In a week when the Foreign Secretary announced a three-week extension to the lockdown, ‘Stay Home – Save Lives” remained the central message as tea-time briefings from government ministers and senior health staff continued daily.
Meanwhile, disquiet over the behaviour and abilities of individual ministers was growing.
More equal than others?
On Saturday the Minister for Communities Housing and Local Government, Robert Jenrick was leading the government’s daily briefing. It was going well until 33 minutes in, when Sky’s Deborah Haynes asked on behalf of the sans-culottes “How come you are able to claim that your house in Herefordshire is your main home when your children go to school in London and your wife also works in London?”
To the background of a slithering metallic sound, he said that “the lockdown doesn’t affect everybody equally”. As those who’ve been threatened or arrested for driving shorter distances than the minister’s 150 miles will no doubt attest.
Planning a Head?
On Sunday while interviewing Michael Gove, Andrew Marr described President Macron talking about the shortcomings of their government’s response, “including not being able to give out as many masks as we wanted to our health professionals” making the point about the adult approach Mr Macron was taking with the French people.
The Gove-meant response came haltingly … “this is a new virus and by definition none of us … could know quite what were going to be the consequences of this virus … because we hadn’t seen … anything exactly like this … before”.
Save that whether the virus is Bird Flu, Sars, Ebola, Swine Flu or Covid-19 one immediate consequence of a pandemic is a need for PPE. In huge quantities – here, not being exported.
Care for Care Homes
The week before last Reuters reported that over a quarter of French deaths were in the country’s care homes. Last week Sverige Radio reported that over one third of Swedish deaths were in care homes, with families discovering that care home staff had no PPE whatsoever.
Here in Britain, approximately none of the deaths in care homes (or in the community) were up-to-date in official daily statistics as bureaucrats were accused of dragging their heels.
Ask anyone who’s ever had to make a difficult decision as to what they wish they’d had in hindsight. Hard facts are far more important than (un)comfortable fictions.
Borough ‘In Briefs’
Wokingham Borough Council’s social media channel has continued to publish information and guides on giving and receiving help during the pandemic. Here’s a quick look at what they’ve been saying since last week.
As well as giving details of the Community Hub, which gives centralised support throughout the Borough, this week’s message on Local Support gave contact details for the various Covid-19 support groups that individuals have been setting up in towns and parishes.
In addition to those mentioned last week in Woodley (1,366 members), Wargrave (377) and Whitegates (81), there’s now Covid support groups in Twyford (811), Crowthorne (643), Hurst (396), Woosehill (389), Swallowfield (74), Sonning (44) and Finchampstead (41).
That’s over 5,000 people interested or involved in supporting their communities in one way or another.
Democracy’s back in Town
Locally this last week, Wokingham’s Town Council held the first video meeting of the Planning and Transport committee under the new Coronavirus Act – which has relaxed the rules on having councillors present in person.
With an access link on WTC’s calendar for the video meeting, members of the public as well as councillors and staff could easily join it.
The calendar was refreshingly quick to load up and logging in to the meeting worked flawlessly.
Using Google Hangouts, the meeting was well chaired with a roll call of those ‘virtually present’ being taken at the outset. As a member of the public it felt somewhat awkward to be included in this as an observer doesn’t have a voice in a public meeting.
During the meeting, it was evident who’d had experience of video calls before. At least two councillors had microphone-equipped headsets and had got their cameras and lighting set up well and could be seen and heard clearly.
For those with little experience, having a camera view from below looking up at the underside of their face, made them a) unrecognisable and b) distractingly ugly.
Later on in the meeting it was disconcerting to find that some councillors had switched their videos off and weren’t speaking. Were they there or not ?
That said, the meeting was interesting and only the absence of policy codes from WBC’s Core Strategy and Development Delivery docs made some councillor comments on planning applications rather less effective than they might otherwise have been.
Also as this was the first meeting of its type, not having a summary of agreements at the end with everyone signifying their verbal / visible acceptance is something that will have to wait until next time.
All in all it was refreshing to see local democracy getting back into gear after having been shut down for so long by central government’s social distancing and isolation rules.
Borough Democracy to come
Apart from Wokingham Town Council’s P&T meeting and Swallowfield’s Parish Council Meeting with links published so that you could join – all other Parish, Town and Borough council meetings are either cancelled or only accessible by special request.
At the time of writing I’ve yet to get the access codes to be allowed to listen to WBC’s Executive and Special Executive meetings on Wednesday, but I’m looking forward to tuning in on them – just after catching up with the news on the BBC Home Service read by Alvar Lidell.
What the Neighbours said
After last week’s parrot calamity, my neighbours have told me that the extra lockdown means their cat now faces three weeks of short rations.
Excepting ‘que i vicini detto’, that was week five of the lockdown – that was.
