Awol

Singapore too. That’s 2 of the 3 early poster boys for Covid response going backwards quickly, which may support the UK scientific analysis that it wasn’t containable in the short-medium term?

I did think allowing 17 flights from northern Italy to land in UK on the day they locked down - with no checks at UK end - was a bit complacent.. Much of that failure to act on restricting travel seemed to come from a political fear of being labelled racist little Englanders - there was a government and media effort at the time to squash some genuine (if very limited) anti-Chinese racism that was springing up. A case of putting ideology before public health, perhaps? One for the inquiry anyway.

Going from memory here but didn’t they close their border with Italy In early March? Pretty sure that was applied to trains and flights too. Germany then closed its border to Austria a few days later, plus France and Switzerland. Perhaps limiting free movement of people into a country once a pandemic breaks out is helpful in controlling the spread?

Sky said his missus has symptoms too. Pretty grim given she’s pregnant.

I think it’s standard procedure for the foreign secretary to be the designated survivor in case of the PM being incapacitated. Agree he’s unlikely to cover himself in glory though. Marmalade maybe, but not glory.

Apparently not - although the idea Johnson can continue managing the country through a crisis while seriously unwell is ridiculous.

Boris off to hospital. Edit: I guess that means Raab is acting PM.

Exactly, what I don’t know is how you identify the tipping point where furlough for workers transitions to unemployment because businesses are no longer viable. I’m all for individual workers being bank-rolled by the government for months if necessary, the issue then is having no job to go back to. If Starmer wants to make a splash then some well developed proposals for universal basic income would be hard to resist once the post-crisis crisis hits.

Gove reporting hospital admissions in the Midlands up 47% for Covid cases since beginning of April - the highest rate of increase in the country. Nightingale at NEC will now be a 2,000 bed field hospital - think original plan was for 1,000 beds.

Oh FFS. @foreveryoung commented that he wasn’t sure Labour would be doing any better dealing with COVID if they were in government now. I replied with a joke about Abbott and Burgon who would have been senior ministers in such a government. That triggered her fans into a bout of chivalry - though they’ve ignored the dig at Burgon for some (obvious) reason. Point taken, I shall focus exclusively on criticising the government, and not mentioning where that’s straying into partisan levels of f**kery bordering on the absurd. It’s VT not Labour List, though I admit that’s not always obvious.

Not met many politicians then?! Sat with a fair few reds and blues on ‘fact-finding’ jaunts who couldn’t find their arse with both hands, although not Saint Diane tbf - who I doubt would struggle with that task.

Don’t know, I’ve only been watching the situation in Italy. Can’t imagine there’s much headroom in Greece but Ireland seems to have turned itself around pretty successfully after the last crisis. This time is a different order of magnitude to 2008-10 though. We’re looking at a depression not a recession.

Sovereign defaults. Italy is too big to fail but is now (very sadly) goosed. It needs a mutualised debt instrument, a euro or corona bond to raise money after this. Spain & France may well be in the same boat. Italy will not accept the kind of crushing, socially destructive austerity programme Greece was forced in to. Germany, the Netherlands and the Commission are opposing bonds for now, but the crunch point is coming fast when it’ll be a choice: go Federal or go home. That’s likely to determine the future of the EU in its current form - and yes I remember it being discussed as one of many reasons to leave on here.

The Tories have been able to get as sloppy as they have only because Corbyn was a uniquely repulsive leader. Starmer is a different kettle of fish and I expect the Labour front bench to reflect that. It’s a good result for the country as much as for Labour.

It wasn’t to defend the Tories, it was mock Diane Abbott. I don’t need a reason to do that.

White House Press conference on Monday:

As predicted Americans are told they should all wear masks in public. Interesting to see how long PHE holds out for against this obviously correct advice.

The party approves of jokes, and has approved jokes. The afflicted shall never be mocked - unless they contract COVID-19.

That’s fair enough. I prefer the Burkean idea that a society is a partnership between the living, the dead and those still to be born. Our rights, responsibilities and achievements are part of a common endeavour, inherited and ongoing, the cultural scaffolding that binds a nation together through shared culture, custom and habit. That’s not about being better or worse than anyone else, just unique, as all nations are - or diversity wouldn’t even be a thing. Nothing iffy about taking pride in that - imo, of course.

Okay I’ll rephrase, for most people it’s normal to feel an attachment and fondness to your country of birth. I’ve lived in all four home nations and quite a few places abroad. This sense of ambivalence, embarrassment or even shame about one’s national identity is a peculiarly English phenomenon. Or as Orwell put it: “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals 
are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always 
felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman 
and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse 
racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably 
true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of 
standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a 
poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping 
away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes 
squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British.” I don’t think much has changed since then.

English when in UK, British when outside it. Proud of either/both because this is a mostly good country, with mostly good people, doing mostly good things, most of the time. Imagine that’s how most normal people feel about their country, wherever it is.

You joking? Every morning I wake up and say to the wife, ‘what we really need now is Diane Abbott and Richard Burgon.’

I’m guessing you didn’t bother reading any of the preceding posts for whatever reason. In summary.. Snowy and I were discussing realism, in the theoretical IR context. Jareth chimed in with the following: “realists by definition believe in herd immunity”, implying there was some other solution - and totally irrelevant to that conversation about politics. I replied: “herd immunity is the only exit strategy, either through mass infection or vaccination”. Jareth then carried on with some irrelevant nonsense about being a fan of Cummings because I agreed herd immunity was the only exit strategy. It continued downhill from there. Yes, I do understand the concept of flattening the curve, why it matters and why not having enough PPE, ICU capacity and critical care nurses is a problem. I’ve criticised the government repeatedly for it, including them suppressing the results of the pandemic exercise in 2016. I’ve also noticed some of the folks now incessantly criticising the people trying to manage the situation as it is, were the same ones dismissing how serious this could get before it actually did - and in much the same tones. If you can tell me what I’ve written above that’s wrong then fair enough. If not, you can take your disappointment elsewhere.

Right, but carriers aren’t always symptomatic and you’d have to test and quarantine everyone coming across the border. You might manage that in a fairly remote country with low foot fall in airports, like NZ. Logistically in UK it would be a nightmare. We struggle to design and run simple processes at scale very well!

If you know different, please share. If not, please bother someone else.