End the “lockdown” nonsense now!
“Fewer than 24 people are catching coronavirus each day in London, new modelling suggests, with forecasts predicting the virus could be wiped out in the capital within a fortnight.
Analysis by Public Health England and Cambridge University calculates that the “R” reproduction rate has fallen to 0.4 in London, with the number of new cases halving every 3.5 days.
If cases continue to decrease at the current rate, the virus will be virtually eliminated in the capital by the end of the month, raising questions about whether the strict lockdown measures would need to continue.” [Daily Telegraph]
…and in places, idiots brainwashed by “lockdown” propaganda have even left traps designed to injure people!
After leaving their traps, they no doubt go home to stand outside their homes, virtue-signalling by clapping like drunken seals “for the NHS”.
Government subsidy for the self-employed
“A government scheme to support self-employed workers signed up 440,000 people on its first day at a cost of £1.3bn, according to the Treasury.
The self-employment income support scheme (SEISS) provides workers whose finances have been hit by the coronavirus pandemic with a cash grant of 80% of their average monthly trading profits up to a cap of £2,500, backdated to cover the last three months.
Launched this week, more than two weeks ahead of schedule, the scheme is expected to support up to 3.5 million of the UK’s 5.2 million self-employed people.” [Guardian]
https://twitter.com/WeWillBeFree82/status/1260953339799445505?s=20
https://twitter.com/RAnxius/status/1260954810855063553?s=20
https://twitter.com/WillowWyse/status/1260957344567091203?s=20
What strikes me first is how “autres temps autres mœurs“…
In the past decade particularly, we have seen the way in which the Conservative Party governments (aided in 2010-2015 by their LibDem enablers) stigmatized the poor, and particularly the poor who are also unemployed and/or disabled, and living on mostly very modest State benefit monies.
Many people who are now gratefully in receipt of the “furlough” payments for furloughed employees, and those who are applying for what amounts to the new State benefit for the (supposedly) “self-employed”, will have voted “Conservative” in the past 10 years. Amazing how attitudes change with circumstances…
While the new “benefits” are modest (the maximum claimable is £2,500 per month), they are still more than almost all unemployed and disabled can claim (even if Housing Benefit etc is included in the latter categories’ monies).
It reminds me of the attitudes of the farmers, who like to pretend that they are self-standing independent people running agricultural businesses, yet who “accept” farm subsidies and grants at (under the system as it now is, which may change) around £150 an acre merely for owning or renting land, fundamentally. A farmer with 200 acres (the overall average), will get 200 x £150, so about £30,000 a year. Not huge, but still pretty good for doing effectively nothing (a simplification, but one cannot get into more here)! That sum will be payable whether the farm makes £100,000 profit, £10,000 profit, nothing, or a loss.
The farmers do not see themselves as being “on benefits”, of course! You only have to listen to BBC Radio 4 Farming Today to hear the convoluted arguments and language they and the NFU farmers’ lobby employ to justify their subsidies (“providing a service“, “doing environmental work“, “growing the food the nation/world needs“, “ensuring Britain’s food security” etc…). Anything but “we want the State to pay us for owning land“, though occasionally you do hear “without the farm payments, half the farmers in England will go out of business“. And your point is?… The coal mines, steel works etc used to say the same.
Is it April the First?
There are now so many red flag warnings that Western society has gone mad that it is hard to select from the hundreds, thousands, of examples. What about this?!
Regular readers will know that I have blogged about Little Greta Nut (now 17) previously:
https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/09/29/greta-thunberg-system-approved-wunderkind/
One of the few good things about the Coronavirus situation is that, up until now, it has pushed Greta Nut off the news agenda. Now, those behind her have managed to inveigle her back on, despite her lack of any knowledge or qualification.
Economic ruination?
“Almost half of UK businesses are within six months of running out of cash, despite the lifeline provided by the government’s furlough scheme, according to the latest official snapshot of how firms are faring.
In its fortnightly survey on the economic impact of Covid-19, the Office for National Statistics found 44% of firms that responded said their reserves would last for less than six months.”
“About 27% said they had cash that would last beyond six months.” [The Guardian]
So only a quarter of UK enterprises have cash reserves sufficient to last them beyond November of this year? Sobering.
“When the government put the economy into lockdown in March a third (33%) of those surveyed said they thought it would take six months or more for the country to bounce back to its pre-crisis state, but that figure has risen to 46%.” [The Guardian]
The “furlough” and other recent Government schemes are expensive in themselves (at least £8 billion per month, and now more, with the “self-employed” subsidy), but a debt of that sort (meaning eventually perhaps £100 billion) is at a level that can be handled, given that the UK can at present borrow at long-term rock-bottom interest rates
The economist Jonathan Portes was making that point only this morning on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme. If I heard correctly, he thought that it worked out at £30 per person per year (interest or interest + capital repayment? I have seen £100 per year as a combined figure). In any event, not catastrophic. A long-term national debt burden.
What would be catastrophic would be a general economic collapse. Were that to happen, the pound sterling would fall like a stone (despite the similar problems in other countries, particularly EU countries). That in turn would make imports prohibitively expensive. Britain imports (including raw materials) about 80% of its food.
In addition, a general economic collapse would cause enormous unemployment, in that genuine employment would be hit, and so would the basically fake (short-term, “gig economy”, part-time, zero-hours) employment and (equally fake, really) “self-employment” of millions.
Still, as Lenin put it, “worse will mean better…” meaning that, for us now, and in 2021-22, there might be, for the first time in my present lifetime, a realistic chance for social nationalism in the UK.
White genocide
The tweeter below sees, in the Daily Mail‘s cropping of a photo, “white racism” but I see something else— the cover-up around “the Great Replacement” of whites by non-whites in Europe.
When I was a child, in the early and mid 1960s (I was in Australia 1967-69), Britain was an almost-entirely white country (despite the lies put out to the masses by shows such as Grantchester, Endeavour, various other popular TV shows). Certainly you never saw many, if any, blacks or browns etc in most of the country or even in Central London (there were enclaves in ports such as Liverpool and Cardiff). In fact, the only black person I believe I ever saw in England was the consultant (ear, nose, throat) from somewhere in the Caribbean, whom I saw when aged about 6, maybe 7, at the Royal Berkshire Hospital.
Now, the BBC and the msm generally have stolen British (and other European) history, right back to the Middle Ages, and even to Roman Britain and earlier!
Tweets seen
https://twitter.com/ManAdvert/status/1261059194574249986?s=20
https://twitter.com/ClimateCultist_/status/1260967430999830529?s=20
More news from the “lockdown” farce
“All prosecutions under the new Coronavirus Act have been unlawful, a review has found.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) revealed that all 44 charges it had so far checked had been withdrawn or overturned.” [The Independent]
More recent tweets of interest
The Conservatives have slipped back to 51% popularity. What, I wonder, would David Cameron-Levita or Theresa May not have given for such a level of support? However, it is merely popularity by default, given that Labour support continues to bump along the bottom, a function of irrelevance.
Hard to argue against the above Hitchens comment, looking at the present government of fools.
“There is no correlation between fatalities and lockdown stringency. The most stringent lockdowns – as in China, Italy, Spain, New Zealand and Britain – have yielded both high and low deaths per million. Hi-tech has apparently “worked” in South Korea, but so has no-tech in Sweden. Sweden’s 319 deaths per million is far ahead of locked-down Norway’s 40 and Denmark’s 91, but it’s well behind locked-down UK’s 465 and Spain’s 569.” [The Guardian]
An attack on Boris-idiot
“Britain’s last experience of protracted national disruption, Jim Callaghan’s Labour government continued to lead the Conservatives in some polls. But as the crisis dragged on, and seemed increasingly beyond Callaghan’s control, the government’s ratings collapsed and never fully recovered.
If that happens to Johnson, the disconnect between his popularity and his political abilities will stop being a mystery that columns like this try to solve. His long hold over voters and the media, ever since he won the mayoralty in usually Labour-supporting London 12 years ago, will be seen as a bit of a con – like an enticing but dodgy company that eventually went bust.”
All well and good, but if the public get fed up (enough) with Boris-idiot and his government of fools, to where do they turn? Britain, or at least England, has a basically binary system. When the “other party” is flat on its back, defeated, irrelevant, as Labour now is, will the electorate turn to it? Doubtful, especially with someone like Keir Starmer as leader and MPs such as Rachel Reeves around him. You never know, and the System loves the pointless ping-pong on Con-Lab politics, but Labour has no real base any more, in any sense; unless you say that Labour’s base is now the affluent but virtue-signalling London multikulti types, and the Twitterati, together with the ethnic minorities (except Jews) and public service people. The old Labour of the steel mills, the coal mines, the transport unions, the (now near-irrelevant) TUC, has disappeared.
Again, this should be, in theory, the time when social nationalism rises up to destroy the evil ones, but there is no such party, no such movement. Yet.
[above: the satirical singer-songwriter, Alison Chabloz, at the piano]
Ian Robert Millard 