Westministenders: The Virus

[RedToothBrush]

Its like living in a Bad Disaster B Movie.

If you thought Brexit on your TV every day was Bad, The Virus is a whole new level.

The 5pm broadcast with Johnson and friends, and the public infomation video with the unblicking Chris Witty (who has such unfortunate mannerism he makes me think he's me a Dr Who alien akin to the Slitheen).

Who knows what will happen. Just that everything has changed and our entire economy is now on life support whilst we figure out how to deal with the crisis and what on earth our exit strategy is.

Johnson has however refused to join a joint EU purchase scheme designed to assist countries through the crisis.

Meanwhile the US is about to go nuts... so what does that do to a trade deal?

More money for the NHS? More hospitals?

Well its possible that might just happen...

Listening I was not suggesting that people take pensions early - most can't of course.
I was talking of people having to work in their 60s who are exhausted and just counting down the months and years until pension

Younger and middle-aged people, if their business cannot be started, are in a similar situation to employees who have lost their job and have to change career
they'll be hunting for an ordinary job as an employee, probably for much less than they were on before

Those in their 60s but not yet of penionable age - will have even more problems doing this than those in their 50s
Even those in their 40s probably need to be proven highflyers, to get a comparable job

Whatever we do, nearly all of us will be worse off
Even if it's only higher taxes for years to pay for it all

A big row is now breaking out over the Government food parcels being full of empty calories and inappropriate items.

Now this did not happen during the war. The rations were carefully worked out, given their knowledge and personal tastes of the time.

(safer ground ?)

Of course, back then, a lot of people didn't have televisions. This took off in a big way when ITV began to be rolled out nationally - so late 50s?

I thought the usual story is the coronation - 1953 - was the biggest push in TV ownership. Or rental ... there was a scene in the Eric'n'Ernie biopic about families gathering round to watch it.

Growing up in the 70s, I knew kids at school whose parents had decided not to have a TV or telephone.

(DW and I comment on how we seem to have regressed since by the time we've put the TV on and Netflix/Prime/iPlayer have finally come up it's no different to the old days of waiting for the TV to warm up ...)

As someone who was born in 1961 (so just a wee bit older than DGR ), my recollection of war movies etc when I was growing up was of courage and derring do.

We were a generation who didn't suffer the post-war privations (which would have provided a more rounded understanding) yet only saw the "courageous" films, like The Dambusters, The Great Escape, Escape to Victory, The Bridge over the River Kwai (weekend/Christmas staples on TV).

It was only later with The World at War series and still later with movies like Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan that a more balanced view of the horrors of war was more widely disseminated.

We got our first TV in 1949. I always think I must be one of a fairly small number of 70 year olds to have had TV all my life. It was a 9" Pye. 😀

they'll be hunting for an ordinary job as an employee, probably for much less than they were on before
with no financial cushion in the mean time and significant bills to pay from last month when they had the expectation of income carrying on.

Is the long term destruction of employment for many many thousands of people
REALLY worth it for the number of extra deaths that may or may not be avoided?
I am really not sure at all.

The Dambusters, The Bridge on the River Kwai and the Guns of Navarone, were 1955, 1957 and 1961 respectively. I imagine that by then people had begun to put some distance between themselves and the war. Rationing had by then ceased; identity cards had been scrapped, and yes, things like the Coronation gave people a boost.

One of my earliest memories is the Coronation - i.e. being taken into a marquee, clutching a bar of chocolate. I didn't realise the memory was the Coronation until told so later.

My parents married just after WW2, while dad was posted abroad

When they returned to the UK (well, mum's 1st ever visit) it was about 1948

They travelled by train from a S England port all the way up North to his posting

Mum said she was horrified that for the whole journey she could only see towns and cities in rubble - a couple of years after the was

She said she wondered what on earth she had got herself into

The late 40s were very grim in the UK
My late brother nearly died as a baby his first winter, because there was no coal to heat the house
He was saved by dad's CO who personally ordered in emergency supplies just for them

There was one family in our street who always had to be the first to do anything. So they had a tiny boxy style TV from 1953 when by 1958 or so they had all got bigger. Ours was a 17 inch one.

Our first TV was about 1961 - I remember watching reports of JFK's assassination, Churchill's funeral, Aberfan disaster

Our first car was in 1960 - a white Polo.
Dad was so proud of it

We walked before then and we walked when he had the car for work:
2 ½ miles each way to Kindergarten my mum told me, with me skipping along reciting my times tables
I've wondered if my lifelong love of exercise & maths came from not having a car available

WW2 is irrelevant.
People were allowed out doors.
People were allowed to work if they could.

Churchill was asked what was the point of funding the arts during WW2
and answered that there was no point winning if civilised society did not survive.

At the moment we are binning all of civilised society

• sport
• arts
• education
• business

for the sake of ..... a very low number of excess deaths

The point about ITV (est. 1955) was ITN

Contrary to that dram series a few years ago, there was almost no news on BBC TV before the 1960s, and what there was entailed invisible announcers reading out agency copy after 7pm. This was at the insistence of the newspaper barons who bent the arm of govt.

BBC coverage, such as it was, is exemplified by Anthony Eden's 'Interview' with Leslie Mitchell during the 1955 election campaign:

"Well now, Sir, is there anything at all you would like to begin by saying?"

Ah, leaving nostalgia aside ....

Listening If there had been scenarios presented with rough costing, we could have had a sensible debate before lockdown

However, too many people claiming "it's just flu" and "scaremingering" meant a credibiity gap getting the more anxious to listen
The govt ran out of time and credibility

I guestimated that extra góvt spending and lost income could be £250 billion, plus the same again over the next 6-10 years

So maybe £500 bn total over 10 years ?

For a worst CV case of saving 500,000 people

• don't need good maths to calculate that per person saved !

And milder measures would have saved 250,000

I stopped - it's mad and I need better costs estimates; might be wildly over-estimating
Remember our annual GDP is only about £2 trillion

Listening I hope you are not trying to claim WW2 was easier, even for UK civilians
It wasn't
People like my dad's family only had a few years after near-starvation during the 1920s-1930s
No reserves

Night after night of bombings in industrial cities
Living in damaged homes, because no resources to repair them
kids sent away to the country to strangers, while the parents had to stay to work in the cities
Rationing .....

BBC coverage, such as it was, is exemplified by Anthony Eden's 'Interview' with Leslie Mitchell during the 1955 election campaign:

Was that the one with them both smoking ?

Some lockdown viewing might be the BBCs "Rock and Roll years", they could have a bit of a blast. You get to see some iconic moments in TV, like Bowies "Starman" on TOTP, the Iranian Embassy siege (or end thereof). And some top tunes. Pretty certain that interview is in there too.

What do you think a better approach would be LQ? Make sure that everyone had masks when going about their daily work? What else?

I can see that the Government has a problem, but their own actions do not help. Like being dogmatically against anything to do with the EU, allowing the NHS to be woefully unprepared and until the last couple of weeks, being unwilling to listen to expertise.

They could have made more provision for the crisis - even being properly prepared for a bad winter flu epidemic would have given the NHS more margin. But no, they were too pig headed and stubborn.

381 deaths "today" highest yet

BigChoc
WW2 was tangible even to those not in the bombing runs.
This is intangible - many of the medics on other threads seem to not grasp the fact that 10,000 Brits die every week even in normal times.

Even if we lock down and destroy the economy, Covid and its successors will still be there
as will climate change

Hitler once defeated, stayed defeated.

therefore it is not a good comparator

Nicotine was the least of Eden's opiates at that time. He was off his face for Suez, which became the BBC's finest hour when they refused to bow to govt. bullying and gave Gaitskill a right of reply to Eden's barefaced lies.

As Nye Bevan put it, using his stammer like a pro: "If Sir Anthony Eden is an honest man, ....and he might be. ..........Then .........He is ........To supid to be a prime minister!"

The men 18-40 conscripted and mostly sent to war, terrible conditions and danger
I've an uncle I never met because he died aged 18 when his submarine was sunk

Women made to work in munitions factories, or on farms,
often seperated for months / years from their kids
That's my gran and aunties

That's the point I'm making Peregrina - that the films made in the 50s and 60s were a very one-sided view of the war (I can understand why films made during the war were more propagandised). So those of us born in the 60s and later, who never experienced rationing or, directly, the horrors of war, got a warped view of the World War and some will have seen it as a time of courage (which was indeed part of that time) and stiff upper lips (if a British film) or brilliant daring (if a US film) and not so much of the horror . That balance took longer to disseminate - and even then that wider awareness was/is patchy if you read some of the worst of the Brexiters comments about how the UK stood alone in WW2 - many of the worse culprits being people who were not even born at the time

Peregrina
What is the alternative?
Testing, testing and more testing.
Those who have antibodies should be allowed to get on with earning money.
I am pretty sure that the number of cases and immune in the country is FAR higher than any data set is showing

but I'm also assuming that this Coronavirus will be like the others and mutate and only offer short term immunity till the next wave.

This lockdown stuff is being done as if its a once and forever
how will people react when they realise that it may be every 18 months or so ..... ?

Well... this is what Toby Young is arguing. I’d be worried about agreeing with him!

In @TheCriticMag I've set out the case for ending the lockdown on April 14th, the day after Easter Monday. Or if the Government must extend, by the following Monday so children can return to school after the Easter holidays
I make three main arguments.
First, that the cost of the economic bailout Rishi Sunack has proposed is too high. Spending that kind of money to extend the lives of a few hundred thousand mostly elderly people with underlying health problems by one or two years is a mistake.

Etc.

(And of course, wealthy people’s jobs often don’t put them at direct risk of infection. They’d like the rest of us to go back to work. Isn’t that what Trump was encouraging? Of course, I am very sympathetic to workers who will lose out from lockdown. And as an aside: what about zero-hours staff - have they been forgotten?)

mobile.twitter.com/toadmeister/status/1244940563629182976

Gove has now decided that we will buy ventilators from EU nations.