I have already noted this morning that exceptionally serious scientists and the UK's chief medical officers all agree that we face the risk of the NHS being entirely overwhelmed by the Covid crisis that we now face. The scale of risk is utterly unprecedented.
In the face of this we get the likes of Marcus Fysh MP who has said in the Express that:
Yesterday on the BBC he said:
And this from a man who voted for voter ID to be required in future elections. His choice of 'papers please' appears to be entirely dependent upon whether it is his freedom that is being impinged, or not.
As Nick Robinson of the BBC noted:
And as Prof Colin Talbot of the University of Manchester noted:
Defeating an enemy sometimes requires actions that are necessary even if normally undesirable, such is the scale of the threat.
But, apparently, we do not face a threat from omicron according to these MPs. Note this crass tweet from last night:
It so happens that I agree that vaccine passports are not a great idea. They will not stop the spread of covid. The evidence of that is now so clear that we should instead shut all hospitality and places of mass entertainment now and require that people work from home. And we should definitely be closing schools and universities with no plan that they will reopen in January until the risk has abated, as it eventually will if that is what we do.
The government is nowhere near discussing these absolute necessities, which is what they are.
Nor, come to that is Labour. It is calling this wrong.
Instead, we have politicians frightened to use the evidence that now unambiguously exists to both demand and then decide upon the appropriate measures that we need to address the crisis that we face, which they are utterly unwilling to do.
How politics might come out the other side of this I do not know. I can only hope that something better might. But I fear it will cost a lot of lives to get to that point. If it does we will have a duty to deliver the changes to make sure this never happens again.
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To compare with Nazi Germany shows the crass ignorance of Mr Fysh and is an insult to all those who really suffered under that regime. Where do these people come from ?
The frightening thing is that the BBC is cutting out most independent epidemiologists, and public health experts – who think the governement’ss response entirely inadequate- , so as to frame the debate entirely as between the government ‘sensible/balanced’ policy and their own nut case back benchers.
BBC allowing days and days of unchallenged ranting to these ideologues revelling in their own ignorance – must be against the charter ‘to inform’.
I fear we are at a point where we should be more cautious about speaking of “when we come out of this”. Don’t we need to start thinking seriously about the consequences of prolonged pandemic overlapping with accelerating climate and environmental collapse? It’s abundantly clear now that global power-brokers have neither the wit nor the will to confront either, but prefer pulling us all into their playground squabbles.
We have to come out of this
This is very dangerous but also, faintly comical as well?
I wonder if he voted against any moves to sell Government data about us to the private sector and the basis of ‘centralisation?
The survival of democracy might be the least of our concerns; the survival of a functioning society is equally at risk if we continue to allow highly infectious pathogens to run rampant through the population. Throughout this pandemic our pernicious government has repeatedly failed to act quickly enough, repeatedly performing the impression of doing something, while doing as little as possible until, back to the wall, the mountebank Johnson has been forced into the semblance of an act, even if that act might already be too late. The latest scheme – boosters for everyone by New Year’s Eve – is another, the delivery of which has not been thought through and which has been left to an already exhausted NHS to scramble to put in place. This will, of course, mean that other illnesses, other medical conditions, will have to wait. At what point does the backlog overwhelm the health service? At what point do untreated illnesses begin to overwhelm the untreated sick?
On the wider point of societal collapse, how many times can we survive the repetition of a mutating virus being allowed to infect us – at the rate of 200,000 cases a day according to Javid. We had to act as if omicron was the worst of the worst as soon as we knew about it. We could not afford to wait to find out if it were just a mild illness, even if it eventually turned out to be so. Waiting for “incredibly strong evidence of danger”, as Fysh wants to do, is an act of incredible stupidity, when the consequences of waiting could be catastrophic. Alicia Kearns says that there are very real costs if, for example, schools have to close as a result of any action that needs to be taken, as if allowing omicron free rein has no costs at all. Both seem to think that the danger omicron poses is a matter of assessing personal risk, but taking precautions against a highly infectious virus, where the consequences are global and unbounded, cannot be equated with assessments of personal risk, where the consequences are local and bounded.
Back in January 2020, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and colleagues wrote that the “precautionary principle delineates conditions where actions must be taken to reduce risk of ruin, and traditional cost-benefit analyses must not be used. These are ruin problems where, over time, exposure to tail events leads to a certain eventual extinction. While there is a very high probability for humanity surviving a single such event, over time, there is eventually zero probability of surviving repeated exposures to such events. While repeated risks can be taken by individuals with a limited life expectancy, ruin exposures must never be taken at the systemic and collective level.”
Kearns and Fysh see risk at this individual level. Seeing it in this way is a form of indulgence because they assume that there is always someone else, some big other, who will deal with the consequences of their freedom to act in whatever manner they want. Fysh and Kearns don’t believe they have any responsibility for clearing up any mess caused by their freedom. This form of infantile freedom is inherent in Johnson’s government – even as it takes away our freedom to dissent, our right to protest – and it is this, as much as anything, that could take us down the road to ruin.
The direction of travel towards an ever more authoritarian state is frightening. Vaccine passports are mere net curtains on the concrete block the state is creating to dominate the little people.
I am one of the estimated 6 million, born abroad, who potentially could be transported overnight without appeal. My suitcase is packed with my Irish passport.
I am too
It seems that the editorial stance being taken by the BBC is similar to that of most of the emphasis prior to the Referendum in 2016 of pitching Tory Remainers against Tory and other right-wing Leavers. That saves them having to do the hard graft of true and costly journalism. As to any person drawing comparisons with Nazi Germany, I would very gently invite quiet reflection whether the words of Joseph Goebbels apply, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
I assume you are referring to UK gov?