Day 45 of UK lock down: Dead cat day

32,000 people in the UK have so far died as a result of the virus – putting the country at the top of the league table of deaths in Europe. Dominic Raab predictably brought his

junior barrister’s mind into gear to point out that the positioning on the league table is just speculative and not to be taken literally. Fair enough Dom, but 32,000 deaths juxtaposed onto the UK government’s slow and inept handling of the crisis is not speculative and should be taken very seriously indeed, regardless of how we compare to Italy.

Similarly, the sensitive Matt Hancock has reportedly been left speechless by the news, smeared all over the British press, that one of the government’s top scientific advisors contravened the lockdown guidance and had a social visit from a friend. By implication, and comparison, Mr Hancock must be a man of great integrity, which makes what he has been up to when not sweating in front of the daily bulletin cameras all the more breathtaking – steadily transferring large chunks of our heroic NHS to the private sector in the midst of this crisis. That’s the same NHS that we’ve been told to save and applaud, whilst trying not to think about its woeful lack of funding.

#hypocrisy  #LedByDonkeys  #disastercapitalism

Day 41 of UK lock down: Just Stop Lying

The lock-down is giving a good opportunity to reflect and prepare for what comes next, but the uncertainties are so bewildering, that it’s difficult to focus.

 However, what seems as certain as night following day is that the UK’s Conservative government will continue to spin and lie in response to every challenge. Johnson’s track record of lying is thoroughly recorded, as is that of Gove , Raab, Patel,  and Hancock. Yet they keep going. The tactic, from the same dezinformatsiya black propaganda  & disinformation playbook that has worked for Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro,  seems to be to spout whatever bollox suits the narrative of the moment, in the hope that more people will believe it than not, before quietly withdrawing it later when attention is elsewhere.

The Tories did it about Brexit. They’re doing it about Coronavirus. And they’ll be doing it about the climate and ecological emergency when it’s back on the mainstream agenda.

Extinction Rebellion’s first demand is Tell the Truth. Not complicated but massively important. This is reality we need to confront, not some computer game.  If we allow lies and spin to become the norm of discourse, then we are simply, and comprehensively, screwed.

Day 25 of UK lock down: preparing to race to the bottom

There are several convincing economic forecasts that suggest we could be heading for a post-pandemic global recession as bad, if not worse, than that of the 1930s. We have also recently seen how lack of cooperation with the EU has led the UK to be even further behind in procuring adequate amounts of PPE for NHS and care workers.

Nevertheless, the cabal of fuckwits in Downing Street have concluded that, somehow, Covid-19 increases the case for avoiding regulatory alignment with the EU and for hastening down the path towards a no-deal Brexit, with all the additional economic damage that will bring.

Whether this is a true reflection of what they are pursuing, or just some mad and divisive negotiating stance designed to disorientate their EU counterparts, probably won’t be clear until Hogmanay, but neither option bodes well for the future.

https://www.newstatesman.com/covid19#update-324263

Day 24 of UK lock down: truth in the time of Covid-19

According to Felipe Fernández-Armesto, the pursuit of truth is "the quest for language that can match reality." He identifies four key methods of determining the truth - what we feel, what we are told, what we figure out, and what we observe. Applying the correspondence theory of truth, favoured by Socrates, Plato & Aristotle, to those methods, if a message corresponds to the actual state of affairs, then it is true.

Yet, each new day of the pandemic brings more politicians making public statements which are either so vague that they have no tangible content, or so demonstrably disconnected to reality that it makes your head spin.  

It’s probably fair to say that waffling and lying are not new human character traits, but now we can all do our own fact checking from the saturation media coverage. When Matt Hancock denies the initial UK strategy of herd immunity, or when Trump claims to have taken the pandemic seriously since January, it’s easy to find proof that they are talking bollox. What’s more worrying is the question of why they think they can get away with it.

Day 14 of UK lockdown

Johnson & his cronies continue to work to the Brexit play book of jingoistic & dishonest sound bites, with help from the Titanic School of Risk Assessment.  Today the Queen is being wheeled out to add her praise of our plucky and world-leading Britishness, maybe because the incidence graph is now outstripping Italy’s much lamented performance at an equivalent stage of the viral spread.

However, the graph simply reflects tested cases,  & hospitalised deaths from within those cases. As a result of catastrophic mismanagement, the current rate of testing has only reached 0.03% of the UK population, so these statistics are virtually meaningless.