, and that would have had everyone stumped!

    1. Really?

      That is an Ontario MPP speaking so there has to be some substance to it but not award in the media over here.

      Time to go looking before they come to lock me up for not following trudeaus woke agenda.

  75. Yes, Boris, this is the tipping point – for our trust in you. 13 October 2020.

    Here we go again. Vast swathes of the north of England have been put back into special measures under a new, three-tier system announced by the Prime Minister, despite a welcome admission from the World Health Organisation that lockdowns don’t work. Which of the three levels of risk does your area fall into: 1. Dread; 2. Super-Dread; or 3. Deceased by Saturday?

    According to the Government, the city where I live is at ‘Medium’ risk from Covid-19. That’s odd. A doctor who works at the big teaching hospital, a centre of excellence for the whole of East Anglia, assures me there are seven patients on the Covid ward, no Covid patients in ICU, and 60 awaiting test results. That sounds like a pretty low risk to me. Far more chance that I’ll die in a road accident or clonk my head on the door of the Aga as I bend down to take the banana bread out of the baking drawer (as I did on Sunday) than perish from corona.

    Despite what the TV headlines may screech on the hour, every hour, for the vast majority of Britons there’s still relatively little to worry about. Even at the peak, our hospital never exceeded 50 per cent of ICU capacity. Very few of them did. The Nightingale hospitals, put up at vast expense to help out if the NHS became overwhelmed, were hardly used. Some, including a huge one in Birmingham, have recently been taken down by workmen who cheerfully cursed the “effing waste of money”.

    Why would ministers and scientific advisers scare us, as they did this week, with the threat of putting the Nightingales on red alert, as though waving some ghoulish shroud at Hallowe’en, when they must have given the order to decommission those hospitals? The grim conclusion is that it suits them to treat the public like children. They keep us in a state of fear so we dare not question the measures that are wrecking our economy, causing anguished family separations and condemning pregnant women to endure labour alone and even wear a mask to meet their new baby, as well as killing thousands upon thousands of non-Covid patients. It is unforgivable.

    There is no tier for ‘Low’ risk in the new Covid warning system. Of course there isn’t. People must not be allowed to get the impression that it’s safe to keep calm and carry on, as a previous generation of Britons managed while being bombarded by something infinitely more lethal than a microbe whose victims have an average age of 82.4 years.

    In London, where Mayor Sadiq Khan was agitating yesterday for more job-destroying measures for his beleaguered, broken city, a fourfold increase in Covid “cases” during September has not translated into rapidly rising hospital admissions or deaths. The number of false positives derived from those dodgy PCR tests makes it hard to get a true picture, but it looks as if high numbers of infections are not leading to deaths because the capital may be on its way to achieving herd immunity. Pray that it may be so.

    At the height of the crisis, it was not unknown to have 1,000 Covid deaths in a single day. On Monday, there were 65 in all of England and Wales, yet Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, insisted on calling this a “tipping point”. Cue baffling slides designed to prepare a weary population for more punishment while taking the ‘dem’ (for democracy) out of pandemic. Oh, what a tangled statistical web they weave when first they practice to deceive!

    It’s now three weeks since that notorious Graph of Doom when Sir Patrick Vallance told us that Covid cases could start doubling every seven or eight days, which meant that, by mid-October, there would be 50,000 a day. By one calculation, the Vallance projection needed 262,424 cases to be announced yesterday for the moving average for the week to hit 50,000. Did Pat perchance find those quarter of a million cases down the back of the same sofa where Dido, Queen of Carnage, discovered the 16,000 missing Test and Trace contacts?

    To be fair to Baroness Harding, the poor woman has only been given £12.6 billion to come up with a workable NHS tracking system. With that amount, you could have paid every single elderly and vulnerable person in the UK £60,000 to shield themselves in the Bahamas and used the change to recompense students for their non-existent university experience.

    You might think we were owed an apology for these monstrous blunders and miscalculations, but the scientists and public health officials plough on unabashed. Unbelievably, some even got gongs in the Honours List. They are relishing their moment in the limelight and can afford to be much more risk-averse than a Sunderland publican or a Merseyside gym owner, who can’t hold back the tears as they watch the businesses they built up over many years crumble to dust, closed by ministerial diktat.

    I’m sick of the Sage scaremongers who now accuse the Government of acting too late and failing to impose a “circuit breaker” of stricter measures three week ago. Hang on, wasn’t it Sage that, back at the beginning, wanted no lockdown at all? As a group of 12 members of the House of Lords wrote in a letter to The Times this week: “If lockdown were a treatment undergoing a clinical trial, the trial would be halted because of the side-effects”.

    It certainly would. I’m a bit more hopeful today that the PM is starting to wrest some control back from Sir Patrick and the pessimist paradigm. But if Boris doesn’t trust the British people with the truth – according to the most recent peer-reviewed paper on Covid-19, 99.8 per cent of all people who get the virus survive, including 99.96 per cent of those under 70 – then why on earth should we trust him? Treat us like children and we’ll act like them. They call this a tipping point and they well could be right, but not in the way they think. Their pointless, destructive local lockdowns will end in tiers.
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/yes-boris-tippingpoint-trust/

    1. A bit late for me to read all that tonight but Boris is toast. Overcooked and burned out. How anyone here could have thought a new Con PM would be any different from the last half dozen is beyond my ken.

    3. Boris Johnson can be seen as an inveterate liar bought by the Soros Gates conspiracy. His henchman the pillock Matt Hancock is his accomplice in giving out fabricated figures for infections and deaths attributed to Covid – 19 novel coronavirus.

      It is difficult to find words to describe the members of SAGE and the nincompoops Whitty and Vallance and their underlings. As for the tens of billions gifted to god knows who (NHS supply contracts) and the incompetent Dido Harris, a serial failure as an executive, the less said the better.

      I trust these bastards will eventually be prosecuted for malfeasance in public office and sent to jail for long terms.

      I note that quite a few of the underlings were given honours in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. A disgrace and abomination.

      1. Not a single one of them will suffer any consequences what so ever. Just like the disaster area that is Dido Harding they will be elevated to the Lords or go and pretend to work for a Charity or Facebook.

  76. I grew up not knowing my African heritage. But now I feel a calling. 13 October 2020.

    Over the past few years, I have witnessed a calling to the diaspora. In 2019, Ghana launched a Year of Return campaign to commemorate 400 years since the first enslaved Africans were shipped to Virginia in the US. The past decade has seen Afrobeats become one of the world’s most popular genres. Wizkid and Burna Boy are household names, and their songs laced with Yoruba slang have been heard in clubs across every continent.

    And when the 2018 movie Black Panther broke box office records, it was Wakanda that resonated. A successful sub-Saharan country, governed by Africans, depicting royalty, success, wealth and strength; we collectively had our arms across our chest shouting “Wakanda forever!” Meanwhile the Black Lives Matter movement has gripped us all and Beyoncé’s visual album Black Is King, released this summer, is an ode to the richness of African history and a call to us in the diaspora to remember who we are and where we came from.

    Talk about lack of self-awareness! The Ghanaians were the ones who did the enslaving and it was they who sold their captives to the Europeans. As for Wakanda, this exists only in Hollywood’s imagination, though one has to say there is no Black African state that fits the accompanying description. Without exception they are all corrupt despotisms!

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/13/i-grew-up-not-knowing-my-african-heritage-but-now-i-feel-a-calling

      2. I see your B of B account is suspended – what did you do to offend? I was suspended from April to a couple of weeks ago.

          1. Cripes! Haven’t they ever heard that expression? It doesn’t mean literally! Did you appeal? Is it a permanent suspension? Mine was (I assume) for spam as I posted a lot of tweets about wildlife wet markets in a Tweetstorm. I appealed several times and was ignored, then suddenly set free. Good job you alrready had the old codger account.

          2. I have appealed and am still waiting the response despite trying to send a couple of reminders.

    2. In a delicious irony the Wankanda depicted is so successful because of its isolationist no gimmegrant policies

      You couldn’t make it up……………

      “T’CHALLA: Nakia thinks we should be doing more.

      W’KABI: More, like what?

      T’CHALLA: Foreign aid, refugee programs.

      W’KABI: You let the refugees in… they bring their problems with them. And then Wakanda is like everywhere else. Now if you said you
      wanted me and my men… to go out there and clean up the world, then
      I’ll be all for it.”
      Sounds a bit,a bit colonialist??

    3. How are they going to cope when they learn that all the Worlds population originated in Africa!

  78. Halfcock’s most recent lie – this arvo to the Commons:

    “Thousands will die without new coronavirus curbs, Matt Hancock tells rebel MPs”

    Time for a coup.

      1. Yo Phil. I was there, once. It was a caravan, while I was house hunting in East Anglia. As it happens, I’m just christening my new (to me) Siemens oven. ‘Tis a thing of beauty…

        1. Hi Geoff,

          Nice. What ya cookin’?

          Bruises healed from last night? I ran out of popcorn ! 🙂

          1. :-))

            Slightly out of date Waitrose Lemon & Pepper Chicken. Being a cheapskate, I tend to buy 3 for £10 Easy to Cook stuff. I’ve had smartphones with an inferior display to the oven…

            Last night is prolly best forgotten…

          3. :-))

            Slightly out of date Waitrose Lemon & Pepper Chicken. Being a cheapskate, I tend to buy 3 for £10 Easy to Cook stuff. I’ve had smartphones with an inferior display to the oven…

            Last night is prolly best forgotten…

    2. “Probably not, but if we do, and given your cookery skills, two loos would be a good idea”

  80. Imagine if they had covid on the Titanic when they hit the iceberg because of climate change, the band wouldn’t be allowed to play, only six people per lifeboat, people wouldn’t be allowed out of their cabins without a mask on, people would have to walk one way the length of the ship to get stairs.

    3. Just travel on a French boat. It’s the only nation that doesn’t insist on ‘women & children first’. (Sauve qui peut)

        1. A long time since I’ve seen High Noon. Films were so much more enjoyable back in the day when they knew how to engage with the audience, rather than the “let’s make a film about it” brigade that we have today.

      2. Night night poppiesmum , the film seems to reflect what’s happening now. No one willing to stand up for decency.

  84. Disneyland is to be closed. It is being placed under indefinite lockdown. Apparently “trace and track” identified 5763 contacts giving it as their address. Of these 5762 were Mickey Mouse and one was Daffy Duck.

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