Coronavirus:
“Nightingale emergency coronavirus hospital may not be needed as urgently as expected”
“London’s intensive care units were expected to be overflowing at this point but are only three-quarters full”
“But while the emergency capacity had been expected to be required as soon as last Wednesday, the first patients are now likely to arrive early next week – a tentative sign that the coronavirus outbreak in the capital may not be as bad as expected.” [The Guardian]
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/03/nightingale-emergency-coronavirus-hospital-london
Maybe I was right in my guess that the virus crisis is both less serious than at first thought and perhaps also already at or even past its peak, though the Government evidently thinks not and is talking about 1,000 Coronavirus deaths daily by Easter (14 April).
Ah…
The truth is that, the longer this “lockdown” goes on, the worse will be the economic damage and the less likely it will be that the police will be able to enforce what amounts to —for quite understandable reasons— the house arrest of most of the population.
As I have blogged previously, the “lockdown” is mostly holding, so far, because most people have accepted that it is necessary. As soon as people start to doubt that necessity, and so stop fearing that they and their own families might both get the virus and need hospital treatment for it (or even die from the virus, though that is happening to only about one person in every 20,000 or 30,000), that will be the end of the “lockdown”, because the police simply do not have the numbers to stop people en masse from doing anything.
Labour Party leadership election and deputy leadership election
A few tweets seen today:
To my mind, the problem Labour has is not really one of personalities or personality, but of inherent purpose. Labour came into being to represent a class of people —the industrial working class— and, later, the working classes generally, that had been frozen out of the political process.
That “working class”, or “proletariat”, to use Marxist terminology, no longer exists in any large quantity, though faux-revolutionary “thinkers” (scribblers) such as Owen Jones try to turn the urban and suburban “precariat” and/or “lumpenproletariat” into a kind of 21stC “proletariat”; and so the flat-capped, booted steel workers or miners of the past are replaced by “chavscum” people wearing pseudo-sports clothing and footwear and driving hatchback cars (probably uninsured). It doesn’t work.
The “precariat”, lower-paid people, unemployed etc on minimum wage and/or State benefits mostly take no direct interest in politics and do not join political parties, certainly not System ones. They probably do not even vote, most of them. The days when fully-unionized mass meetings of “workers” all voted and moved as one, as in 1926, or even 1980, are gone. Finished. History.
We should not forget that, in 2019, only about 67% of those (even) registered to vote, voted. A third and possibly more of the potential electorate turned their collective back on the whole process.
I have said this before, but few in the msm want to accept that the “old parties” (to use a Mosley-ite term) or System parties are all on their last legs. The misnamed “Conservatives” are riding high (54% in the polls this week) purely because Labour and the LibDems look even less credible.
Actually, it’s quite funny that, on Twitter, the Labour Party activists’ echo-chamber of choice, people are earnestly debating which doormat for the Jewish lobby would make the best “leader” or deputy, when Labour is around 26% in the opinion polls.
Labour will get the votes of, in broad-brush terms, most public service people, most NHS employees, most of the blacks and browns that bother to vote, most of those dependent on State benefits that bother to vote. Fine, but all of those add up to only about 25%-30% of the electorate. What was Labour’s vote-share in 2019? 32.2%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_breakdown_of_the_2019_United_Kingdom_general_election
Britain’s FPTP voting system and oddly-delineated constituency boundaries provide built-in uncertainty, but Labour needs to get more than 35% to be in with a chance of forming even a minority government. Its problem there is that the white people of the UK are voting with their feet, not so much toward the Conservatives as away from Labour (as I have predicted for months and even years). In Scotland to the SNP, in England to Conservative Party (to some extent) and to protest and alternative parties such as UKIP in 2015, Brexit Party in 2019 (except that its own leader stabbed it and its members in the back), and in both countries to apathy and non-voting:
Coronavirus levels off in mainland Europe
“Fall in daily deaths in Spain”
The Coronavirus wave seems to have peaked all across Europe as well as in China.
Ian Robert Millard 