Lockdown diary, day 24

What a day.

  • Captain Tom completes his walk and has raised more than £16 million for NHS charities.
  • The lockdown extended for three weeks - a sad necessity.
  • More people than ever taking part in the "Clap for carers" at 8pm
  • And proof positive that on the issue of whether we should listen to experts, British politics has completely reversed itself.

Remember when it was Brexit supporters like the present PM, Foreign secretary and cabinet office minister, Messrs Johnson, Gove and Raab, who were accused (with more than a small degree of justice) of ignoring or rubbishing the advice of experts?

I was clearing up some old newspapers to go out for recycling today, and fell about laughing when I found a newspaper from as recently as the start of the pandemic in which some daft Guardianista journo was expressing the fear that Johnson, Gove and Cummings would not pay enough attention to the experts.

Well, for the past few weeks it has been exactly the other way around. It's the government which has been listening to the experts, and the critics - whether they are the ones who say the government  should have locked down harder and sooner to save more lives, or that they should have done the opposite to protect the economy, or the imbeciles who think anyone who doesn't belong in bedlam can simultaneously make both criticisms - who are ignoring the expert advice.

If you want any indication of who appears to be playing the anti- expert card now, today ITV's Robert Peston asked

"It appears to be government by scientist. Should that concern us?"

One of the replies to this on Twitter, from Bea Johanssen, was


"We aren't governed by scientists, but by politicians heeding expert advice.

It beats government by journalist."

Quite.


Keep well.

Stay home; protect the NHS; save lives.

Comments

Jim said…
An example of everyone doing all they can to get to the stage of relaxing the lock down is here

We Need a stategey to get to the point where we can consider realeasing the lock down

CAN WE HAVE IT?

An exit strategy is not how the lock down is realeased, its a plan of how to get to the point where the lock down is released. I think a lot of people dont get that. We need an exit stategy.
4:13 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
The government has put out tens of thousands of words about the strategies it has adopted to try to get us towards the point where we can loosen the lockdown - such as the five point plan to increase testing, and yes, increasing both testing for who has the disease and getting to the point where we have a proper testing programme for who has antibodies are both very important.

In the meantime what we all need to do is maintain social distancing so as to limit the amount of this disease circulating in society. Because that is a necessary condition for ending the lockdown.
5:42 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the...
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more