End the Lockdown
- Thread starter Walter
- Start date
The Bank of England has a dire warning for the UK economy - but the Tories are still flying in the polls.
And I end with some interesting comparison stats between the US and the EU.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Uk government approach to combating the Invisible Enemy, the Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, has laid out what the bank sees as a potential outcome for us - and it makes for pretty grim reading.
At least in the short term.
Although the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, the MPC, kept the bank rate at its historic low of 0.1% and maintained the Quantitative Easing programme at £645 billion - something it will it says have achieved in the next month or so - the bank did also say that the government’s policies could end up delivering the worst recession for 300 years.
Me? I’d call it a depression.
But it also said that the UK economy will shrink by 30% in the first six months of the year.
And, as long as we come out of lockdown in the next few months the economy could rebound to be only 14% smaller at the end of 2020, compared to the end of 2019.
And that 14% would be the largest drop for 300 years.
And in a sign that some on the MPC see things getting worse, two of its members did vote to increase the QE programme by another £100 billion to £745 billion in order to pump even more liquidity into the markets.
Bear in mind, that this has only just been increased by £200 billion to help with the financial problems brought on by this public health crisis. And they haven’t yet filled that order.
Then there’s unemployment.
Do you put that on your resume? "Was found fit to be a deck ape in the Navy" as the pinnacle of your achievement in life?
You poor thing.
Lockdown fanatics scare me far more than Covid-19
Their extremism is a menace to liberty and livelihoods. They must be stopped
BRENDAN O'NEILL
EDITOR
8th May 2020
Spiked
Britain is on the brink of the worst recession since the Great Frost of 1709
I know I’m meant to be scared of Covid-19. But I’m far more fearful of the lockdown fanatics. These people who are so blase about the halting of economic life, and who bristle at any suggestion that the lockdown should be eased, pose a graver threat to the future of the UK than coronavirus does. They are a menace to liberty, reason and people’s livelihoods. Our society is taking steps to tackle Covid – now we need a huge collective effort to face down lockdown fanaticism.
The lockdown fanatics were out in force yesterday. No sooner had there been hints from Downing St that the lockdown might be mildly eased than they had taken to their computers and media platforms to condemn such reckless talk of restoring a small amount of everyday liberty. #KeepTheLockdown trended on Twitter. Labour Party people insisted the lockdown must stay. Labour has effortlessly moved from being the party that wanted to keep us in the EU against the will of the largest democratic vote in history to being the party that wants to keep us all in our homes despite expert predictions of the largest economic contraction on record if we don’t get back to work.
Piers Morgan burst yet another blood vessel, fretting that people might go outside to enjoy the sunny bank holiday weather. The horror. Meanwhile, the TUC has spent the past week insisting that it is unsafe to allow working people to go back to their jobs. Yes, we now live in a country where a Tory government wants people to have the right to return to work and the TUC wants us not to. It doesn’t get more surreal than this.
And of course social media was awash with lockdown-loving leftists and millennial media types, at home making their sourdough bread and watching Normal People, fuming against any suggestion that the government’s cute experiment in dystopian welfarist living should be ended anytime soon. These people who can work from home – doing their public-sector stuff or making their ironic podcasts – insist that anyone who calls for a return to work is elevating the economy over lives. As if the economy isn’t lives, too. As if work, production and creating the wealth that funds health, schools and housing isn’t also about life.
It is testament to how distant the publicly employed or knowledge-economy middle classes have become from the sphere of production, from meaningful and useful economic life, that they can brush aside ‘the economy’ as a mere abstract phenomenon as they pop their latest Instagrammable attempt at banana bread, full of ingredients made, transported and sold by ‘the economy’, into the oven.
Sadly, the government seems increasingly incapable of withstanding pressure from the fearmongers in the media and cultural elites. And so it backed down. The lockdown will stay. Don’t break it or we will drag it out for even longer, Dominic Raab said, as if he is the headmaster and we his pupils. ‘Brits were told not to sunbathe in parks this bank holiday weekend or any new freedoms could be lost’, as the Sun summed it up. Go outside and lie down in a park at a safe distance from anyone else and you will have your liberty rescinded – this is the world we live in now; this is the awful reality lockdown fanaticism has birthed.
Here’s why lockdown fanaticism unnerves me more than Covid-19. The coronavirus pandemic is clearly a very serious health challenge. It is right that we take it seriously and that we devote as many of society’s resources as possible to ensuring that it doesn’t impact on the populace too harshly. It is right to propose social-distancing measures, which is what we had before the lockdown was imposed. But where Covid is proving to be less lethal than we first feared, lockdown fanaticism is proving to be more lethal.
The Covid threat is not the apocalypse we were warned about. Its death rate is low. Its impact on younger people is negligent. Just 0.75 per cent of deaths in the UK have been among under-40s, and the majority of those were people with underlying health conditions. And yet most under-40s – fit, healthy workers – remain locked at home, denied the right to work and play and keep society going.
The horror stories that were spread about Covid-19 by government officials and media fearmongers have been exposed as inaccurate, and in some cases hysterical. As the government adviser Professor Robert Dingwall says, the government has ‘effectively terrorised’ us into ‘believing that this is a disease that is going to kill you’. When in the vast majority of cases that simply isn’t true. As Professor Dingwall points out, 80 per cent of people who get the virus never have to go to a hospital, and of those who do, ‘most of them will come out alive – even those who go into intensive care’.
So, coronavirus is proving manageable. It has not overwhelmed our health systems. It is not the plague. It is mild or even asymptomatic in most people. Society can handle it. What society can’t handle much more of, though, is lockdown fanaticism. This is a more destructive force than Covid-19.
Covid is just a virus. It doesn’t know what it is doing. It spreads to survive. But the lockdown fanatics are conscious human beings. They know – or ought to – the destructiveness of the path they are carving out for Britain and other nations. They know the economic calamity and anti-social culture of fear they are foisting upon society, with all the mass unemployment, denigration of public services, and even death that this will cause. And yet they carry on.
Britain is on the brink of the worst recession since the Great Frost of 1709, according to the Bank of England. Others are predicting an utterly unprecedented 13 per cent contraction in national output. Millions will lose their jobs. And that’s just the UK. More than 100million Indians have lost their jobs as a result of the global contagion of lockdown. Many will be plunged into hunger, and worse. The International Labor Organization says 1.5 billion people around the world are at risk of losing their livelihoods. The halting of economic life and production and transportation could lead to a global ‘hunger catastrophe’, says the UN. I hope the lockdown fanatics think about that next time they post a pic of their latest loaf of sourdough.
But they don’t think about it. Not seriously. They treat it as incidental. The economic devastation being wrought in the US, the UK and elsewhere gets a few column inches here and there or is an afterthought in the nightly news. But it is rarely the story. Lockdown fanatics are so convinced of their moral rectitude, so bound up in anti-Covid zealotry, so enjoying their part in the culture of fear and the culture of condemnation against anyone who breaks lockdown, that they just zone out the terrible things that they are helping to bring about.
Or, worse, they engage in a political sleight of hand. They say job losses, rising mental-health problems, lack of money and a global downturn that will hit the poor severely are also down to Covid. ‘Covid-19 is giving rise to economic problems, too’, they occasionally say. No. We cannot allow this. It is not Covid that is destroying livelihoods and liberties – it is our societies’ historically unprecedented, ill-thought-through, contagion-like authoritarian response to Covid; it is lockdown fanaticism.
They need to take some responsibility. Covid can be excused; it’s a virus. The lockdown fanatics cannot be excused. Their extremism is hampering sensible government action, stymieing open public debate, and nurturing economic catastrophe. They must be held to account. More than that, they must be opposed. We need a return to reason, freedom and productivity.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/08/lockdown-fanatics-scare-me-far-more-than-covid-19/
Their extremism is a menace to liberty and livelihoods. They must be stopped
BRENDAN O'NEILL
EDITOR
8th May 2020
Spiked
Britain is on the brink of the worst recession since the Great Frost of 1709
I know I’m meant to be scared of Covid-19. But I’m far more fearful of the lockdown fanatics. These people who are so blase about the halting of economic life, and who bristle at any suggestion that the lockdown should be eased, pose a graver threat to the future of the UK than coronavirus does. They are a menace to liberty, reason and people’s livelihoods. Our society is taking steps to tackle Covid – now we need a huge collective effort to face down lockdown fanaticism.
The lockdown fanatics were out in force yesterday. No sooner had there been hints from Downing St that the lockdown might be mildly eased than they had taken to their computers and media platforms to condemn such reckless talk of restoring a small amount of everyday liberty. #KeepTheLockdown trended on Twitter. Labour Party people insisted the lockdown must stay. Labour has effortlessly moved from being the party that wanted to keep us in the EU against the will of the largest democratic vote in history to being the party that wants to keep us all in our homes despite expert predictions of the largest economic contraction on record if we don’t get back to work.
Piers Morgan burst yet another blood vessel, fretting that people might go outside to enjoy the sunny bank holiday weather. The horror. Meanwhile, the TUC has spent the past week insisting that it is unsafe to allow working people to go back to their jobs. Yes, we now live in a country where a Tory government wants people to have the right to return to work and the TUC wants us not to. It doesn’t get more surreal than this.
And of course social media was awash with lockdown-loving leftists and millennial media types, at home making their sourdough bread and watching Normal People, fuming against any suggestion that the government’s cute experiment in dystopian welfarist living should be ended anytime soon. These people who can work from home – doing their public-sector stuff or making their ironic podcasts – insist that anyone who calls for a return to work is elevating the economy over lives. As if the economy isn’t lives, too. As if work, production and creating the wealth that funds health, schools and housing isn’t also about life.
It is testament to how distant the publicly employed or knowledge-economy middle classes have become from the sphere of production, from meaningful and useful economic life, that they can brush aside ‘the economy’ as a mere abstract phenomenon as they pop their latest Instagrammable attempt at banana bread, full of ingredients made, transported and sold by ‘the economy’, into the oven.
Sadly, the government seems increasingly incapable of withstanding pressure from the fearmongers in the media and cultural elites. And so it backed down. The lockdown will stay. Don’t break it or we will drag it out for even longer, Dominic Raab said, as if he is the headmaster and we his pupils. ‘Brits were told not to sunbathe in parks this bank holiday weekend or any new freedoms could be lost’, as the Sun summed it up. Go outside and lie down in a park at a safe distance from anyone else and you will have your liberty rescinded – this is the world we live in now; this is the awful reality lockdown fanaticism has birthed.
Here’s why lockdown fanaticism unnerves me more than Covid-19. The coronavirus pandemic is clearly a very serious health challenge. It is right that we take it seriously and that we devote as many of society’s resources as possible to ensuring that it doesn’t impact on the populace too harshly. It is right to propose social-distancing measures, which is what we had before the lockdown was imposed. But where Covid is proving to be less lethal than we first feared, lockdown fanaticism is proving to be more lethal.
The Covid threat is not the apocalypse we were warned about. Its death rate is low. Its impact on younger people is negligent. Just 0.75 per cent of deaths in the UK have been among under-40s, and the majority of those were people with underlying health conditions. And yet most under-40s – fit, healthy workers – remain locked at home, denied the right to work and play and keep society going.
The horror stories that were spread about Covid-19 by government officials and media fearmongers have been exposed as inaccurate, and in some cases hysterical. As the government adviser Professor Robert Dingwall says, the government has ‘effectively terrorised’ us into ‘believing that this is a disease that is going to kill you’. When in the vast majority of cases that simply isn’t true. As Professor Dingwall points out, 80 per cent of people who get the virus never have to go to a hospital, and of those who do, ‘most of them will come out alive – even those who go into intensive care’.
So, coronavirus is proving manageable. It has not overwhelmed our health systems. It is not the plague. It is mild or even asymptomatic in most people. Society can handle it. What society can’t handle much more of, though, is lockdown fanaticism. This is a more destructive force than Covid-19.
Covid is just a virus. It doesn’t know what it is doing. It spreads to survive. But the lockdown fanatics are conscious human beings. They know – or ought to – the destructiveness of the path they are carving out for Britain and other nations. They know the economic calamity and anti-social culture of fear they are foisting upon society, with all the mass unemployment, denigration of public services, and even death that this will cause. And yet they carry on.
Britain is on the brink of the worst recession since the Great Frost of 1709, according to the Bank of England. Others are predicting an utterly unprecedented 13 per cent contraction in national output. Millions will lose their jobs. And that’s just the UK. More than 100million Indians have lost their jobs as a result of the global contagion of lockdown. Many will be plunged into hunger, and worse. The International Labor Organization says 1.5 billion people around the world are at risk of losing their livelihoods. The halting of economic life and production and transportation could lead to a global ‘hunger catastrophe’, says the UN. I hope the lockdown fanatics think about that next time they post a pic of their latest loaf of sourdough.
But they don’t think about it. Not seriously. They treat it as incidental. The economic devastation being wrought in the US, the UK and elsewhere gets a few column inches here and there or is an afterthought in the nightly news. But it is rarely the story. Lockdown fanatics are so convinced of their moral rectitude, so bound up in anti-Covid zealotry, so enjoying their part in the culture of fear and the culture of condemnation against anyone who breaks lockdown, that they just zone out the terrible things that they are helping to bring about.
Or, worse, they engage in a political sleight of hand. They say job losses, rising mental-health problems, lack of money and a global downturn that will hit the poor severely are also down to Covid. ‘Covid-19 is giving rise to economic problems, too’, they occasionally say. No. We cannot allow this. It is not Covid that is destroying livelihoods and liberties – it is our societies’ historically unprecedented, ill-thought-through, contagion-like authoritarian response to Covid; it is lockdown fanaticism.
They need to take some responsibility. Covid can be excused; it’s a virus. The lockdown fanatics cannot be excused. Their extremism is hampering sensible government action, stymieing open public debate, and nurturing economic catastrophe. They must be held to account. More than that, they must be opposed. We need a return to reason, freedom and productivity.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/08/lockdown-fanatics-scare-me-far-more-than-covid-19/
The guy who wanted to dump the Nuke subs and put the moola into health and taking British Rail out of privation.
Oh. That guy? He's a complete bellend.
Here's Jeremy's brother Piers leading an anti-lockdown protest in Glastonbury:
Federal Court Overturns Kentucky Ban on In-Person Church Services: 'The Constitution Will Endure'
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politi...services-the-constitution-will-endure-n389542
Amen. End the lockdown.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politi...services-the-constitution-will-endure-n389542
Amen. End the lockdown.
In London today, the police behaved disgracefully
Cops are enforcing the lockdown in a rude, arrogant and heavy-handed way.
BRENDAN O'NEILL
EDITOR
9th May 2020
Spiked
You heard them before you saw them. It sounded like a platoon of soldiers. The one in charge was barking orders to ‘move forward!’ and then came the trudge of their boots. Scores of them, making military manoeuvres, marching in a long, thin line through one of Britain’s prettiest parks: St James’s Park in London. This was the Metropolitan Police today, enforcing the lockdown, sweeping through parks and streets and issuing the same warning to everyone they came across, from young lovers to dads playing football with their kids to homeless people with nowhere else to go: ‘Move on.’ It’s one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen the police do.
Watching them stream through St James’s Park, looking for all the world like a line of soldiers conquering a small town, you’d think they were on their way to confront some serious organised crime. But of course their targets were sunbathers, those apparently selfish people demeaned in the media and now harassed by the cops. And a dad playing football with his toddler. ‘Aren’t we allowed to exercise?’, the dad asked. ‘For one hour’, came the reply. ‘How long have you been out?’ And young lovers and friends. I saw a copper on horseback shouting down at two young men as if they were in the process of committing some awful crime. I guess they were in the eyes of the lockdown fanatics: they were sitting under a tree.
A young Muslim mum sitting down and watching her two kids play with little tennis bats was confused, too. Can’t kids play outside? She was told she couldn’t sit still. She had to walk. ‘How about walking your kids around the park?’, said the spectacularly patronising cop. They even threw out homeless people. I saw them tell four individual homeless people (ie, not a group of homeless people) to move on. Where to? Must they also walk and walk, forever, and never sit down anywhere? The most despicable thing I saw was a policeman telling an elderly homeless gentleman to move on. Inarticulately, the man explained he had nowhere else to go. I stepped in and explained to the cop that there is no home for him to go to, and he has to be able to sit down somewhere on a hot day. ‘I don’t make the rules’, came the snivelling, officious reply.
The police’s reputation will have taken a severe beating in London today. Anyone who argued back — as two young women did, patiently explaining that they are from the same household and that they were metres away from everyone else — was patronised or even insulted. ‘You’re putting other people’s lives at risk’, the women were told, which is completely untrue — being outside and socially distanced on a very warm day carries virtually zero threat of infection. I heard an officer call someone an idiot. Another officer made fun of someone who asked about his right to be outside. It was staggeringly rude and even repugnant behaviour. A politician, or someone, needs to get a grip on these people.
All through central London there were police vans, packed with cops waiting to sweep through parks and greens and streets. The saddest sight I saw was on a small green on the South Bank where a woman of African descent was watching as her very young child, two years old at the most, kicked a football around. As five police officers on bikes approached the woman actually did that thing that I thought was just a meme: she started doing star jumps, hoping that her exercising might make the cops go away. No such luck. She was told that if she wasn’t really exercising, she had to go home. I’d seen enough by this point. I asked the cop if he really thought it was a good use of his time to send a mum and her very young child home. He called me a moron.
I have not seen the police like this before. Sure, I’ve seen police heavy-handedness; I’ve actually encountered it, on demonstrations many years ago. I’ve seen police harassing homeless people for no good reason. I’ve seen the over-policing of certain streets and certain communities and seen how dispiriting people find it. But this arrogant, sneering barking of orders at sunbathers and mums and homeless people resting under trees on a warm day is completely new. It is lockdown fanaticism in action. This rude and heartless officiousness is the logical conclusion of the culture of hysteria our political and media elites have whipped up over Covid-19.
And the thing is, every single police intervention I saw today was unnecessary. Every one. That homeless gentleman was not near anyone else. The mum and her young kid playing football were the only people on that small green on the South Bank. (Until the police turned up.) It is only corona-hysteria that has turned these perfectly safe and good outdoor activities into dangerous things the police must clamp down on. What I saw today among the police was relish. They welcome these new powers. Their petty authoritarianism and contempt for ‘rule-breakers’ has been emboldened. They have shown themselves to be a force not for the people, but against us. Someone sensible in the police or in government should be thinking hard about how to repair the police’s reputation following their disgraceful and excessive behaviour during this lockdown.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/09/in-london-today-the-police-behaved-disgracefully/
Cops are enforcing the lockdown in a rude, arrogant and heavy-handed way.
BRENDAN O'NEILL
EDITOR
9th May 2020
Spiked
You heard them before you saw them. It sounded like a platoon of soldiers. The one in charge was barking orders to ‘move forward!’ and then came the trudge of their boots. Scores of them, making military manoeuvres, marching in a long, thin line through one of Britain’s prettiest parks: St James’s Park in London. This was the Metropolitan Police today, enforcing the lockdown, sweeping through parks and streets and issuing the same warning to everyone they came across, from young lovers to dads playing football with their kids to homeless people with nowhere else to go: ‘Move on.’ It’s one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen the police do.
Watching them stream through St James’s Park, looking for all the world like a line of soldiers conquering a small town, you’d think they were on their way to confront some serious organised crime. But of course their targets were sunbathers, those apparently selfish people demeaned in the media and now harassed by the cops. And a dad playing football with his toddler. ‘Aren’t we allowed to exercise?’, the dad asked. ‘For one hour’, came the reply. ‘How long have you been out?’ And young lovers and friends. I saw a copper on horseback shouting down at two young men as if they were in the process of committing some awful crime. I guess they were in the eyes of the lockdown fanatics: they were sitting under a tree.
A young Muslim mum sitting down and watching her two kids play with little tennis bats was confused, too. Can’t kids play outside? She was told she couldn’t sit still. She had to walk. ‘How about walking your kids around the park?’, said the spectacularly patronising cop. They even threw out homeless people. I saw them tell four individual homeless people (ie, not a group of homeless people) to move on. Where to? Must they also walk and walk, forever, and never sit down anywhere? The most despicable thing I saw was a policeman telling an elderly homeless gentleman to move on. Inarticulately, the man explained he had nowhere else to go. I stepped in and explained to the cop that there is no home for him to go to, and he has to be able to sit down somewhere on a hot day. ‘I don’t make the rules’, came the snivelling, officious reply.
The police’s reputation will have taken a severe beating in London today. Anyone who argued back — as two young women did, patiently explaining that they are from the same household and that they were metres away from everyone else — was patronised or even insulted. ‘You’re putting other people’s lives at risk’, the women were told, which is completely untrue — being outside and socially distanced on a very warm day carries virtually zero threat of infection. I heard an officer call someone an idiot. Another officer made fun of someone who asked about his right to be outside. It was staggeringly rude and even repugnant behaviour. A politician, or someone, needs to get a grip on these people.
All through central London there were police vans, packed with cops waiting to sweep through parks and greens and streets. The saddest sight I saw was on a small green on the South Bank where a woman of African descent was watching as her very young child, two years old at the most, kicked a football around. As five police officers on bikes approached the woman actually did that thing that I thought was just a meme: she started doing star jumps, hoping that her exercising might make the cops go away. No such luck. She was told that if she wasn’t really exercising, she had to go home. I’d seen enough by this point. I asked the cop if he really thought it was a good use of his time to send a mum and her very young child home. He called me a moron.
I have not seen the police like this before. Sure, I’ve seen police heavy-handedness; I’ve actually encountered it, on demonstrations many years ago. I’ve seen police harassing homeless people for no good reason. I’ve seen the over-policing of certain streets and certain communities and seen how dispiriting people find it. But this arrogant, sneering barking of orders at sunbathers and mums and homeless people resting under trees on a warm day is completely new. It is lockdown fanaticism in action. This rude and heartless officiousness is the logical conclusion of the culture of hysteria our political and media elites have whipped up over Covid-19.
And the thing is, every single police intervention I saw today was unnecessary. Every one. That homeless gentleman was not near anyone else. The mum and her young kid playing football were the only people on that small green on the South Bank. (Until the police turned up.) It is only corona-hysteria that has turned these perfectly safe and good outdoor activities into dangerous things the police must clamp down on. What I saw today among the police was relish. They welcome these new powers. Their petty authoritarianism and contempt for ‘rule-breakers’ has been emboldened. They have shown themselves to be a force not for the people, but against us. Someone sensible in the police or in government should be thinking hard about how to repair the police’s reputation following their disgraceful and excessive behaviour during this lockdown.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/09/in-london-today-the-police-behaved-disgracefully/
The original goal of keeping our healthcare system from being overwhelmed? It wont be overwhelmed any longer if we go to normal? What are you losing out on?
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