So, we have lockdown again.
I will ignore the staggering incompetence for now of saying schools must stay open on Sunday and insisting they shut on Monday night.
I will ignore too the fact that even now there are some absurd acts allowed under lockdown, such as communal worship, which seem like mass spreading events if ever there was something designed to be one.
Instead I will say what Starmer should have even saying, but did not, when he clearly knew this was coming.
I watched his Channel 4 interview. I did not hear the demand for extra business support.
Nor did I hear the demand for support now for all those who have so far been deeply unfairly denied it.
I did not hear the demand made that loans to business be turned into capital, or in the smallest cases into grants.
I did nit hear the demand that threats of eviction must be removed.
I did not hear the request that mortgage holidays be extended.
Was there a mention of universal credit? I did not hear it.
Was access to the internet free of charge for all children learning online mentioned? Not that I heard.
Johnson covered the point on free school meals, but Starmer did not.
And where is the help with household heating and additional water costs when children are now at home, especially as it is the most expensive time in the year? Was that mentioned? I did not hear it.
Was there discussion on whether there had been advance in identifying those who might need help, and how? Again, I did not hear it. Not having the means to make quick settlement was a reason against a UBI last March, but should it be now? Why?
And where was the call for support for single parents, in particular, who without support networks will find this especially difficult, as will the children who suffer their stress?
Was there a demand that tax return deadlines be delayed so that HNRC can ensure help is provided instead to those who need it?
Where, this time, was the deferred VAT return arrangement, let alone payment arrangement, or the demand that both be provided to reduce stress in already over-stretched companies?
It's the job of Oppositions to call out government failings, but we have an position that now sits in front of flags and says it will provide the government with all the support it needs, when it's job is to demand something so much better, even in a time of crisis because if the Opposition does not do that then who will?
Johnson's performance was bad, to the point that I am baffled that anyone has any remaining belief in him, except for the fact that Starmer now seems very little better.
How did we get here?
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It’s called Covid.. be grateful you live in England and not Europe, especially France as you will get vaccinated miles quicker..and hopefully will will come out of this, for the most part by Easter
By the way you do not have to be a Tory basher or Starmer basher (you are clearly both) to be frustrated and unhappy with what we ALL face. The whole nation pretty much feels the same. The reason why there is no “uprising” or “ revolution” or whatever is because it is a near impossible situation to manage. Fair enough the more “command” style nations of Asia have fared better but I presume most people don’t want the infringement of civil liberties that go hand in hand. Elsewhere in the West we are all in the same boat.. though I’ve no idea what the French were thinking about with their procurement and rollout of the vaccine.
I never thought New Zealand and Australia were command economies, but they seem to have handled Covid quite well!
I know they have smaller populations, are isolated and don’t rely on trucks bringing in supplies. But they have dealt with outbreaks quickly by track and trace, and isolating visitors and returnees in hotels (at the visitor’s/returnee’s cost). We haven’t tried any of that.
To reduce visiting driver’s time in the UK, could trucks have been separated from their tractor units at Dover (or Manston) and the onward journey completed by UK drivers with in visiting drivers returning with empty/export loads.
Visitors or returnees here have been allowed to do what they want, with the recommendation that they self isolate for a period. The track and trace is a dismal failure with very low success of tracking either the source of the infection or subsequent contacts.
Personally, I’d rather have my civil liberties infringed slightly for a few months and then a return to a more normal life with a lower risk of infection.
The notable island that has handled the pandemic abjectly, is Britain. We still have not closed borders (especially airports), ensured isolation on entry (in hotels); and totally failed to support isolation by those required to do so, with financial and other resources (see Reicher, St.Andrews University, Pagel London University on C4 News last night).
Taiwan has had very few deaths. This is not just about ‘command’ States. We have known about pandemics and the need for ‘cordon sanitaires’ in Britain since WWI, and what to do. Our failure is the product not of ‘freedom’; but an obsessive neoliberal, free market ideology which cannot cope with real problems rather than easy ones, and the aggressive and pugnacious advancement of ‘possessive individualism’ in circumstances that simple wisdom requires do not apply. This is the triumph of basic ignorance and stupidity in Government.
That will be the same France where the Covid case rates are a fraction of the UK’s and where their lockdowns have been much tougher and people take them seriously.
And Im not sure I’d be that confident that the UK government that has given us the incompetence and corruption of PPE and Test and Trace will be any better with vaccination. Check on the vaccine production volumes and resources available to deliver it. It does not add up.
The nationalist bragging about ‘look at us, we’re first, just because we are not in the EU’ does not stand up to close examination. It just reflects the desperate situation that the government has got us into, together with an irresponsible section of the population.
Anecdotal example: small town near me yesterday, only 60% of people wearing masks. Even wandering into the remaining open shops without masks.
Medium town in France where my brother lives – 99% of people wearing masks. You don’t get into shops of any kind without one.
Even assuming people respect the restrictions, it will still get worse before it gets better. Perhaps two or three weeks for hospital admissions and deaths to peak. We should have locked down again when cases continued to rise above the previous level after the November lockdown ended.
Yet again, for a third time, it is too little and too late. This guy seems constitutionally unable to take hard and unpopular but necessary decisions until someone almost literally holds a gun to his head. His inaction has made this situation several times worse than it needed to be. The problem has been as plain as a pikestaff for weeks. Grasp the nettle and get on top of it, for crying out loud.
Where is the leadership? A tub of lard could hardly do worse.
A tub of lard is currently managing quite well, at managing the crisis badly!
i did find Johnsons take on why they left the decision to today amusing.
“parents who’s children were in school today may reasonably ask why we did not take this decision sooner”
“(because) we’ve been doing everything to keep schools open, because we know how critical each day is to childrends education”.
sorry……….but the eduation system, from kindergarten through to maybe A-level, is pretty much pointless. Especially at a young age, it’s nothing more than babysitting. It’s crazy how many people have just accepted this mantra of how important it has been to keep kids in school during this time, and how losing these precious months has had serious and long term consequences for their children. Am i the only one that finds this stupefying?
(sarcasm on) How will their kids survive in the future? Missing 6 months of memorization to pass those tests, information which will not be retained or be useful for employment? How will they survive without learning to conform to rules, obedience, following orders and learning how to behave in a system, geared to provide only one thing – easily controlled workers for corporations? a system that is designed, from the outset, to decentivise creativity, self-learning, and learning through experiences.
the education system is utterly antiquated and unfit for purpose, and has been for decades. We know so much more now about brain development, the science of learning, critical thinking, and none of it has been deployed in the schooling system. All it does is generate people who cannot critically think, and are easily conformable. I say, the longer kids are out of school, the better it will be for their development. Lucky them!
I agree that many children will cope very well without mainstream education. I also agree that schools have been on the back foot in understanding and rolling out good quality education. BUT, for many children that come from (often) lower income households, school is the one consistent in their lives. It is the place where they can attain some uptick in their overall well being and have the possibility of a better future.
I agree with that
I am not aware of any actual labour policy under Starmer.
He appears to just agree with everything the torys say and seems fixated on purging the party of any members on the left.
In my opinion it has become solely a drive to become acceptable to the establishment by appearing non-threatening to the status quo so he can get elected and have his own turn grasping the reins of power.
Is this now the best the UK can do? A vacuous, insular, leaderless nation driven by hatred of the mythical ‘other’ and delusions of grandeur from a bygone era that never actually happened?
Sorry to jump in again but what I cannot fathom is that there are obviously people like yourself Richard who are knowledgeable, passionate and compassionate who exist in our society.
But that is not represented in Parliament.
Instead of teachers, doctors, ‘activist’ lawyers and scientists we have bankers, sociopaths and fascists.
This clusterfuck is the end result of the system being engineered to churn out people like bojo, patel, jrm and ids into positions of power.
What goes on at Eton to damage human beings so must beggar belief!
Labour’s policy appears to be to simply demand things to happen at the point at which they are inevitable. It’s pathetic. Do they really think people are buying this as effective opposition?
They have no view on anything. What does Starmer actually believe in? Does anyone know?
The furlough scheme and support for the self employed showed that it was perfectly possible to introduce support schemes, however flawed at short notice and of course to make the sort of decisions that were needed.
Given that we are now 9 months down the line with Coronavirus I cannot understand why it wasnt possible to draw up contingency plans to cover future lockdowns and to make more detailed plans to provide support for both households and business’s.
As a ‘for example’ – as you have suggested Richard, some sort of non means tested support for Council Tax, energy bills, a lump sum to all child benefit recipients etc etc. Instead it seems as though we are being infected to save The Hospitality Industry instead of a proper support scheme being put in place.
The time has simply been wasted
The assumption was that we would have herd immunity now
How wrong can you be?
If I was asked to point at one reason this has happened is the horrible centralisation of power and money in the UK.
I have to say that the communal worship bit took me by surprise given what happened in South Korea where I believe an out break there was the result of a couple of a city’s huge churches still gathering under a lock down.
Is this the Catholicism of a certain Rees-Mogg at work?
But honestly, if Boris and Co knew about the Korean example, how could they sanction that here? On what basis? The communal worship bit tells us a lot about why we are where we are.
In answer to your question, I think that what has happened is that policy has been over-politicised by the rancor within the Twattie party because public facing policy seems to be as a result of internal bargaining and internal appeasement within it by the Cabinet.
There can be in my view no other explanation.
As for Starmer…………..look, the Labour party got rid of LA final salary pensions in 2003 on the basis that it could not afford them and then in 2007 and 2008 gave huge tax breaks in billions to the private pension sector.
What sort of political party pleads poverty in Government whilst at the same time cutting revenue like that to create that poverty (if you believe as they do that taxes pay for services)?
Stuff like this tells you all you need to know about modern Labour. They are really quite Thatcherite in their thinking and have no faith in the beliefs and values that led them to be created as a party.
Labour are clueless and not worthy of their position as HM Opposition in my view.
Communal worship was banned in Scotland in Lockdown 1 and now is banned again under the latest lockdown. In between it has been subject to covid restrictions which have been rigorously enforced. Booking systems have been implemented to ensure limited participation, social distancing, masks, no singing etc…
It may well have been a super spreader event prior to lockdown in March but not since. Nor now. Might be different in other parts of the disunited kingdom of course.
In the Scottish parliament yesterday in response to the FM’s statement the Scottish labour leader cited that only 23% of applications for the £500 self isolation scheme had been successful. The answer given indicates that this is a UK scheme administered by local councils and is aimed at those on benefits only. 77% who feel they need it don’t qualify. Why will they self isolate?
Indeed I too was surprised to read here that communal worship is still happening in England. Pressure from Mogg? Hmm.
In Scotland all worship services ( any faith ) stop from Friday. Our FM has Christians and Muslims in her government and presumably they did not exert pressure to remain open? Life is precious and to endanger it by insisting on risky behaviour is counter-intuitive to the faith they ( and I ) are practising
Herd immunity demands that enough people become infected and recover, or get inoculated. Herd immunity means let the disease spread unchecked and protect those most likely to be seriously affected
The inoculation was never going to happen, until now.
Many people, mainly the young who knew from the walls-to-wall news that they were not going to become seriously ill, happily continued to socialise. Even now, on the eve of Total Disaster/Lockdown, the park carpark is filling-up, the recreational walks are starting. The present regulation says that you can meet ONE other person outside. Yet I see several families meeting-up and going for long walks. The retail shops are still open, and full (some shops have hastily started stocking food to go with the usual tat they sell).
I just get the feeling that this was always the way it was going to be.
From the government point-of-view this disease targets mainly those whose cost to the government, while alive, is high. Old people. Sick people.
Maybe Boris has been drinking too much. Maybe he is barely holding it together. Maybe putting extra political pressure on him now would actually be worse for the country.
The Tory right reaction tends to be doubling down on command and control when the opposition points out their weakness. But for us to get through this, they need to cede control – to schools, to local authorities, to medical professionals and so on. Gently giving those groups more power is what will get us more control of the situation.
He’s actually trying to win the trust of Johnson and other Tories I think, not the British people. When this cabinet inevitably implodes, perhaps he’s trying to reduce the blast radius. Right now Boris is a cornered dog, and so being openly hostile to him might make things worse. Maybe quietly convincing Tories it’s time for him to go is the short term plan.
See there are still folk who think Starmer works for the opposition, when in fact there is no opposition to the torys.
Well, if he wants to be PM they would eventually have to defeat the Tories. But there is no election to fight right now, and it looks increasingly likely local elections will be delayed again.
I’m not a Starmer fan, and I think he should be opposing more and properly holding the government to account. But I also don’t think not kicking them when it seems politically best makes very much difference.
Most people don’t watch the day to day politics. They don’t watch PMQs, they don’t care when points are scored and lost. As such, point scoring isn’t that relevant to a politicians popularity.
His biggest problem I agree is that he’s incapable of forming a vision that people will get behind. I see the government as completely unaccountable – just as they were when Corbyn was in charge. It doesn’t matter if what the opposition says if it has no effect on government policy.
Should he oppose more? Yes. Will it make any difference if he did? No.
They own the crisis either way, he’s probably just trying to help rather than goading them into making their tragedy even worse than it already is.
Starmer was given an opening on Radio 4 this morning – ‘are you saying some people have died unecessarily’. You could hear the terrified gasp – ‘we have got to support the government now’. He still won’t move the debate from ‘govt. too slow’ etc , to ‘govt. consciously rejected the science) on 21st Sept) – after being told thousands of deaths would ensue – and thats the route they took’.
Well, I will say exactly that. The UK government has moved too slow to lock down three times, and also unlocked too quickly, and kept the tier measures in place for too long when they were blatantly ineffective. Test, track, trace, isolate is still a key measure, and has been catastrophically poor. The ONS statistics make it plain that tens of thousands of people have died as a direct result of this government’s incompetence.
I totally agree with you about Starmer Richard, however because I have closely followed his actions from both before and after his ascension to leader of the opposition, I am not surprised. His main goal is not to fight for the people of this country, it is to cull the whole Labour Party of any whiff of socialism. He has acted illegally as leader over stepping what he is allowed to do . I really believe he is a Tory plant as do thousands of true Labour Party members like me who have either resigned from the party or been suspended. When 400 NUT members had an emergency Zoom meeting to discuss January 4th , Starmer was no where to be seen. He has not consulted or supported teachers. He has trashed the manifesto written and approved by all the members and put nothing in its place. Remember free broadband and all the other policies that would have supported all people in the UK ? That was even before COVID. It was to rebuild our already broken country after 10 years of cuts and destruction of our NHS and other public services. Anyone but Corbyn? It’s a joke . Our country is doomed.
Corbyn was not a suitable leader for Labour – he was utterly hopeless – and I saw him close up
John McDonnell was a straightforward austerian
Nor is Starmer suitable
but the question is then no who the right leader is, but whether Labour has any future role
I think not at present
Agreed but neither do we want them to be Boris’ hand maidens.
Could you imagine what the Tory party would be like if a Labour Government was behaving like this?
I think what Min Molly is suggesting is that under Corbyn, Labour had some sort of vision about the direction they wanted to take the country in. Starmer wants to be PM – that’s it.
I agree with you Richard that Corbyn was not the ideal leader but he was at least inspiring, the ideas offered by the party under his leadership to tackle society’s problems at least on the same page as yours.
I also find it hard to believe that in the current situation they (McDonnell et al) would feel limited by a previous commitment to a balanced budget given it so clearly hampers the ability to tackle the problems at hand. Yes they may not be fully paid up MMTers and prepared to shout it from the roof tops, but they at would surely recognise the importance of spending what is necessary in a crisis.
All rather moot points now though I guess.
“Corbyn was not a suitable leader for Labour — he was utterly hopeless — and I saw him close up”
Funny you didn’t mention this when you were the warm up act at his rallies
Corbyn adopted me
And I learned quite a lot as a result
We got here by letting the days go by whilst being led by our noses and prodded up our asses (sic).
Currently the what would otherwise be the chaos, confusion and RAGE of the ‘middle’ classes/ skiers / winter sun seekers and continental second home owners, is gratefully being hidden behind the ever more restrictive Covid measures. It is almost as if they planned it so! Certainly took advantage of it.
I have written often about the coup state and propaganda media and their agendas so to preserve the sharpness of this blog will withhold from doing so again. Except for the following paragraph.
A couple of the biggest illusions are that of supposed omnipotent great wizards, sorry ‘leaders’, that we have ‘freely elected’, who supposedly are making the decisions themselves! When all they are, are just the grand puppets who spend most of their working day being the manakins to dress up in the grand narratives – all invisible clothing.
We did have a choice of an imperfect Leader but with the heart and like minded expert administration a year ago – hence the global robber barons Gauntlet against that great fissure.
I refer you to John Craces column yesterday as he finally comes to see the truth but not quite ready to yet about the new rebuilt NuLabInc with Starmer being groomed to keep us from challenging their grand machinations (note how Blair has run to the front and is ready to lead him into Downing Street).
Vituperative and almost return to form by John. Comments closed early due to the voices who responded.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jan/04/to-predict-government-policy-listen-to-boris-and-wait-for-the-opposite#comments
So to be pragmatic and to help move us towards actual liberation and grassroots politics that would threaten the industrial level of GM top down control, not in just this isle but across the planet for the future humanity’ sake – I suggest that the Narrative must be challenged!
Your blog is a great template as are a handful of other indy’s.
But such a pushback would be hindered from birth. It would have the nazgul circling and attacking brutally. All the forces of the controlled media (most of it) and any number of DS and bought infiltrators, ii/77th type commentators, would be set against it. Blows would rain from all pillars of the Establishment and their worm tongues. Arrests made, kangaroo courts and judges unleashed (even more than today (cf Assange, Salmond etc).
Freedom of speech and press would finally be admitted to having been abolished.
So – find some right (as in not evil minded) thinking benefactors that would guarantee a million or two cash burn for 10 years. Recruit a dedicated bunch of operation managers (hand up here) and collect a stable of real, honest experts in their fields and genuine independent investigative journalists, all paid equanimously a reasonable salary not a ‘commercial’ one.
Then We can draw a line in the sand and draw all who really believe in truth and democracy and equality to rally behind it – and face our enemies within from within.
That’s how we can get away from here, slowly and surely.
Crace on form, I agree
It is only when reading all the “charges” against the PM and the Labour leader do things strike home. The tight spot in which we find ourselves merits much better leadership than comes from this pair.
The corporate sector is nowhere nearly being supported in an adequate form while, for me, the families struggling to cope with loss of income and no mention of financial aid is horrendous. If ever a UBI was needed it is now, even on a modest scale but we may come to the stage where there will be hand wringing that it was too late for hundreds if not thousands of families.
When trying to consider the actions taken by Starmer, it is worth remembering the famous interview with Mrs Thatcher when she was asked, after retirement, to name her most famous political achievement.
She answered without hesitation “New Labour.”
England needs a new centre left or even left wing party! Otherwise it’s a Tory government backed up by the red Tories, for the forseeable. England needs a new party akin to the SNP, people would vote for them in their droves. Is that not possible, could it be being blocked by the powerful, or is there just not the will for for it? There must be some with the means and the will, who could get organised, no?
I wish I knew how to deliver this