Paul Barbara – That subject has been raised here before, but it is an excellent Link well worth posting again so here is how to do that. The process to embed a link is so easy even I get it… I tend to highlight the words: “Byline Times Article” as my link words; then go the tool bar just above the dialog input box. I have only figured out B = Bold; / = Italicize and the next one in from the left is: “Link.” When you click on Link another box will open and you can cut and paste your url into the url box and press Add Link. Byline Times Article will become a clickable link to: ‘Why did Cabinet Office Rush through Procurement of Controversial Electoral Services Company IDOX Just Before the General Election?’ I encourage you to discover and post more interesting links.
Is it all in a magic fortnight of risk? Boris Johnson’s hailed return to office after surviving what was claimed to have been a serious brush with Covid 19 virus, actually complies with the WHO directives on isolation: two full weeks after the complete cessation of all symptoms. While it was OK for the punters to go straight back to work just seven days after the initial onset of symptoms it was not considered safe to risk the elite team toiling at number ten! There are hints that restrictions on those entering the UK are set to change after weeks of pointed questions regarding our lax control of entry points. Without any distinction between those returning home and foreign visitors to the UK, everyone arriving from overseas will be expected to self-isolate for, you guessed it, two weeks…
In response to his views on the possibility for remote voting in future, the new House Speaker, Lindsey Hoyle, felt sessions earlier in the week had been a success; he was particularly enamoured of his ultimate control of the mute button. Damian Green offered a bizarre version of “the dog ate my homework” by raising a concern that “cats walking across laptops might vote on a critical finance bill!” Coming from the man who was caught with a load of porn on his work laptop, one has to wonder about the proclivities of his feline friends, were they just searching for more pussy? Seriously, it would be hard to imagine the moggies making worse political decisions than the likes of Reese Mogg. My concern is that the public will have no way of knowing if MPs even bother to listen in to a debate before dutiful compliance with Boris Johnsons dictates under threat of removal; the Tory whip is now a Cat-o’-nine Tails.
In the daily Tory deluge of misinformation and party political spin it was Environment Secretary George Eustace’s turn to make a pitch. He focused on convincing us all that, despite early panic buying ahead of the lockdown the UK food supply chain was back on track and stocks on supermarket, store shelves had returned to normal pre-crisis levels. It sounded reassuring except that it was not the experience of most shoppers who were aware of big gaps on the shelves, shortages of key items and price hikes on many food basics. He talked of supermarkets opening up more food delivery slots, but that too is a nightmare of impossibility, especially for the elderly, the vulnerable and the poor: those least used to shopping online. The higher prices are hard to reconcile for those who are forced to subsist on a benefit that increased by only a paltry one pound from its previous non survivable frozen weekly amount.
We waded through painfully repetitive preaching from Dr. Steven Powis, National Medical Director for NHS England, after he had made the monotonous presentation of doom filled statistics ending with how many had sadly died in our Hospitals of Covid 19. The customary lament was followed by stone faced sympathy in the common refrain of “my heart goes out to… all our hearts go out…” In reality the “hearts” of many Tories vacate their bodies in childhood at the inconsolable moment of boarding school abandonment. The most enduring impression of my first day at school was the sight of two scrawny little boys with jet black hair, six year old twins left to sob their hearts out in a gut-wrenching spectacle that would not be tolerated by their fellow boarders in a future deprived of parental sanctuary.
I was lucky to be going home that day, but disturbed by what I witnessed that made a lasting impression on me. Latter on in my stay at that school I longed to become a boarder, a seemingly exciting, independent life, but it was probably for the best that I did not. During extended time away from home, children of the privileged soon learn to seriously toughen up as any display of emotion is totally unacceptable. It is this cruelly instilled inhumanity that endures throughout their life, as only ruthless self preservation at the expense of others will allow them to get ahead, satiating the constantly reinforced greed for power, privilege and extreme wealth. British private and public schools are “factories for fortune hunters” where they acquire the determination, techniques and skills to trample on those they are taught to consider beneath them, like the worthless “economically inactive skivers” who will perish in the Tory “Holocaust of Care.”
At the point of unanswered questions there was another plea as one media representative urged the Government to count all of the deliberately hidden deaths in Care Homes on a daily basis just do for the Hospital deaths so that “we can make sure we know what’s happening on the ground…” Little hope of that when the Tory policy is to keep such sensitive statistics under wraps. There was lengthy, convoluted, disingenuous waffle from Powis on the difference in gathering such numbers in terms we were already fully aware of. In a strange inconsistency that belayed the truth that the Care Home death toll is a known quantity, Powis claimed that this number was falling. If, as he claimed, Care Home death remained unquantified, how could he assert with any confidence that they were going down? Even the Tories cannot extrapolate scientific fact out of imaginary, contrived, non-existent numbers.
The Tory Government’s exhaustive efforts to hide the most shocking consequence of their unconscionable negligence and neglect has fuelled wild speculation of numbers that double the total number of lives lost. Their reticence over revealing numbers, that they must have ready access to, is completly discrediting their claimed reliance on the “best scientific advice.” Despite their obfuscation and constant denial of the evidence, mathematics is inextricably wedded to science as credible scientific modelling relies on hard data. Back in the early days of my sailing career I used a sextant to navigate on long ocean passages; you cannot possibly fix your position without taking sights and crunching the numbers. The Tory decision to end testing and allow the infection to run rampant throughout the UK population has produced a state of “data free” analysis that has no scientific credibility; as the Americans say: “garbage in – garbage out!”
The reality of the Tories negligent conduct with regard to the vulnerable in our Care Homes comes under fire every single day. The constant battle to acquire PPE for Care Home staff… is met with more feeble excuses. The excruciating and inexcusable delays in testing Care Home staff… elicit yet more excuses. These same points were raised and callously glossed over at PMQs on Wednesday as the press fawned over Starmer claiming he is providing a new level of scrutiny despite his obvious gestures of right leaning enablement that must come as a huge relief to the Tories.
We had a testing program in place, but it was inexplicably stopped on the 12th of March, we should all be asking why? The first guest confronted by Andrew Marr on Sunday was Labour MP Rachael Reves, Shadow to Michael Gove. After giving vent to her alarm over Care Home neglect she was asked a really telling question. Marr said “are you concerned that early on people were released from Hospital without being tested and sent back to Care Holmes where we might have unwittingly been sending the virus into the homes where people were most vulnerable?” The word “unwittingly” was far too forgiving as the Tory Government’s “scientific experts” must have known exactly what the result of this horrific strategy would be, compounded by the lack of PPE and testing for Care Home Staff. Surely culpable negligent homicide on an industrial scale is the only reason for them hiding the shocking death toll!
With regard to rumours of stricter controls on UK arrivals Andrew Marr, declared that very early on “testing was just a side issue,” but said: “I see you quote the WHO,” in response to Rachael Reeves reliance on globally accepted directives. Marr pointed out that Dr Jenny Harris from Public Health England, who he admitted had later contracted Covid 19 herself, said testing those entering the UK was “not an appropriate mechanism going forward!” He also said that Professor Chris Van Dam had said that the advice Government got was not good. In a post press conference BBC interview with the Independent’s Travel Editor, Simon Calder, regarding the possibility of more stringent border controls it was revealed that in Australia you are “frog marched off the plane to an upmarket detention centre;” he noted that the UK was unlikely to be that strict.
Labour Shadow Health Minister Justin Madders expressed concern over the ongoing shambolic mess evolving in the Social Care sector. The other concern he raised was over Dominic Cummings participation in SAGE committee meetings, what was his full remit? George Eustace had said in no uncertain terms that the naming of SAGE participants would not be revealed to the public saying in a strange perversion of reverse scrutiny that it would insure that they remained “free from outside influence.” However, keeping SAGE participant names secret is further eroding trust and the greatest concern is over the potential for Cummings’s unqualified warped eugenics pseudoscience to manipulate the credible advice of scientific experts.
The same tired footage of an NHS staff member being kitted up to go into the ICU has been screened over and over again as if she is the only Doctor or Nurse in the entire country to get access to proper PPE! Another frequently repeated piece of footage of a test being administered to someone in a car is on constant auto-repeat; this does not inspire confidence that the Tories are rolling out an extensive program of testing. The BBC reported that the army were being brought in to help roll out testing. The accompanying footage showed a soldier in fatigues wearing a flimsy plastic apron, gloves, and a simple surgical face mask administering tests to potentially infected people in their cars; I thought they might as well have dressed him in pink ballet tutu! Contrast the comprehensive level of PPE worn by technicians in many places overseas administering the exact same test to a similar public cohort.
Trump shocked staffers by ditching his daily propaganda stage show; due to the less than adulatory response he went into a truly astounding self-gagging, mouth lockdown! This follows the public derision over his bizarre comments on “disinfectant by injection” that had officials extremely worried that junkies would adopt the intravenous “make me great again” strategy. However America’s prolific and most infamous twitter twat took to his favoured medium to insult the “lame-stream media who don’t report the facts” as the profuse praise he had expected did not materialize or wasn’t sufficient to make his daily narcissistic bragging worthwhile.
Well known TV Horticultural specialist Allan Titchmarsh was interviewed on Sunday making a strong pitch for opening up gardening centres. He revealed the dire situation British growers faced, saying that a third of them would be forced out of business if they were unable to open for several more weeks. He made coherent logical arguments that in garden centres social distancing was easier to manage outdoors, that plants will die but books will still be on shelf after the lockdown is lifted and that gardening is really important to our mental health. We need to preserve and maintain our ability to grow plants, especially as many may be thinking for the first time of growing their own vegetables to maintain independence. We have communal gardens here with little individual control over what is grown, but even without a garden or a balcony, I am considering hydroponics and a window garden to supply my greens.
They are reporting that the sky is a more distinctive blue now with the huge reduction in all that toxic pollution from so many cars. Mother earth is filling her lungs, taking a long, deep, pollution free breath of clean unspoilt air. The oil magnates are running out of space to store their dirty cargo in readiness for a return to our addiction to commuting and air travel. But some things may never return to the old “normal.” Do snap peas really need a jet flight from Kenya to rapidly rot in our fridge? Why not spend more time with family and continue working from home if possible? The Covid 19 crisis has proven that, yes we absolutely can spend less time in transit. Perhaps the indoor confinement has taught us to enjoy our precious natural environment a little more.
The powerful forces of the super wealthy are still at work, feverishly trying to manipulate this dire crisis situation to turn a profit; we must fight to thwart their selfish goals. The elite who manipulated, bought and stole our votes in the Covert 2019 Rigged Election must have their bogus Tory “landslide victory” fully investigated so that the truth is exposed and the gross injustice is corrected. A progressive Government would be in a unique position right now to move on from this crisis with the bold new initiatives of a Green New Deal. None of this will ever be possible if we leave this toxic Tory Government in place to ramp up exploitation of the poor and disadvantaged, any who still remain following the cull, desperate and ready to toil for subsistence or die in destitution under a resumption of Tory austerity. The bright blue sky will turn to a dull polluted gray if we accept such misery without a fight.