NOT BEFORE bedtime perhaps, but certainly before vaccination, with Boris Johnson announcing the new “tougher” tiers before he’d published the impact assessments to MPs and got parliamentary approval.
Talking of vaccination, last week saw a number of claims and counter-claims about Covid vaccinations. There were enough column-inches on this topic to build a stairway to heaven, but Hancock’s no piper and Boris isn’t leading the team to reason.
Fortunately there was clarity a’plenty as Wokingham Borough’s leader, John Halsall, announced last week we’re being moved from tier 1 to tier 2 when Lockdown ends.
Knight in Gale
Last week, one of Wokingham Borough’s four MPs made some comments on so-called “social” media. The three I found were hard-headed, practical, straightforward suggestions as to what the government could or should be doing.
The one about government’s alternative to making up more complex rules had Twitterati perplexed. It appeared that instead of thinking for themselves, they wanted others to do it for them and (seemingly) welcoming even more complex “rules” to live under.
The one about using ventilation to help keep businesses open, especially hospitality firms or small businesses also made Twitterati pause, if only momentarily perhaps with the dawning thought that if you could bring ‘outdoors’ conditions ‘indoors’ then people might not get infected quite so easily.
But it was a tough ask and derailment soon followed, with fishing, welsh anthems and Tory friends putting paid to rational discussion.
The third one about opening and staffing the Nightingale hospitals to take care of Covid patients and get the rest of the NHS fully working didn’t need the Twitterati to think at all – it only needed them to start reacting.
By mid-afternoon the tirades of critique and outright criticism was off-Twitter and headed for hyper-space. Radio broadcasts soon followed with LBC and BBC Berkshire.
And in the middle of all the froth and broth was anyone thinking about what Sir John had suggested? Not a bit of it.
Being able to segregate Covid patients from non-Covid ones, so that those without the disease don’t end up fearing going into Royal Berks Hospital; or worse – going in and catching Covid-19 all seemed not to matter.
Being able to get economies of scale, increases in efficiency and better treatment by creating centres of excellence with the right type of trained and focused expertise and resources to help save a higher percentage of Covid-19 infected people also didn’t seem to matter either.
If you wanted background as to why Sir John Redwood’s points are worth consideration, taking a squint at www.worldometers.info/coronavirus could help you discover the proportions of people in each country who catch Coronavirus, then go on to die of it.
In continental Europe if you live in Slovakia, Lithuania or Belarus, only eight from every 1,000 people who catch the disease later die of it. In Denmark, it’s 10; Portugal 15; Germany 16; France 24.
In the UK, it’s 36 – we’re the ‘Sick man of Europe’.
And while some of Sir John’s critics might have a point, so does he.
If for no other reason that it’s well past time that the government understands that rules, ruination and rhetoric aren’t working half as well as the narcissist-in-chief would have us believe.
Or am I being too optimistic and it would be better if the world’s fifth largest employer were run by the Twitterati instead?
Renewable Energy
In all the politics of the week came news from Cornwall that one of my closest friends from University days of nearly 50 years ago had died just after the start of the second lockdown.
Though there’s no funeral we can attend, I’d like to pay tribute to Haydn as one of the most warm hearted and self-deprecatingly funny people you could ever wish to meet.
Whether it was his :
- “don’t mind if I do” turn of phrase while wearing improbably tall white platform shoes during the glam-rock 70’s;
- or “Q-how can you tell it’s a DEC engineer by the side of the road? A-he’s swapping the wheels round to see if the puncture moves” while running DEC computers during his renewable energy geothermal research days in the 80’s
- through to “a bad consultant takes your watch and tells you the time. A better one takes your watch, tells you the time and gives it back to you” recently, long after he’d become a consultant himself.
We’ll remember Haydn for taking what the world gave and giving it back in better shape.
