Cummings and Goings On

Reproduced in its entirety (almost) from https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1265449109449777160.html

Written by: @RussInCheshire

1. Dominic Cummings, one of the few men to have ever been found in contempt of Parliament, moved onto contempt for everything
2. When the story broke, and he was accused of doing things that look bad, he said he didn't care how things looked 
3. Then ministers said press outrage meant nothing, only the opinion of the people mattered
4. Then polls showed 52% of people wanted Cummings to resign
5. So Cummings decided to show the public some respect, by turning up 30 minutes late to make his explanation 
6. He began by saying he wasn't speaking for the govt, which must be why he was in the Rose Garden of 10 Downing Street
7. Then the self-styled "enemy of the Islington media elite" said his wife, who works in the media, had been ill in their house in Islington
8. But she was only a bit ill, so he popped home, got himself nice and infected, then went back to Downing Street for meetings with lots of vitally important people in the middle of a national crisis
9. But then he got ill too, so then it was suddenly important 
10. Sadly he couldn't get childcare in London, even though 3 immediate relatives live within 3 miles of his London home
11. So because he was carrying a virus that can cross a 2 metre distance and kill, he immediately locked himself in a car with his wife and child for 5 hours 
12. He then drove 264 miles without stopping in a Land Rover that gets maybe 25 MPG
13. Then the scourge of the metropolitan elites made himself extra-relatable by describing his family's sprawling country estate, multiple houses and idyllic woodlands 
14. He explained that he'd warned about a coronavirus years ago in his blog
15. Then it was revealed he actually secretly amended old blogs after he'd returned from Durham
16. And anyway, if he'd warned years ago, why was he so massively unprepared and slow to react
17. Then he said he was too ill to move for a week
18. But in the middle of that week, presumably with "wonky eyes", he drove his child to hospital
19. Then he said that to test his "wonky eyes" he put his wife and child in a car and drove 30 miles on public roads 
20. Then it was revealed his wife drives, so there was no reason for the "eye test", cos she could have driven them back to London
21. Then it was revealed the "eye test" trip to a local tourist spot took place on his wife's birthday
22. Then cameras filmed as he threw a cup onto the table, smirked and left
23. And then it emerged his wife had written an article during the time in Dunham, describing their experience of being in lockdown in London, which you'd definitely do if you weren't hiding anything
24. A govt scientific advisor said "more people will die" as a result of what Cummings had done.
25. Boris Johnson said he "wouldn't mark Cummings " down for what he'd done. 
26. The Attorney General said it was ok to break the law if you were acting on instinct
27. The Health Minister said it was OK to endanger public health if you meant well 
28. Johnson said Cummings' "story rings true" because his own eyesight was fine before coronavirus, but now he needs glasses
29. But in an interview with The Telegraph 5 years ago, Johnson said he needed glasses cos he was "blind as a bat" 
30. Michael Gove went on TV and said it was "wise" to drive 30 miles on public roads with your family in the car to test your eyesight
31. The DVLA tweeted that you should never, ever do this 
32. Then ministers started claiming Cummings had to go to Durham because he feared crowds attacking his home. The streets were empty because we were observing the lockdown.
33. And then a minister finally resigned 
34. Steve Baker, Richard Littlejohn, Isabel Oakeshott, Tim Montgomerie, Jan Moir, Ian Dale, Julia Hartley Brewer, 30 Tory MPs, half a dozen bishops and the actual Daily Mail said Cummings should go
35. The govt suggested we can ignore them, because they're all left-wingers 
36. Then a vicar asked Matt Hancock if other people who had been fined for doing exactly what Cummings did would get their fine dropped. Matt Hancock said he'd suggest it to the govt
37. The govt said no within an hour. Cummings' statement had lasted longer than that 
38. And if the guidelines were so clear, why were people being stopped and fined for driving to find childcare in the first place?
39. Then a new poll found people who wanted Cummings sacked had risen from 52% to 57%
40. Cummings is considered the smartest man in the govt 
41. And in the middle of all this, in case we take our eye off it: we reached 60,000 deaths. One of the highest per capita death rates worldwide.
42. We still face Brexit under this lot.
43. It's 4 years until an election
44. And it's still only Wednesday

"Yeah but yeah but yeah but Stephen Kinnock"
1 Kinnock wasn't infected, so wasn't self isolating
2 Kinnock was delivering food to elderly parents: permitted
3 Labour didn't make the policy breached
4 Kinnock isn't an advisor to Starmer
5 Kinnock didn't attempt to hide it
6 Kinnock didn't break regulations on staying overnight
7 Kinnock's friends didn't say it was OK for *him* to break the law, just not everyone else
8 When Kinnock did it, two senior govt advisors in the UK hadn't already had to resign for the same offence
9 Kinnock's wife didn't write an article in The Spectator describing his experience of lockdown in London, which mislead the public
10 Kinnock wasn't required to inform the Number 10 of his whereabouts, meaning there's a bigger cover-up.

So. What happens next? Johnson will hope this blows over, and in a couple of weeks we'll all forget. But how likely is it people will forget their mum died alone?
Or that they couldn't meet their grandkids for months?
Or their business failed cos nobody could leave home?
They say everyone remembered where they were when Kennedy was shot, or 9/11 happened.
Well this is similar, but it didn't happen miles away - it happened in your home.
We will all remember Covid19, even if we lost nobody.
And Cummings is a key event.
It won't be forgotten.
The instinct for Johnson will be: make something big happen that drags attention away.
But what big announcement could there be?
His schools thing yesterday was totally ignored.
Any "we're opening" announcement will be met by distrust and fear. That route out is closed ..

Raging Against the Machine is Rational, not Heartless

There was an article in yesterday's Times where one of the columnists tried to make a case that supporting governmental panic and the imposition of arbitrary authority by enforcing the current lockdown is a rational position.

Melanie Phillips lauds the Prime Minister's refusal to offer any serious prospect that the deprivation of personal liberty and economic strangulation may be nearing the end. She goes as far as to state that "Urged days ago to announce a speedy exit from lockdown, he has refused to be pushed. He'll set out his plan next week amid signs that restrictions will be lifted only slowly. This has taken courage."

I don't know anything about Ms Phillips's background or expertise, but in my opinion, this is ridiculous: we've not been supplied with any evidence to support claims that the lockdown policy has succeed. Even the government's official figures, now exaggerated by imprecise recording methods and the inclusion of categories not thought necessary a week or so ago, align more to my predictions from early March than those of the Imperial College model.

The much-vaunted new intensive care hospitals haven't been needed - 100 patients treated in total at the London Nightingale when there are 4000 beds! - and nor in my opinion will they be. Any assertions that this is because of the lockdown doesn't have any obvious basis. Just because B follows A doesn't mean that B caused A. It doesn't take "courage" for a largely pointless policy to have its outcome smoothly misrepresented as a success, courage would be the admission that the draconian restrictions on our civil liberties are an error.

The case against the PM's panic policy is not some arbitrary transient choice between compassion and money/freedom, or the worry that governments given or allowed the powers ours now has have always been reluctant to part with them. Melanie Phillips doesn't appear to care: "Yet among people for whom damage to the economy outweighs all other considerations, there's no acknowledgment of Johnson's complex balancing act. For such people, lockdown must end immediately. Some of them claim, moreover, that there never was any need for it in the first place. The virus, they say (with scant regard for either humanity or settled facts) poses no serious threat because it only kills relatively few old people or those who would have died this year anyway." and adds that "A dismaying number of these "economy-firsters" have seized on certain statistical studies to claim that the virus death rate is lower than had been forecast and therefore Covid-19 is not so dangerous after all."

Well I'm most definitely not an "economy-firster", and would like to think that I'm compassionate, sensitive and understanding (although my wife may disagree!), but you don't need statistical studies to know that the forecasts on which the Panic Policy was based were flawed: the empty Nightingale Hospitals show that.

The question is simply whether the government’s actions have caused the death rate to fall to "manageable levels", or whether they haven't, despite Ms Phillips assertion that "it's only because of the lockdown that it's under control". At the moment, without any evidence whatsoever to back that claim up, the jury is still very much out on that one.

Ms Phillips adds: "But all these statistical calculations are suspect because we still don't know how many have been  infected, nor how many have died." Well, it is true that we won't really know how many have died until the outbreak is over, but even then it will be almost impossible as there is no rigour to the way deaths are attributed to Covid-19: They appear to be have been simultaneously over-estimated (in general) and under-estimated (in care homes).

I've got no doubt that there are heartless individuals "with scant regard for either humanity or settled facts", it is very, very wrong to suggest that they are the only people who oppose the PM's policy.
Some of us are not materialist. We simply analysed the data we had available and came to a very different conclusion, and we've yet to be proven wrong.

Nobody I know, and nobody any of them knows, has had, let alone died from Covid-19, which strongly suggests that the Lockdown Panic Measures are an unnecessary danger to the long-term life and health of the British public. We are going to end up living in a country which will not be able to sustain the health and welfare services we currently take for granted and which won't be able to afford the living standards which sustain health.

And all in response to a problem which even the government's chief advisor knew was never the size he'd claimed it to be, otherwise he'd have kept to his own social distancing values wouldn't he?