National mourning?
Today Prince Philip died. Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark was the Queen’s husband and had the title Prince Consort and was known as the Duke of Edinburgh. He was probably best known for...
Category: News
Did Anthony Williams get lucky?
Last Thursday a man who throttled his wife to death last March, shortly after the initial Coronavirus lockdown was imposed, received a five-year jail sentence after a jury accepted his plea of guilty to...
Zero Covid: totalitarian? A cult?
I saw a piece by Freddie Sayers (former editor-in-chief of YouGov, now at UnHerd) billed as a look “inside the Zero Covid campaign”, a report from the conference of the “Covid Community Action Summit”,...
Where did Captain Tom’s money go?
Earlier this week Captain Sir Tom Moore, a World War II veteran who raised £33million for NHS-related charities by walking miles in the form of multiple lengths of his back garden during the first...
Vaccine ‘scepticism’ is not about religion
Sneering scientists won’t win over anti-vaxxers by Giles Fraser (UnHerd) This article is sub-headed “Public intellectuals risk alienating religious believers” and the author is a vicar in an inner London Anglican church with, as...
Subsidise eating in, not eating out
There was talk yesterday that the “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme, which ran through August and saw restaurants subsidised to offer a substantial discount on meals eaten in on weekdays, might be revived...
Why use Hermes?
This week a video appeared on social media and in some newspapers of a Hermes van driver picking up a cage full of parcels and throwing them with great force into the back of...
Expanded congestion charge is just an unjust tax
It’s been reported over the last week or so that, in exchange for a government bail-out of Transport for London, the London public and road transport body overseen by the mayor, that the government...
A tax on progress
Today it was announced that the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, was considering introducing an online sales tax, citing such reasons as a need to “protect the high street” from fears about coronavirus...
Potential problems with face masks
So, finally yesterday the government announced that face masks were to be made mandatory in shops in England, as they have been in Scotland for weeks, from the 24th of July (Friday week), which...
Cruelty over shielding
At the weekend the government announced that the rules for people who are under medical advice to stay indoors to avoid catching Covid-19 at all costs as they are likely to become severely ill...
Bread with few roses, as the government push us back to work
Yesterday a draft of the government’s guidance for “getting Britain back to work” was obtained by BuzzFeed: seven documents giving various advice for how companies might minimise the risk for staff coming back to...
Why the ‘English’ are tolerating lockdown
James Kirkup, writer for the Spectator and director of the Social Market Foundation, published a piece on Unherd today entitled “Why the English sacrificed liberty for lockdown”, musing on how readily and with so...
Blaming the public: PPE edition
This morning I read that a group of NHS managers had suggested that the public should not be advised to wear masks while outside as their buying them would endanger the supply of PPE...
Putting the NHS on a pedestal
Last night, for the third Thursday night in a row, people came out of their front doors to clap in support of NHS workers and carers. For the first time, as far as I...
Blaming the public
Two weeks into the ‘lockdown’ imposed on us in mid-March, the government continues to reveal little at its daily evening press briefings. Last week I heard the slogan “only one thing worse than no...
Trucking in the time of Coronavirus
The last couple of weeks have been a good time for me in terms of getting work, which had been a bit thin on the ground since the end of the last Christmas period....
Coronavirus must bring about public health improvements
One of the things that I have found very noticeable since the beginning of the current Coronavirus outbreak, since well before ‘lockdown’ or even social distancing but back when they were telling us to...
A soft lockdown
So, last night Boris Johnson went on national TV (programmes were interrupted or rescheduled on at least two channels) and announced that the British public was being ‘instructed’ to stay at home other than...
Coronavirus: panic buying and the dangers to disabled people
The medication review I talked about in my previous post happened today. The surgery texted me at 8am to tell me they would be carrying it out over the phone rather than face-to-face. This...