Fun* message from our neighbour. There is a plot of land for sale at the back of her property - we all have shared access which is in our respective title deeds.
Cue potential buyer taking pictures saying "I would buy the lane and bar access, you can park on the road".
Have emailed the estate agent to remind them that (a) there is legal shared access and (b) having raised this fact to them they have a responsibility not to misrepresent this fact to potential clients...
c) because you will protect your rights by injunction. And the buyer who was not specifically made aware of this shared access will then sue the estate agents' asses....
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
We have a general election in exactly 4 weeks time. I haven’t got the faintest scoobie who to vote for. I don’t even know which bloc to vote for. Ditto the council and regional elections on the same day.
We’ve got eight parliamentary parties, and I could seriously consider voting for six of them.
Meanwhile, if the Mail is correct (I know, I know), Jerry Sadowitz's Edinburgh show attracted complaints because he got his penis out on stage, and engaged in racial slurs about Sunak. So it was cancelled. Honestly, these snowflakes. What's wrong with a bit of willy-waving and racism, eh?
He’s Jerry Sadowitz. As with Frankie Boyle, if you’re buying a ticket with his name on it, you know what you’re letting yourself in for.
I'm not in favour of cancelling. But again, if the Mail is accurate:
He called Rishi Sunak a 'p***'; said the economy was awful because it is run by 'blacks and women'. He got his penis out to a woman in the front row.'
He's treading a fine line, surely?
Forgive my nervousness at believing tabloid reports of controversial comedy club acts, devoid of the context and nuance that would have been present at the venue for the live audience.
Just wondering what context you imagine calling Sunak a "Paki" is appropriate.
Or indeed accurate.
It does rather bring to mind the infamous (and often censored scene) in Fawlty Towers with the Major taking his girlfriend to see India.
When he uses the racial slurs, we're supposed to be laughing at him (and at his brand of casual racism) rather than with him. However using the words is central to the joke.
Without knowing the context of the joke, it's hard to make any judgement call on whether or not it was appropriate. Racist slurs are deplorable, but if they're being used in context to make fun of racists, it's acceptable.
I don't disagree with that. I started the debate by pointing out that a) one should take the Mail's reporting on Sadowitz with a pinch of salt, and b) I don't believe in cancelling stuff.
Having said that, I was merely pointing out that Sunak is of Indian, rather than Pakistani, origin. If you're going to use racial slurs as a weapon in humour, you could at least be accurate. Or maybe that was the joke; I don't know, I wasn't there.
Yep, agree, that's the problem, without knowing the context you can't judge the joke.
There is a Stewart Lee routine where he describes himself as being of "scotch" heritage in front of a Scottish audience. Using the wrong word to describe his heritage is integral to the routine.
Does the fact that the theatre cancelled the show not suggest that the penile exposure and racism was not appropriately bound by theatrical context?
Probably. Perhaps even likely. And I'm certainly not rushing to the defence of a penis-flashing racist.
But there is a big gulf between "suggest" and "prove". Given the broader context of comedians being cancelled by people wilfully misinterpreting them based on a partial reading of the joke, I'd want to understand the specifics of the joke in the context of the routine before making a judgement.
The theatre cancelled precisely one night of Sadowitz as it was only a two-night run. Most likely they got a bunch of complaints and figured it was cheaper, quicker and easier to cancel than to investigate. Not being familiar with the Sadowitz oeuvre, I could not comment further.
Fun* message from our neighbour. There is a plot of land for sale at the back of her property - we all have shared access which is in our respective title deeds.
Cue potential buyer taking pictures saying "I would buy the lane and bar access, you can park on the road".
Have emailed the estate agent to remind them that (a) there is legal shared access and (b) having raised this fact to them they have a responsibility not to misrepresent this fact to potential clients...
c) because you will protect your rights by injunction. And the buyer who was not specifically made aware of this shared access will then sue the estate agents' asses....
I suppose its possible the estate agent wasn't made aware of legal shared access. They are now aware. And legally have to represent this to their clients.
The planning permission granted does involve the shared access lane - because of things like water run off. But the signed-off plans have a turning area which provides access both to parking spaces being created by the new house and to our existing driveways.
So providing the person who develops this isn't an anus, it all looks fine. "You can park on the road" just makes me laugh. Had enough of shared access have we? Because you are an anus? Don't spend £stupid to buy this plot and then £lots to build a house as we'll have you in court endlessly. Better to buy something else love.
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
He also said he makes exceedingly good cakes. He was wrong about that.
Interesting nugget on the Opinium polling from Peston - “support for Truss mostly comes from the older end of the Tory party, as she has a 40 point lead among those aged over 65. Among the under 50s, she is 8 points behind Sunak”.
More even than her predecessors Truss will have to be laser-like in looking after the interests of the Tories' elderly client vote.
It that due to policy differences, or just reflecting different generations attitudes towards race?
Look at those age bands, and consider Liz Truss is (to an extent) cos-playing Mrs Thatcher, who left office in 1990, 32 years ago.
Over 65s (who favour Truss) were adults during Mrs Thatcher's hegemony. Under 50s (who favour Sunak) have no adult memory of Thatcher in office. Those in between would have been young adults (club 18-30) in the Thatcher years, more likely hit by cuts and unemployment. If you don't remember Mrs T, you are perhaps oblivious to Truss's echoes.
Truss' 'cos-play' looks to me like the tribute act of someone who remembers the myth not the person and I'd expect those who lived through the 80s to see its inauthenticity rather than go wow that's brilliant.
I suspect that is what is happening with the 50-65 age group, who would have been young adults closer to the sharp end at the time.
Will it take a currency crisis for politicians of all parties to realise there they can't spend without limit and/or cut taxes with no thought to how it will be financed?
Covid spending was financed by and large by quantitative easing (so 'printing money'), which is now going into reverse with quantitative tightening ('burning money'?). Interest costs are higher for any new debt or old inflation-linked debt. We're going to end up pushing things to their breaking point.
We need to be honest with voters that energy prices going up will make us all a bit poorer, and say we are going to do XYZ to improve our energy security and stop this happening again - nuclear, wind and tidal at 10x the current pace.
In the meantime, support for gas price rises should be targeted and form a part of universal credit. Or perhaps something to help phase payments. Anything else is fantasy politics that will backfire.
However current circumstance are extreme and the price cap does seem the obvious way to protect the public, as long as the retail suppliers are protected from being made bankrupt by the cap.
I dunno. Maybe it's a pragmatic way to approach the problem, but it does seem a bit overly broad -- as well as helping people who are going to be in serious financial difficulties, it also effectively would be giving money to people like me who don't have any need for help in paying the bills.
Fun* message from our neighbour. There is a plot of land for sale at the back of her property - we all have shared access which is in our respective title deeds.
Cue potential buyer taking pictures saying "I would buy the lane and bar access, you can park on the road".
Have emailed the estate agent to remind them that (a) there is legal shared access and (b) having raised this fact to them they have a responsibility not to misrepresent this fact to potential clients...
c) because you will protect your rights by injunction. And the buyer who was not specifically made aware of this shared access will then sue the estate agents' asses....
If people want endless handouts they can vote Labour and for the higher taxes to match. Other than support for the poorest that is not the Tory way.
BREAKING: Liz Truss says that although she does not believe in handouts, she won't be paying back the expenses she claimed for her heating bills for the past 3 years x
We have a general election in exactly 4 weeks time. I haven’t got the faintest scoobie who to vote for. I don’t even know which bloc to vote for. Ditto the council and regional elections on the same day.
We’ve got eight parliamentary parties, and I could seriously consider voting for six of them.
Trust the wisdom of crowds. Either gather a small crowd of your friends and have them try to sway you, or look at the opinion polls, where you can choose to support the party of your six with the most support - to strengthen it further - or the party of the six with the least support - to encourage diversity in Parliamentary debate.
Mr. Sandpit, good job Germany didn't do something really stupid like close a load of nuclear reactors because of something that happened in Japan due to an earthquake and tsunami, right?
The question is: was Merkel acting in the Russian interest, or just genuinely stupid when she made that call?
And now they're hooked on Russian gas.
To be fair, the West generally has made some bad calls (including with China) but this was especially foolish and unnecessary.
Wonderful thing, hindsight.
This however, was foresight. One could have predicted that cosying up to Putin was unwise.
India and China are currently cosying up to China, and swimming in cut price energy as a result. It may be morally dubious; unwise it ain't.
It's the long term that matters. People like Putin and the CCP don't give things away without expecting a return. Get dependent on cheap energy on Russia, and then you find your prices will finally go through the roof when you have to take a stand. Borrow money cheaply from China, and in the end, people are storming the Presidential Palace.
And give the politicians an expectation that they will be given Russian money after they leave office and they view Russia in a more favourable light.
- “… there’s no floor to the government’s unpopularity.“
I think this is correct. While unlikely, I do think that a Canada-scenario is feasible.
I note that Martin Baxter’s “Low Seats” prediction for the Tories is currently 102. As the shit hits the fan that number could fall.
This video of a Bury North focus group posted by @rottenborough on the previous thread is essential viewing for Conservatives. These are their 2019 voters. They are in pain. Deep pain. One hates to think what they are going to say in 12 months time.
The final piece in the Canada jigsaw would be Farage chipping away at Conservative support on the right.
Up to now, he has pulled his pinches when it counts. But...
Like all opportunists, he recognises an opportunity when he sees one.
One heck of an opportunity is about to be presented on a plate to the far-right. Farage’s latest vehicle is in by far the best position to mop up that type of voter.
I finally got round to reading that Spectator article Mike recommended yesterday. Jeepers creepers! You don’t usually see that kind of stuff in the Spectator! Pulls no punches. This is a party that is ripe for shedding voters left, centre… and right.
In those final fateful moments, you can observe highly intelligent, highly trained professionals making error after error, gradually dooming them and their passengers. Despite the ringing alarms of the onboard systems, they lose sight of what they are doing or how to avoid the impending doom. They pull the joystick instead of releasing it, they shut down the working engine instead of the failing one, or sometimes the two pilots pull in different directions, cancelling each other out. Eventually, they hit the Point of No Return and, shortly after, the ground.
Pity that Labour, SNP etc are equally devoid of answers though.
Starmer's stance on the energy price cap is good though.
I will just point out here I have been saying for months that it needs to be frozen.
Unless he is committing to taxpayers paying the difference it is no solution at all.
Labour and the LibDems have the immense advantage of being in opposition here. They just have to sound vaguely credible. The detail does not matter. But, yes, taxpayer money does need to be the final resort here. We have a wartime economy, even if we are not ourselves at war directly. In wartime, extraordinary measures are called for.
Incarceration of insufficiently patriotic types next on the agenda.
When fascism comes to England again, it will be wearing a suit and carrying a flag.
So Truss either supports Labour policy on energy pricing - or she makes people pay more. Obviously, she’ll nick the Labour policy. Labour’s job now is to ensure that when it happens voters realise this.
Labour nicked it from the LibDems. LibDem's job is to ensure voters realise this. I'm doing my bit.
If people want endless handouts they can vote Labour and for the higher taxes to match. Other than support for the poorest that is not the Tory way.
BREAKING: Liz Truss says that although she does not believe in handouts, she won't be paying back the expenses she claimed for her heating bills for the past 3 years x
You do know that’s a comedian, and not the BBC Pol Ed?
On the substantive point raised, there’s a limit to how much an MP can claim in total for their housing expenses, so they definitely will be affected by the cost of energy bills.
- “… there’s no floor to the government’s unpopularity.“
I think this is correct. While unlikely, I do think that a Canada-scenario is feasible.
I note that Martin Baxter’s “Low Seats” prediction for the Tories is currently 102. As the shit hits the fan that number could fall.
This video of a Bury North focus group posted by @rottenborough on the previous thread is essential viewing for Conservatives. These are their 2019 voters. They are in pain. Deep pain. One hates to think what they are going to say in 12 months time.
The final piece in the Canada jigsaw would be Farage chipping away at Conservative support on the right.
Up to now, he has pulled his pinches when it counts. But...
Like all opportunists, he recognises an opportunity when he sees one.
One heck of an opportunity is about to be presented on a plate to the far-right. Farage’s latest vehicle is in by far the best position to mop up that type of voter.
I finally got round to reading that Spectator article Mike recommended yesterday. Jeepers creepers! You don’t usually see that kind of stuff in the Spectator! Pulls no punches. This is a party that is ripe for shedding voters left, centre… and right.
In those final fateful moments, you can observe highly intelligent, highly trained professionals making error after error, gradually dooming them and their passengers. Despite the ringing alarms of the onboard systems, they lose sight of what they are doing or how to avoid the impending doom. They pull the joystick instead of releasing it, they shut down the working engine instead of the failing one, or sometimes the two pilots pull in different directions, cancelling each other out. Eventually, they hit the Point of No Return and, shortly after, the ground.
Pity that Labour, SNP etc are equally devoid of answers though.
Starmer's stance on the energy price cap is good though.
I will just point out here I have been saying for months that it needs to be frozen.
Unless he is committing to taxpayers paying the difference it is no solution at all.
Labour and the LibDems have the immense advantage of being in opposition here. They just have to sound vaguely credible. The detail does not matter. But, yes, taxpayer money does need to be the final resort here. We have a wartime economy, even if we are not ourselves at war directly. In wartime, extraordinary measures are called for.
Incarceration of insufficiently patriotic types next on the agenda.
When fascism comes to England again, it will be wearing a suit and carrying a flag.
The party I see waving flags the most is the SNP…
I don't think they're coming to England.
Hoewver progressive, anti nationalism SKS frequently comes to Scotland to tell us what's best for us..
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Meanwhile, if the Mail is correct (I know, I know), Jerry Sadowitz's Edinburgh show attracted complaints because he got his penis out on stage, and engaged in racial slurs about Sunak. So it was cancelled. Honestly, these snowflakes. What's wrong with a bit of willy-waving and racism, eh?
He’s Jerry Sadowitz. As with Frankie Boyle, if you’re buying a ticket with his name on it, you know what you’re letting yourself in for.
I'm not in favour of cancelling. But again, if the Mail is accurate:
He called Rishi Sunak a 'p***'; said the economy was awful because it is run by 'blacks and women'. He got his penis out to a woman in the front row.'
He's treading a fine line, surely?
Forgive my nervousness at believing tabloid reports of controversial comedy club acts, devoid of the context and nuance that would have been present at the venue for the live audience.
Just wondering what context you imagine calling Sunak a "Paki" is appropriate.
Or indeed accurate.
It does rather bring to mind the infamous (and often censored scene) in Fawlty Towers with the Major taking his girlfriend to see India.
When he uses the racial slurs, we're supposed to be laughing at him (and at his brand of casual racism) rather than with him. However using the words is central to the joke.
Without knowing the context of the joke, it's hard to make any judgement call on whether or not it was appropriate. Racist slurs are deplorable, but if they're being used in context to make fun of racists, it's acceptable.
I don't disagree with that. I started the debate by pointing out that a) one should take the Mail's reporting on Sadowitz with a pinch of salt, and b) I don't believe in cancelling stuff.
Having said that, I was merely pointing out that Sunak is of Indian, rather than Pakistani, origin. If you're going to use racial slurs as a weapon in humour, you could at least be accurate. Or maybe that was the joke; I don't know, I wasn't there.
Yep, agree, that's the problem, without knowing the context you can't judge the joke.
There is a Stewart Lee routine where he describes himself as being of "scotch" heritage in front of a Scottish audience. Using the wrong word to describe his heritage is integral to the routine.
Does the fact that the theatre cancelled the show not suggest that the penile exposure and racism was not appropriately bound by theatrical context?
Probably. Perhaps even likely. And I'm certainly not rushing to the defence of a penis-flashing racist.
But there is a big gulf between "suggest" and "prove". Given the broader context of comedians being cancelled by people wilfully misinterpreting them based on a partial reading of the joke, I'd want to understand the specifics of the joke in the context of the routine before making a judgement.
We could leave the decision up to the free market? A private business, who were best placed to understand the full context, took a choice. Does everyone else need to take an opinion on the matter?
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Besides, imagine that we hadn't called lockdowns March, November and January.
Unless you think that cases would have just stopped rising, we would pretty rapidly have ended up at health system collapse. It's just maths.
What would that have done for the mental state of the country?
- “… there’s no floor to the government’s unpopularity.“
I think this is correct. While unlikely, I do think that a Canada-scenario is feasible.
I note that Martin Baxter’s “Low Seats” prediction for the Tories is currently 102. As the shit hits the fan that number could fall.
This video of a Bury North focus group posted by @rottenborough on the previous thread is essential viewing for Conservatives. These are their 2019 voters. They are in pain. Deep pain. One hates to think what they are going to say in 12 months time.
The final piece in the Canada jigsaw would be Farage chipping away at Conservative support on the right.
Up to now, he has pulled his pinches when it counts. But...
Like all opportunists, he recognises an opportunity when he sees one.
One heck of an opportunity is about to be presented on a plate to the far-right. Farage’s latest vehicle is in by far the best position to mop up that type of voter.
I finally got round to reading that Spectator article Mike recommended yesterday. Jeepers creepers! You don’t usually see that kind of stuff in the Spectator! Pulls no punches. This is a party that is ripe for shedding voters left, centre… and right.
In those final fateful moments, you can observe highly intelligent, highly trained professionals making error after error, gradually dooming them and their passengers. Despite the ringing alarms of the onboard systems, they lose sight of what they are doing or how to avoid the impending doom. They pull the joystick instead of releasing it, they shut down the working engine instead of the failing one, or sometimes the two pilots pull in different directions, cancelling each other out. Eventually, they hit the Point of No Return and, shortly after, the ground.
Pity that Labour, SNP etc are equally devoid of answers though.
Starmer's stance on the energy price cap is good though.
I will just point out here I have been saying for months that it needs to be frozen.
Unless he is committing to taxpayers paying the difference it is no solution at all.
Labour and the LibDems have the immense advantage of being in opposition here. They just have to sound vaguely credible. The detail does not matter. But, yes, taxpayer money does need to be the final resort here. We have a wartime economy, even if we are not ourselves at war directly. In wartime, extraordinary measures are called for.
Incarceration of insufficiently patriotic types next on the agenda.
When fascism comes to England again, it will be wearing a suit and carrying a flag.
The party I see waving flags the most is the SNP…
I don't think they're coming to England.
Hoewver progressive, anti nationalism SKS frequently comes to Scotland to tell us what's best for us..
I am aware where the SNP operates. Is Scotland inherently immune from fascism?
- “… there’s no floor to the government’s unpopularity.“
I think this is correct. While unlikely, I do think that a Canada-scenario is feasible.
I note that Martin Baxter’s “Low Seats” prediction for the Tories is currently 102. As the shit hits the fan that number could fall.
This video of a Bury North focus group posted by @rottenborough on the previous thread is essential viewing for Conservatives. These are their 2019 voters. They are in pain. Deep pain. One hates to think what they are going to say in 12 months time.
The final piece in the Canada jigsaw would be Farage chipping away at Conservative support on the right.
Up to now, he has pulled his pinches when it counts. But...
Like all opportunists, he recognises an opportunity when he sees one.
One heck of an opportunity is about to be presented on a plate to the far-right. Farage’s latest vehicle is in by far the best position to mop up that type of voter.
I finally got round to reading that Spectator article Mike recommended yesterday. Jeepers creepers! You don’t usually see that kind of stuff in the Spectator! Pulls no punches. This is a party that is ripe for shedding voters left, centre… and right.
In those final fateful moments, you can observe highly intelligent, highly trained professionals making error after error, gradually dooming them and their passengers. Despite the ringing alarms of the onboard systems, they lose sight of what they are doing or how to avoid the impending doom. They pull the joystick instead of releasing it, they shut down the working engine instead of the failing one, or sometimes the two pilots pull in different directions, cancelling each other out. Eventually, they hit the Point of No Return and, shortly after, the ground.
Pity that Labour, SNP etc are equally devoid of answers though.
Starmer's stance on the energy price cap is good though.
I will just point out here I have been saying for months that it needs to be frozen.
Unless he is committing to taxpayers paying the difference it is no solution at all.
Labour and the LibDems have the immense advantage of being in opposition here. They just have to sound vaguely credible. The detail does not matter. But, yes, taxpayer money does need to be the final resort here. We have a wartime economy, even if we are not ourselves at war directly. In wartime, extraordinary measures are called for.
Incarceration of insufficiently patriotic types next on the agenda.
When fascism comes to England again, it will be wearing a suit and carrying a flag.
The party I see waving flags the most is the SNP…
Isn't that because you're so accustomed to seeing the UJ anyway?
- “… there’s no floor to the government’s unpopularity.“
I think this is correct. While unlikely, I do think that a Canada-scenario is feasible.
I note that Martin Baxter’s “Low Seats” prediction for the Tories is currently 102. As the shit hits the fan that number could fall.
This video of a Bury North focus group posted by @rottenborough on the previous thread is essential viewing for Conservatives. These are their 2019 voters. They are in pain. Deep pain. One hates to think what they are going to say in 12 months time.
The final piece in the Canada jigsaw would be Farage chipping away at Conservative support on the right.
Up to now, he has pulled his pinches when it counts. But...
Like all opportunists, he recognises an opportunity when he sees one.
One heck of an opportunity is about to be presented on a plate to the far-right. Farage’s latest vehicle is in by far the best position to mop up that type of voter.
I finally got round to reading that Spectator article Mike recommended yesterday. Jeepers creepers! You don’t usually see that kind of stuff in the Spectator! Pulls no punches. This is a party that is ripe for shedding voters left, centre… and right.
In those final fateful moments, you can observe highly intelligent, highly trained professionals making error after error, gradually dooming them and their passengers. Despite the ringing alarms of the onboard systems, they lose sight of what they are doing or how to avoid the impending doom. They pull the joystick instead of releasing it, they shut down the working engine instead of the failing one, or sometimes the two pilots pull in different directions, cancelling each other out. Eventually, they hit the Point of No Return and, shortly after, the ground.
Pity that Labour, SNP etc are equally devoid of answers though.
Starmer's stance on the energy price cap is good though.
I will just point out here I have been saying for months that it needs to be frozen.
Unless he is committing to taxpayers paying the difference it is no solution at all.
Labour and the LibDems have the immense advantage of being in opposition here. They just have to sound vaguely credible. The detail does not matter. But, yes, taxpayer money does need to be the final resort here. We have a wartime economy, even if we are not ourselves at war directly. In wartime, extraordinary measures are called for.
Incarceration of insufficiently patriotic types next on the agenda.
When fascism comes to England again, it will be wearing a suit and carrying a flag.
The party I see waving flags the most is the SNP…
I don't think they're coming to England.
Hoewver progressive, anti nationalism SKS frequently comes to Scotland to tell us what's best for us..
I am aware where the SNP operates. Is Scotland inherently immune from fascism?
Nowhere is immune from fascism. However I would note that the politics of England have been substantially influenced by the populist anti EU, anti immigration far right for the last couple of decades, Scotland not so much.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Yesterday I went into boots opticians and every member of staff was wearing a mask and there were signs up saying wear a mask (no members of the public were doing so). That is far from the only example. In our local hospital people are still only allowed one visitor by appointment.
All the restrictions haven't been removed so your paper is premature.
You will need to write it in five or 10 years time as there will of course be aftershocks even when all restrictions are removed. If they ever will be. Because even months after that happens there will be scares (monkeypox, you name it) which will provoke deep anxiety in many people with the thought that there will be further lockdowns.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Besides, imagine that we hadn't called lockdowns March, November and January.
Unless you think that cases would have just stopped rising, we would pretty rapidly have ended up at health system collapse. It's just maths.
What would that have done for the mental state of the country?
We will never know of course what might have happened. The Guardian calls a health system collapse every year and has done for the past 10 years. Famously.
King Cole, no hindsight required. I said at the time it was a bloody stupid decision. So did many others.
The problem in Japan was earthquake + tsunami. Germany is not renowned for tsunamis. The change was deranged, unless one takes the view she was acting more for Russia than Germany (not my opinion - I think she was a damned fool, tying her country to Russia for reasons that were stupid rather than treacherous).
It was popular. She was good at keeping herself in power.
Absolutely, there's always been a very strong anti nuclear power movement in Germany, Fukushima was the last straw. Hardly unusual for politicians to make bad decisions that are popular without necessarily being deranged or treacherous. Also popular with the powerful German coal lobby.
Also, re other comments: You have to find very old Germans to find any who feel guilty about the war.
The difference with younger Germans (eg under 35) is they don't have the sympathetic view of Russia that many Germans had from the events around German reunification, way more important to attitudes than "war guilt" so far as I can tell.
Truss' 'cos-play' looks to me like the tribute act of someone who remembers the myth not the person and I'd expect those who lived through the 80s to see its inauthenticity rather than go wow that's brilliant.
I suspect that is what is happening with the 50-65 age group, who would have been young adults closer to the sharp end at the time.
The cheap tribute act is never going to be a patch on the original even if they can belt out the old tunes with note for note accuracy.
I'm left with two thoughts about Truss - she is either going to take the votes of the membership and then screw them over by going back to the centre or she is what she seems to be - an unreconstructed Thatcherite who genuinely believes if taxes are cut, everyone will be happy, the economy will grow and the small matter of £95 billion of debt interest will be hardly worth worrying about as we all frolic in the sunlit uplands of new Conservative prosperity.
Back in the real world, I'm much more sceptical - she looks seriously out of her depth and whether, when faced with a real problem, she has anything other than bargain basement blustering remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, if the Mail is correct (I know, I know), Jerry Sadowitz's Edinburgh show attracted complaints because he got his penis out on stage, and engaged in racial slurs about Sunak. So it was cancelled. Honestly, these snowflakes. What's wrong with a bit of willy-waving and racism, eh?
I let this pass, but in fact, NO
Because: what actually is wrong with a bit of willy waving and racism? How have we become so pitifully anxious that this unnerves us?
It’s a penis. It’s part of the human anatomy. Unless Jerry Sadowitz is forcing it down your throat, it is utterly harmless. Indeed a detumescent penis is a forlorn and unthreatening thing, like the buttock of a pensioner. Was someone really so scandalised by it they fainted and complained?
As for calling the chancellor a p*ki, that’s rude and probably racist BUT IT’S JUST A WORD. he’s a billionaire chancellor. He can probably cope. My god
More to the point, this is the Fringe. It’s meant to be fringey and edgy, but that’s all gone, so now it will become another sanitised woke-fest and comics will self censor and the grey illiberal lefties win again
It’s dreadful. The whole woke moralising shit is dreadful. We are censoring ourselves to cultural oblivion. We are like the prim victorians but without the empire, the confidence and the amazing engineering. We are just prim, and dull
I agree with you.
Was Mary Whitehouse woke before her time?
Yes, bizarrely
The new left is like the old prudish moralising Whitehouse right. Utterly depressing
My arty lefty friends are in despair, apart from the Woke ones who are now mere ideologues. I tend to avoid them
My only major difference with you is that I see as much censorious bollocks on the right as I do on the left. It may look slightly different, but the intolerance and the refusal to engage is the same. It's a tragedy, genuinely, because argument is one of the great human achievements. And one of the vital foundation stones of progress. I blame social media. Almost entirely.
The right is odious in multiple ways. Undeniable. But at least it makes a vague, often feeble attempt to support free speech. I can’t remember the last time the right tried to cancel a comedy show at the Fringe or similar venues. Probably the Mary Whitehouse era, actually
The BBC is ta frequent target of the right's fury. It makes a decision and then reverses it in the face of relentless attacks from the right-wing commentariat - see furores over the Last Night of the Proms, for example. Then there's the government itself making peaceful protest a criminal offence. And look at how Liz Truss reacted to protestors at a recent hustings.
I think freedom is under threat from all corners. It is terrifying.
Meanwhile, if the Mail is correct (I know, I know), Jerry Sadowitz's Edinburgh show attracted complaints because he got his penis out on stage, and engaged in racial slurs about Sunak. So it was cancelled. Honestly, these snowflakes. What's wrong with a bit of willy-waving and racism, eh?
He’s Jerry Sadowitz. As with Frankie Boyle, if you’re buying a ticket with his name on it, you know what you’re letting yourself in for.
I'm not in favour of cancelling. But again, if the Mail is accurate:
He called Rishi Sunak a 'p***'; said the economy was awful because it is run by 'blacks and women'. He got his penis out to a woman in the front row.'
He's treading a fine line, surely?
Forgive my nervousness at believing tabloid reports of controversial comedy club acts, devoid of the context and nuance that would have been present at the venue for the live audience.
Just wondering what context you imagine calling Sunak a "Paki" is appropriate.
Or indeed accurate.
It does rather bring to mind the infamous (and often censored scene) in Fawlty Towers with the Major taking his girlfriend to see India.
When he uses the racial slurs, we're supposed to be laughing at him (and at his brand of casual racism) rather than with him. However using the words is central to the joke.
Without knowing the context of the joke, it's hard to make any judgement call on whether or not it was appropriate. Racist slurs are deplorable, but if they're being used in context to make fun of racists, it's acceptable.
I don't disagree with that. I started the debate by pointing out that a) one should take the Mail's reporting on Sadowitz with a pinch of salt, and b) I don't believe in cancelling stuff.
Having said that, I was merely pointing out that Sunak is of Indian, rather than Pakistani, origin. If you're going to use racial slurs as a weapon in humour, you could at least be accurate. Or maybe that was the joke; I don't know, I wasn't there.
I'm a fan of Sadowitz, but insofar as the term p*ki can ever not be racist, I'd say using it in reference to somone of Indian heritage is unmistakeably so.
One tweeter said he's seen Sadowitz a few times and previously he's heard him use 'pakistani' (dunno in what context). I wonder if like many of the instinctively combatitive JS feels he's got to ramp it up with the dying of the light? That would be sad. Luckily we don't see that sort of thing on PB.
I thought Sadowitz was amusing when he first came to prominence, as the whole shocking act was just that: an act. His interviews, however, have convinced me, it's no act. He really is this hate-filled racist misogynist. And he readily admits it. Just nobody believed it. The joke loses its flavour when one realises it's not humour, it's a heart-felt rant.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Yesterday I went into boots opticians and every member of staff was wearing a mask and there were signs up saying wear a mask (no members of the public were doing so). That is far from the only example. In our local hospital people are still only allowed one visitor by appointment.
All the restrictions haven't been removed so your paper is premature.
You will need to write it in five or 10 years time as there will of course be aftershocks even when all restrictions are removed. If they ever will be. Because even months after that happens there will be scares (monkeypox, you name it) which will provoke deep anxiety in many people with the thought that there will be further lockdowns.
Unfortunately the Government has ceased the data collection and ended our funding, although we have been funded to do some separate work on monkeypox, and there are other data collection exercises, e.g. by the ONS. More research will, I’m sure, shed more light on what is driving this phenomenon.
I should’ve said all Government restrictions have been lifted. Boots is a private company and can do what it wants.
re Sadowitz the instinct is to side with him. I would be amazed if he didn't use the p word to make a point about how some people might see our potential next PM.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Besides, imagine that we hadn't called lockdowns March, November and January.
Unless you think that cases would have just stopped rising, we would pretty rapidly have ended up at health system collapse. It's just maths.
What would that have done for the mental state of the country?
We will never know of course what might have happened. The Guardian calls a health system collapse every year and has done for the past 10 years. Famously.
Do you think the current waiting lists, or waiting times for ambulances, or difficulties getting dental care, are indicative of a health system that’s all hunky-dory?
If people want endless handouts they can vote Labour and for the higher taxes to match. Other than support for the poorest that is not the Tory way.
BREAKING: Liz Truss says that although she does not believe in handouts, she won't be paying back the expenses she claimed for her heating bills for the past 3 years x
You do know that’s a comedian, and not the BBC Pol Ed?
On the substantive point raised, there’s a limit to how much an MP can claim in total for their housing expenses, so they definitely will be affected by the cost of energy bills.
Yes and no. If you live in an expensive place, you'll hit the ceiling before the energy price rise. If you don't, you won't. When I was an MP I wanted to be close to Parliament (partly as my wife wasn't very well so I wanted to be able to pop over if there was an issue and partly just laziness), so I rented a flat in Great Peter Street and always claimed the full allowance to pay for it. But if I'd lived in, say, Brixton I'd have been nowhere near the ceiling, and any energy price rise wouldn't have affected me there.
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
That will be why Boris with multiple marriages and relationships displays these virtues so well.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Yesterday I went into boots opticians and every member of staff was wearing a mask and there were signs up saying wear a mask (no members of the public were doing so). That is far from the only example. In our local hospital people are still only allowed one visitor by appointment.
All the restrictions haven't been removed so your paper is premature.
You will need to write it in five or 10 years time as there will of course be aftershocks even when all restrictions are removed. If they ever will be. Because even months after that happens there will be scares (monkeypox, you name it) which will provoke deep anxiety in many people with the thought that there will be further lockdowns.
Unfortunately the Government has ceased the data collection and ended our funding, although we have been funded to do some separate work on monkeypox, and there are other data collection exercises, e.g. by the ONS. More research will, I’m sure, shed more light on what is driving this phenomenon.
I should’ve said all Government restrictions have been lifted. Boots is a private company and can do what it wants.
That's ridiculous. Restrictions are restrictions. If you want to write a paper on the effect of restrictions then you can't decide to exclude the ones that you choose to classify differently.
Did Javed make the distinction? Irrelevant of course but do you happen to know?
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Besides, imagine that we hadn't called lockdowns March, November and January.
Unless you think that cases would have just stopped rising, we would pretty rapidly have ended up at health system collapse. It's just maths.
What would that have done for the mental state of the country?
We will never know of course what might have happened. The Guardian calls a health system collapse every year and has done for the past 10 years. Famously.
Do you think the current waiting lists, or waiting times for ambulances, or difficulties getting dental care, are indicative of a health system that’s all hunky-dory?
Of course not. But that's not the point being made. And coming back to the QALY calcs we will need to add illnesses not treated or diagnosed for two years and which are now manifesting themselves.
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
That will be why Boris with multiple marriages and relationships displays these virtues so well.
He's never been very good at learning though. Remember, he was sacked from the Times for lying, sacked from the Tory front bench for lying, sacked as PM for lying...If he'd only learned his lesson the first time he'd have been fine.
Despite everything, the Conservatives' poll rating is nothing unusual.
I can't recall Corbyn, Ed M leading in these forced choice questions. Starmer is clearly doing the best since Blair.
Labour are doing OK. A ten point lead in forced question suggests neck and neck if we assume the non Lab/Con votes are splitting 2 to 1 Labour (which seems reasonable, 'progressives' etc) then its indeed neck and neck. Of course if the Tories got 45% in a GE under FPTP they'll have a majority, so how many of these forced choicers who get actually squeezed is a key question.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Yesterday I went into boots opticians and every member of staff was wearing a mask and there were signs up saying wear a mask (no members of the public were doing so). That is far from the only example. In our local hospital people are still only allowed one visitor by appointment.
All the restrictions haven't been removed so your paper is premature.
You will need to write it in five or 10 years time as there will of course be aftershocks even when all restrictions are removed. If they ever will be. Because even months after that happens there will be scares (monkeypox, you name it) which will provoke deep anxiety in many people with the thought that there will be further lockdowns.
Unfortunately the Government has ceased the data collection and ended our funding, although we have been funded to do some separate work on monkeypox, and there are other data collection exercises, e.g. by the ONS. More research will, I’m sure, shed more light on what is driving this phenomenon.
I should’ve said all Government restrictions have been lifted. Boots is a private company and can do what it wants.
There's quite an aggressive message on our Surgery answerphone to the fact that changes to mask wearing do not (by implication capital letters) apply at our surgery. Masks still have to be worn. Furthermore I've been making quite frequent visits to far too many other Health professionals premises recently and generally speaking masks are required.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Yesterday I went into boots opticians and every member of staff was wearing a mask and there were signs up saying wear a mask (no members of the public were doing so). That is far from the only example. In our local hospital people are still only allowed one visitor by appointment.
All the restrictions haven't been removed so your paper is premature.
You will need to write it in five or 10 years time as there will of course be aftershocks even when all restrictions are removed. If they ever will be. Because even months after that happens there will be scares (monkeypox, you name it) which will provoke deep anxiety in many people with the thought that there will be further lockdowns.
Unfortunately the Government has ceased the data collection and ended our funding, although we have been funded to do some separate work on monkeypox, and there are other data collection exercises, e.g. by the ONS. More research will, I’m sure, shed more light on what is driving this phenomenon.
I should’ve said all Government restrictions have been lifted. Boots is a private company and can do what it wants.
That's ridiculous. Restrictions are restrictions. If you want to write a paper on the effect of restrictions then you can't decide to exclude the ones that you choose to classify differently.
Did Javed make the distinction? Irrelevant of course but do you happen to know?
We cite the Javid piece in the article: you can read it yourself. He touted the end of Government restrictions, as people here did too.
I think the argument that Boots optician asking people to wear masks and everyone ignoring their signs represents a significant ongoing restriction to UK society is a bit weak.
But, anyway, it’s not a paper on restrictions: it’s a paper on national mental health. Within that, we consider the role of lockdowns and other Government restrictions, although we don’t offer any firm conclusions given the difficulties in teasing apart different possible factors. We also cite some other literature on the matter. Overall, this suggests that there isn’t a simple relationship between lockdowns and poor mental health. The point of that was to illustrate the broader difficulty of doing QALY calculations on events over the pandemic.
re Sadowitz the instinct is to side with him. I would be amazed if he didn't use the p word to make a point about how some people might see our potential next PM.
But I wasn't there obvs.
The vast majority of people spouting off about it weren’t there either.
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
That will be why Boris with multiple marriages and relationships displays these virtues so well.
In religious terms marriage is supposed to be for life, Boris has many qualities but having successful marriages is not one of them
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Yesterday I went into boots opticians and every member of staff was wearing a mask and there were signs up saying wear a mask (no members of the public were doing so). That is far from the only example. In our local hospital people are still only allowed one visitor by appointment.
All the restrictions haven't been removed so your paper is premature.
You will need to write it in five or 10 years time as there will of course be aftershocks even when all restrictions are removed. If they ever will be. Because even months after that happens there will be scares (monkeypox, you name it) which will provoke deep anxiety in many people with the thought that there will be further lockdowns.
Unfortunately the Government has ceased the data collection and ended our funding, although we have been funded to do some separate work on monkeypox, and there are other data collection exercises, e.g. by the ONS. More research will, I’m sure, shed more light on what is driving this phenomenon.
I should’ve said all Government restrictions have been lifted. Boots is a private company and can do what it wants.
There's quite an aggressive message on our Surgery answerphone to the fact that changes to mask wearing do not (by implication capital letters) apply at our surgery. Masks still have to be worn. Furthermore I've been making quite frequent visits to far too many other Health professionals premises recently and generally speaking masks are required.
My sympathies that you’re having to have so many experiences of healthcare premises of late!
I am sceptical that continuing precautions at health premises are what’s driving continued poor mental health in the country.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Yesterday I went into boots opticians and every member of staff was wearing a mask and there were signs up saying wear a mask (no members of the public were doing so). That is far from the only example. In our local hospital people are still only allowed one visitor by appointment.
All the restrictions haven't been removed so your paper is premature.
You will need to write it in five or 10 years time as there will of course be aftershocks even when all restrictions are removed. If they ever will be. Because even months after that happens there will be scares (monkeypox, you name it) which will provoke deep anxiety in many people with the thought that there will be further lockdowns.
Unfortunately the Government has ceased the data collection and ended our funding, although we have been funded to do some separate work on monkeypox, and there are other data collection exercises, e.g. by the ONS. More research will, I’m sure, shed more light on what is driving this phenomenon.
I should’ve said all Government restrictions have been lifted. Boots is a private company and can do what it wants.
There's quite an aggressive message on our Surgery answerphone to the fact that changes to mask wearing do not (by implication capital letters) apply at our surgery. Masks still have to be worn. Furthermore I've been making quite frequent visits to far too many other Health professionals premises recently and generally speaking masks are required.
My sympathies that you’re having to have so many experiences of healthcare premises of late!
I am sceptical that continuing precautions at health premises are what’s driving continued poor mental health in the country.
Yes it's puzzling isn't it. The remnants of the most restrictive environment that anyone has ever known which we are telling you continue to this day and you have no idea what relevance it might have to mental health.
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
Yes, my wife displays those qualities in abundance….
We have a general election in exactly 4 weeks time. I haven’t got the faintest scoobie who to vote for. I don’t even know which bloc to vote for. Ditto the council and regional elections on the same day.
We’ve got eight parliamentary parties, and I could seriously consider voting for six of them.
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
That will be why Boris with multiple marriages and relationships displays these virtues so well.
In religious terms marriage is supposed to be for life, Boris has many qualities but having successful marriages is not one of them
In non-religious terms marriage is supposed to be for life, but life isn't perfect and mistakes are made, and sometimes it is best to part ways.
This is an aspect of Christianity that puzzles me. In general the religion recognises that people are flawed beings who can't avoid making mistakes and being sinful, but that's kinda okay if you apologise for it, because Jesus sacrificed himself so that you would be forgiven for your sins. But make a mistake in marriage and you're expected to top punish yourself for that mistake for the rest of your life. No forgiveness there.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Yesterday I went into boots opticians and every member of staff was wearing a mask and there were signs up saying wear a mask (no members of the public were doing so). That is far from the only example. In our local hospital people are still only allowed one visitor by appointment.
All the restrictions haven't been removed so your paper is premature.
You will need to write it in five or 10 years time as there will of course be aftershocks even when all restrictions are removed. If they ever will be. Because even months after that happens there will be scares (monkeypox, you name it) which will provoke deep anxiety in many people with the thought that there will be further lockdowns.
Unfortunately the Government has ceased the data collection and ended our funding, although we have been funded to do some separate work on monkeypox, and there are other data collection exercises, e.g. by the ONS. More research will, I’m sure, shed more light on what is driving this phenomenon.
I should’ve said all Government restrictions have been lifted. Boots is a private company and can do what it wants.
There's quite an aggressive message on our Surgery answerphone to the fact that changes to mask wearing do not (by implication capital letters) apply at our surgery. Masks still have to be worn. Furthermore I've been making quite frequent visits to far too many other Health professionals premises recently and generally speaking masks are required.
My sympathies that you’re having to have so many experiences of healthcare premises of late!
I am sceptical that continuing precautions at health premises are what’s driving continued poor mental health in the country.
To be honest, getting sick people (we can assume GP surgeries and hospital admissions contain them) to wear masks around others when in a confined space is not the worst piece of public policy whatever they are sick with.
The biggest danger for Labour (and the govt if they take up a cap on the cap type policy) is how pissed off people are at the energy companies getting compensated. Its the new 'bailing out the banks and nobody is held to account'. If youre struggling and prices are 'frozen' at struggling to pay levels and the energy company taking 200 a month off you gets compensated for not taking 400, the CEO and shareholders all get fat payouts and nothing changes then theres a problem
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
That will be why Boris with multiple marriages and relationships displays these virtues so well.
In religious terms marriage is supposed to be for life, Boris has many qualities but having successful marriages is not one of them
In non-religious terms marriage is supposed to be for life, but life isn't perfect and mistakes are made, and sometimes it is best to part ways.
This is an aspect of Christianity that puzzles me. In general the religion recognises that people are flawed beings who can't avoid making mistakes and being sinful, but that's kinda okay if you apologise for it, because Jesus sacrificed himself so that you would be forgiven for your sins. But make a mistake in marriage and you're expected to top punish yourself for that mistake for the rest of your life. No forgiveness there.
It's a curious inconsistency.
That's the only curious inconsistency you've managed to unearth in religious belief systems.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Yesterday I went into boots opticians and every member of staff was wearing a mask and there were signs up saying wear a mask (no members of the public were doing so). That is far from the only example. In our local hospital people are still only allowed one visitor by appointment.
All the restrictions haven't been removed so your paper is premature.
You will need to write it in five or 10 years time as there will of course be aftershocks even when all restrictions are removed. If they ever will be. Because even months after that happens there will be scares (monkeypox, you name it) which will provoke deep anxiety in many people with the thought that there will be further lockdowns.
Unfortunately the Government has ceased the data collection and ended our funding, although we have been funded to do some separate work on monkeypox, and there are other data collection exercises, e.g. by the ONS. More research will, I’m sure, shed more light on what is driving this phenomenon.
I should’ve said all Government restrictions have been lifted. Boots is a private company and can do what it wants.
There's quite an aggressive message on our Surgery answerphone to the fact that changes to mask wearing do not (by implication capital letters) apply at our surgery. Masks still have to be worn. Furthermore I've been making quite frequent visits to far too many other Health professionals premises recently and generally speaking masks are required.
My sympathies that you’re having to have so many experiences of healthcare premises of late!
I am sceptical that continuing precautions at health premises are what’s driving continued poor mental health in the country.
Agree; what is depressing is having to visit so many healthcare premises rather than the fact that the staff are masked! On that point, we've had several quotes for work to be done on our bathroom in the last few days. We need to turn it into a wet room, now that I'm not as mobile as I'd like to be. However none of the plumbers or wetroom converters have been masked, but the occupational therapist, who is also visiting us, always wears a mask!
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
That will be why Boris with multiple marriages and relationships displays these virtues so well.
He's never been very good at learning though. Remember, he was sacked from the Times for lying, sacked from the Tory front bench for lying, sacked as PM for lying...If he'd only learned his lesson the first time he'd have been fine.
The lesson he has learnt is that with enough chutzpah and bluster it does not matter if you get sacked or divorced for lying, there are always more suckers out there.
We have a general election in exactly 4 weeks time. I haven’t got the faintest scoobie who to vote for. I don’t even know which bloc to vote for. Ditto the council and regional elections on the same day.
We’ve got eight parliamentary parties, and I could seriously consider voting for six of them.
Trust the wisdom of crowds. Either gather a small crowd of your friends and have them try to sway you, or look at the opinion polls, where you can choose to support the party of your six with the most support - to strengthen it further - or the party of the six with the least support - to encourage diversity in Parliamentary debate.
Good advice!
The only person who actually knows what he is going to vote, and who has attempted to persuade me too, is our older son. It is his second GE and he is strongly Liberal.
He did actually get me seriously thinking about that party. I have a few friends who are Liberals, one an MP who has been a strong pro-Ukrainian voice in our country ever since I met her about ten years ago.
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
That will be why Boris with multiple marriages and relationships displays these virtues so well.
He's never been very good at learning though. Remember, he was sacked from the Times for lying, sacked from the Tory front bench for lying, sacked as PM for lying...If he'd only learned his lesson the first time he'd have been fine.
The lesson he has learnt is that with enough chutzpah and bluster it does not matter if you get sacked or divorced for lying, there are always more suckers out there.
We have a general election in exactly 4 weeks time. I haven’t got the faintest scoobie who to vote for. I don’t even know which bloc to vote for. Ditto the council and regional elections on the same day.
We’ve got eight parliamentary parties, and I could seriously consider voting for six of them.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Yesterday I went into boots opticians and every member of staff was wearing a mask and there were signs up saying wear a mask (no members of the public were doing so). That is far from the only example. In our local hospital people are still only allowed one visitor by appointment.
All the restrictions haven't been removed so your paper is premature.
You will need to write it in five or 10 years time as there will of course be aftershocks even when all restrictions are removed. If they ever will be. Because even months after that happens there will be scares (monkeypox, you name it) which will provoke deep anxiety in many people with the thought that there will be further lockdowns.
Unfortunately the Government has ceased the data collection and ended our funding, although we have been funded to do some separate work on monkeypox, and there are other data collection exercises, e.g. by the ONS. More research will, I’m sure, shed more light on what is driving this phenomenon.
I should’ve said all Government restrictions have been lifted. Boots is a private company and can do what it wants.
There's quite an aggressive message on our Surgery answerphone to the fact that changes to mask wearing do not (by implication capital letters) apply at our surgery. Masks still have to be worn. Furthermore I've been making quite frequent visits to far too many other Health professionals premises recently and generally speaking masks are required.
My sympathies that you’re having to have so many experiences of healthcare premises of late!
I am sceptical that continuing precautions at health premises are what’s driving continued poor mental health in the country.
Agree; what is depressing is having to visit so many healthcare premises rather than the fact that the staff are masked! On that point, we've had several quotes for work to be done on our bathroom in the last few days. We need to turn it into a wet room, now that I'm not as mobile as I'd like to be. However none of the plumbers or wetroom converters have been masked, but the occupational therapist, who is also visiting us, always wears a mask!
There were three people in boots yesterday, where the staff were masked, and none looked particularly vulnerable; and hundreds in Tesco's, where no one was masked.
We have a general election in exactly 4 weeks time. I haven’t got the faintest scoobie who to vote for. I don’t even know which bloc to vote for. Ditto the council and regional elections on the same day.
We’ve got eight parliamentary parties, and I could seriously consider voting for six of them.
My general takeaway. Affluent, not necessarily posh, men who don't like taxes, rules and public officialdom. Libertarian with a dash of pro-British sentiment.
The biggest danger for Labour (and the govt if they take up a cap on the cap type policy) is how pissed off people are at the energy companies getting compensated. Its the new 'bailing out the banks and nobody is held to account'. If youre struggling and prices are 'frozen' at struggling to pay levels and the energy company taking 200 a month off you gets compensated for not taking 400, the CEO and shareholders all get fat payouts and nothing changes then theres a problem
I suppose you can refuse to compensate and renationalise as they fail? I’m only half joking because if we now agree, as a nation, to a centrally set price, then the “market” for energy has become even more artificial than it always was and nationalisation makes the most sense.
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
That will be why Boris with multiple marriages and relationships displays these virtues so well.
He's never been very good at learning though. Remember, he was sacked from the Times for lying, sacked from the Tory front bench for lying, sacked as PM for lying...If he'd only learned his lesson the first time he'd have been fine.
The lesson he has learnt is that with enough chutzpah and bluster it does not matter if you get sacked or divorced for lying, there are always more suckers out there.
Freudian slip?
I was just teeing it up for someone to knock it in the back of the net.....
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
That will be why Boris with multiple marriages and relationships displays these virtues so well.
He's never been very good at learning though. Remember, he was sacked from the Times for lying, sacked from the Tory front bench for lying, sacked as PM for lying...If he'd only learned his lesson the first time he'd have been fine.
The lesson he has learnt is that with enough chutzpah and bluster it does not matter if you get sacked or divorced for lying, there are always more suckers out there.
Freudian slip?
I was just teeing it up for someone to knock it in the back of the net.....
Must be very disappointing for you then that I blew it.
My son(14) has asked for a Nigel Farage cameo video for his birthday, What is the responsible parent to do?
Order it for him.
He's probably doing it to wind you up but doing so shows you're a good sport and that both you and he have a sense of humour.
Even if it's not a wind-up it's best to stay calm. Eg my son went through quite an intense Clarkson and Top Gear phase as a teenager. It worried me sick at the time but it turned out it was just a phase. By the time he went to uni he was perfectly ok.
So, wait it out and see what happens - is my advice.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Yesterday I went into boots opticians and every member of staff was wearing a mask and there were signs up saying wear a mask (no members of the public were doing so). That is far from the only example. In our local hospital people are still only allowed one visitor by appointment.
All the restrictions haven't been removed so your paper is premature.
You will need to write it in five or 10 years time as there will of course be aftershocks even when all restrictions are removed. If they ever will be. Because even months after that happens there will be scares (monkeypox, you name it) which will provoke deep anxiety in many people with the thought that there will be further lockdowns.
Unfortunately the Government has ceased the data collection and ended our funding, although we have been funded to do some separate work on monkeypox, and there are other data collection exercises, e.g. by the ONS. More research will, I’m sure, shed more light on what is driving this phenomenon.
I should’ve said all Government restrictions have been lifted. Boots is a private company and can do what it wants.
There's quite an aggressive message on our Surgery answerphone to the fact that changes to mask wearing do not (by implication capital letters) apply at our surgery. Masks still have to be worn. Furthermore I've been making quite frequent visits to far too many other Health professionals premises recently and generally speaking masks are required.
My sympathies that you’re having to have so many experiences of healthcare premises of late!
I am sceptical that continuing precautions at health premises are what’s driving continued poor mental health in the country.
To be honest, getting sick people (we can assume GP surgeries and hospital admissions contain them) to wear masks around others when in a confined space is not the worst piece of public policy whatever they are sick with.
You could make the same argument for disposable gloves given surface contamination. People in any case shouldnt be visiting the GP for feeling 'under the weather' which is the most likely communicable threat at a GPs surgery. Thats what 111 etc is for.
» show previous quotes I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I'd not heard David Cameron's terrible quote - makes me think better of him.
I agree with Dynamo that it would be great if QALYs (quality of life years - helps compare extending life and improving it, usually used to assesss the value of medicines) were used more generally. They don't solve ethical dilemmas, but they illuminate the choices one makes and the assumptions that underly them. A lot of the arguments on PB come down to different assumptions of this kind. For example, I'm pretty relaxed about being told what to do in everyday life - wear a mask, don't sit on this bench, don't walk on the grass - so the freedom to do what I please is an 0.1 for me, whereas I think most people in PB would rate it much higher.
By the way, Dynamo, when you first joined I think a few people thought you were a troll, but I'm now finding your contributions really interesting - thanks. (Maybe consider shorter paras for easier reading though?)
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
That will be why Boris with multiple marriages and relationships displays these virtues so well.
In religious terms marriage is supposed to be for life, Boris has many qualities but having successful marriages is not one of them
In non-religious terms marriage is supposed to be for life, but life isn't perfect and mistakes are made, and sometimes it is best to part ways.
This is an aspect of Christianity that puzzles me. In general the religion recognises that people are flawed beings who can't avoid making mistakes and being sinful, but that's kinda okay if you apologise for it, because Jesus sacrificed himself so that you would be forgiven for your sins. But make a mistake in marriage and you're expected to top punish yourself for that mistake for the rest of your life. No forgiveness there.
It's a curious inconsistency.
No like anything in religion the sin is distinct from the sinner but you have to recognise you have sinned before forgiveness.
Divorce is still a sin, certainly in the Roman Catholic church
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
That will be why Boris with multiple marriages and relationships displays these virtues so well.
In religious terms marriage is supposed to be for life, Boris has many qualities but having successful marriages is not one of them
In non-religious terms marriage is supposed to be for life, but life isn't perfect and mistakes are made, and sometimes it is best to part ways.
This is an aspect of Christianity that puzzles me. In general the religion recognises that people are flawed beings who can't avoid making mistakes and being sinful, but that's kinda okay if you apologise for it, because Jesus sacrificed himself so that you would be forgiven for your sins. But make a mistake in marriage and you're expected to top punish yourself for that mistake for the rest of your life. No forgiveness there.
It's a curious inconsistency.
A friend explained this to me just last night. When he was a child he prayed to God for a bike. When he was an adult he stole a bike and prayed to God for forgiveness.
By the way, Dynamo, when you first joined I think a few people thought you were a troll, but I'm now finding your contributions really interesting - thanks. (Maybe consider shorter paras for easier reading though?)
Anybody not wearing luridly blue and yellow underpants and not having a Bandera tattoo is under suspicion on here.
» show previous quotes I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I'd not heard David Cameron's terrible quote - makes me think better of him.
I agree with Dynamo that it would be great if QALYs (quality of life years - helps compare extending life and improving it, usually used to assesss the value of medicines) were used more generally. They don't solve ethical dilemmas, but they illuminate the choices one makes and the assumptions that underly them. A lot of the arguments on PB come down to different assumptions of this kind. For example, I'm pretty relaxed about being told what to do in everyday life - wear a mask, don't sit on this bench, don't walk on the grass - so the freedom to do what I please is an 0.1 for me, whereas I think most people in PB would rate it much higher.
By the way, Dynamo, when you first joined I think a few people thought you were a troll, but I'm now finding your contributions really interesting - thanks. (Maybe consider shorter paras for easier reading though?)
Now, after the fact, it would be nice to have a rational debate (maybe inside a Royal Commission) about lockdowns, exactly that balance you speak of, and in what circumstances we would have one (and then release from it) in the future.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Yesterday I went into boots opticians and every member of staff was wearing a mask and there were signs up saying wear a mask (no members of the public were doing so). That is far from the only example. In our local hospital people are still only allowed one visitor by appointment.
All the restrictions haven't been removed so your paper is premature.
You will need to write it in five or 10 years time as there will of course be aftershocks even when all restrictions are removed. If they ever will be. Because even months after that happens there will be scares (monkeypox, you name it) which will provoke deep anxiety in many people with the thought that there will be further lockdowns.
Unfortunately the Government has ceased the data collection and ended our funding, although we have been funded to do some separate work on monkeypox, and there are other data collection exercises, e.g. by the ONS. More research will, I’m sure, shed more light on what is driving this phenomenon.
I should’ve said all Government restrictions have been lifted. Boots is a private company and can do what it wants.
There's quite an aggressive message on our Surgery answerphone to the fact that changes to mask wearing do not (by implication capital letters) apply at our surgery. Masks still have to be worn. Furthermore I've been making quite frequent visits to far too many other Health professionals premises recently and generally speaking masks are required.
My sympathies that you’re having to have so many experiences of healthcare premises of late!
I am sceptical that continuing precautions at health premises are what’s driving continued poor mental health in the country.
To be honest, getting sick people (we can assume GP surgeries and hospital admissions contain them) to wear masks around others when in a confined space is not the worst piece of public policy whatever they are sick with.
You could make the same argument for disposable gloves given surface contamination. People in any case shouldnt be visiting the GP for feeling 'under the weather' which is the most likely communicable threat at a GPs surgery. Thats what 111 etc is for.
What do 111 tell you if you ring them to say you feel under the weather?
The biggest danger for Labour (and the govt if they take up a cap on the cap type policy) is how pissed off people are at the energy companies getting compensated. Its the new 'bailing out the banks and nobody is held to account'. If youre struggling and prices are 'frozen' at struggling to pay levels and the energy company taking 200 a month off you gets compensated for not taking 400, the CEO and shareholders all get fat payouts and nothing changes then theres a problem
I suppose you can refuse to compensate and renationalise as they fail? I’m only half joking because if we now agree, as a nation, to a centrally set price, then the “market” for energy has become even more artificial than it always was and nationalisation makes the most sense.
Its a really tough question. I think long term we need to be taking control of the production and wholesale of 100% of our needs. British energy plc with protectionist priorities. Short term it requires something like furlough specifically aimed at energy, and at all costs no compensation to any providers. Also, a solution to businesses being fleeced by the providers as they are outside the cap
Forced to choose between a Conservative government with Rishi Sunak as prime minister or a Labour government led by Keir Starmer (with no option for “neither” or “don’t know”), voters as a whole chose Starmer and Labour by 56% to 44%. Offered a similar choice but with Liz Truss as Conservative leader, they chose Starmer and Labour by a slightly narrower 55% to 45%.
18% of 2019 Conservatives said they would prefer a Starmer-led Labour government if Sunak were Tory leader, while 17% said the same if Truss were in charge.
Might change when Truss is actually in office with a honeymoon effect, but that's a lot of potential Tory defectors - one in six actively preferring the opposition.
Forced to choose between a Conservative government with Rishi Sunak as prime minister or a Labour government led by Keir Starmer (with no option for “neither” or “don’t know”), voters as a whole chose Starmer and Labour by 56% to 44%. Offered a similar choice but with Liz Truss as Conservative leader, they chose Starmer and Labour by a slightly narrower 55% to 45%.
18% of 2019 Conservatives said they would prefer a Starmer-led Labour government if Sunak were Tory leader, while 17% said the same if Truss were in charge.
Might change when Truss is actually in office with a honeymoon effect, but that's a lot of potential Tory defectors - one in six actively preferring the opposition.
It also suggests that the GB public as a whole don't see a lot between them. The differences are MoE.
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
That will be why Boris with multiple marriages and relationships displays these virtues so well.
In religious terms marriage is supposed to be for life, Boris has many qualities but having successful marriages is not one of them
In non-religious terms marriage is supposed to be for life, but life isn't perfect and mistakes are made, and sometimes it is best to part ways.
This is an aspect of Christianity that puzzles me. In general the religion recognises that people are flawed beings who can't avoid making mistakes and being sinful, but that's kinda okay if you apologise for it, because Jesus sacrificed himself so that you would be forgiven for your sins. But make a mistake in marriage and you're expected to top punish yourself for that mistake for the rest of your life. No forgiveness there.
It's a curious inconsistency.
That's the only curious inconsistency you've managed to unearth in religious belief systems.
It's the one I am choosing to talk about today.
I will have to beg your forgiveness for not providing an exhaustive treatise at this time.
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
That will be why Boris with multiple marriages and relationships displays these virtues so well.
He's never been very good at learning though. Remember, he was sacked from the Times for lying, sacked from the Tory front bench for lying, sacked as PM for lying...If he'd only learned his lesson the first time he'd have been fine.
The lesson he learnt was that he could get away with it. Probably why he still believes he can come back now. You can't keep BoJo/big dog down for long. All he faces are temporary setbacks.
Farage is the one taking their cash. He’s laughing.
Cameo was a fun way for out-of-work actors and comics to make some cash during the pandemic. It does seem rather sad to see former politicians on there though. Not just Farage either, Bercow and others have been doing it.
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
That will be why Boris with multiple marriages and relationships displays these virtues so well.
He's never been very good at learning though. Remember, he was sacked from the Times for lying, sacked from the Tory front bench for lying, sacked as PM for lying...If he'd only learned his lesson the first time he'd have been fine.
The lesson he learnt was that he could get away with it. Probably why he still believes he can come back now. You can't keep BoJo/big dog down for long. All he faces are temporary setbacks.
There are no disasters, only opportunities. And indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.
Boris Johnson, on being sacked by Michael Howard in 2004.
Forced to choose between a Conservative government with Rishi Sunak as prime minister or a Labour government led by Keir Starmer (with no option for “neither” or “don’t know”), voters as a whole chose Starmer and Labour by 56% to 44%. Offered a similar choice but with Liz Truss as Conservative leader, they chose Starmer and Labour by a slightly narrower 55% to 45%.
18% of 2019 Conservatives said they would prefer a Starmer-led Labour government if Sunak were Tory leader, while 17% said the same if Truss were in charge.
Might change when Truss is actually in office with a honeymoon effect, but that's a lot of potential Tory defectors - one in six actively preferring the opposition.
Certainly a big contrast from (from memory) Brown getting a hypothetical boost from Blair before he even took over. As many of us had said, stand fast unpredictable black swans like energy prices, and many of those voters would have gone back to Boris. He had to go, but it leaves the Tories in a hell of a spot.
The biggest danger for Labour (and the govt if they take up a cap on the cap type policy) is how pissed off people are at the energy companies getting compensated. Its the new 'bailing out the banks and nobody is held to account'. If youre struggling and prices are 'frozen' at struggling to pay levels and the energy company taking 200 a month off you gets compensated for not taking 400, the CEO and shareholders all get fat payouts and nothing changes then theres a problem
We’re having to import a significant amount of gas from abroad. What do people think is going to happen to energy companies if we prevent them from receving at least the market rate for their gas: Sunshine & roses?
The biggest danger for Labour (and the govt if they take up a cap on the cap type policy) is how pissed off people are at the energy companies getting compensated. Its the new 'bailing out the banks and nobody is held to account'. If youre struggling and prices are 'frozen' at struggling to pay levels and the energy company taking 200 a month off you gets compensated for not taking 400, the CEO and shareholders all get fat payouts and nothing changes then theres a problem
I suppose you can refuse to compensate and renationalise as they fail? I’m only half joking because if we now agree, as a nation, to a centrally set price, then the “market” for energy has become even more artificial than it always was and nationalisation makes the most sense.
Its a really tough question. I think long term we need to be taking control of the production and wholesale of 100% of our needs. British energy plc with protectionist priorities. Short term it requires something like furlough specifically aimed at energy, and at all costs no compensation to any providers. Also, a solution to businesses being fleeced by the providers as they are outside the cap
The problem with protectionism, is what happens if everyone does it. If Biden bans O&G exports before the US mid-terms, using the same logic as you are arguing for the UK to do, then the price is irrelevant because there wil be huge supply shortages.
My general takeaway. Affluent, not necessarily posh, men who don't like taxes, rules and public officialdom. Libertarian with a dash of pro-British sentiment.
If the Tories are as obsessed with the "woke media" as they are here, they are going to lose in a landslide. Totally out of touch
Forced to choose between a Conservative government with Rishi Sunak as prime minister or a Labour government led by Keir Starmer (with no option for “neither” or “don’t know”), voters as a whole chose Starmer and Labour by 56% to 44%. Offered a similar choice but with Liz Truss as Conservative leader, they chose Starmer and Labour by a slightly narrower 55% to 45%.
18% of 2019 Conservatives said they would prefer a Starmer-led Labour government if Sunak were Tory leader, while 17% said the same if Truss were in charge.
Might change when Truss is actually in office with a honeymoon effect, but that's a lot of potential Tory defectors - one in six actively preferring the opposition.
Yes I already posted it.
I don't recall Ed M or Corbyn getting these kinds of numbers. As I keep saying, I maintain that boring is an asset for Labour not a negative
Forced to choose between a Conservative government with Rishi Sunak as prime minister or a Labour government led by Keir Starmer (with no option for “neither” or “don’t know”), voters as a whole chose Starmer and Labour by 56% to 44%. Offered a similar choice but with Liz Truss as Conservative leader, they chose Starmer and Labour by a slightly narrower 55% to 45%.
18% of 2019 Conservatives said they would prefer a Starmer-led Labour government if Sunak were Tory leader, while 17% said the same if Truss were in charge.
Might change when Truss is actually in office with a honeymoon effect, but that's a lot of potential Tory defectors - one in six actively preferring the opposition.
Certainly a big contrast from (from memory) Brown getting a hypothetical boost from Blair before he even took over. As many of us had said, stand fast unpredictable black swans like energy prices, and many of those voters would have gone back to Boris. He had to go, but it leaves the Tories in a hell of a spot.
They didn't want to vote for the Tories, they wanted the Boris Party. Boris let them down and has gone - now it is Thatcher 2.0 who they hate. So therefore they go back to Labour.
The new Tory coalition is broken because Corbyn is out of the picture
Forced to choose between a Conservative government with Rishi Sunak as prime minister or a Labour government led by Keir Starmer (with no option for “neither” or “don’t know”), voters as a whole chose Starmer and Labour by 56% to 44%. Offered a similar choice but with Liz Truss as Conservative leader, they chose Starmer and Labour by a slightly narrower 55% to 45%.
18% of 2019 Conservatives said they would prefer a Starmer-led Labour government if Sunak were Tory leader, while 17% said the same if Truss were in charge.
Might change when Truss is actually in office with a honeymoon effect, but that's a lot of potential Tory defectors - one in six actively preferring the opposition.
Forced to choose between a Conservative government with Rishi Sunak as prime minister or a Labour government led by Keir Starmer (with no option for “neither” or “don’t know”), voters as a whole chose Starmer and Labour by 56% to 44%. Offered a similar choice but with Liz Truss as Conservative leader, they chose Starmer and Labour by a slightly narrower 55% to 45%.
18% of 2019 Conservatives said they would prefer a Starmer-led Labour government if Sunak were Tory leader, while 17% said the same if Truss were in charge.
Might change when Truss is actually in office with a honeymoon effect, but that's a lot of potential Tory defectors - one in six actively preferring the opposition.
Pretty much in line with current polling Nick, if they all defected and nobody went the other way about a 7% swing. So, in reslity maybe a 3 or 4% swing The weighted figures for raw party choice suggest a small Labour lead of 4 or 5%
The biggest danger for Labour (and the govt if they take up a cap on the cap type policy) is how pissed off people are at the energy companies getting compensated. Its the new 'bailing out the banks and nobody is held to account'. If youre struggling and prices are 'frozen' at struggling to pay levels and the energy company taking 200 a month off you gets compensated for not taking 400, the CEO and shareholders all get fat payouts and nothing changes then theres a problem
I suppose you can refuse to compensate and renationalise as they fail? I’m only half joking because if we now agree, as a nation, to a centrally set price, then the “market” for energy has become even more artificial than it always was and nationalisation makes the most sense.
Its a really tough question. I think long term we need to be taking control of the production and wholesale of 100% of our needs. British energy plc with protectionist priorities. Short term it requires something like furlough specifically aimed at energy, and at all costs no compensation to any providers. Also, a solution to businesses being fleeced by the providers as they are outside the cap
You're sounding quite Trotskyite there - nationalisation without compensation would definitely be thrown out by the courts, unless we threw out various safeguards. But I do think that "natural monopolies should be publicly owned" is an idea whose time has returned, especially where they affect everyone's standard of living. I have no desire to nationalise Kelloggs - if I don't like Rice Krispies, there are ,lots of alternatives. But I don't see the point of Southern Water being private - no competition, and no way to blame/vote against them if they don't bother to build any new reservoirs (presumably because they'd be beneficial beyond their franchise).
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Yesterday I went into boots opticians and every member of staff was wearing a mask and there were signs up saying wear a mask (no members of the public were doing so). That is far from the only example. In our local hospital people are still only allowed one visitor by appointment.
All the restrictions haven't been removed so your paper is premature.
You will need to write it in five or 10 years time as there will of course be aftershocks even when all restrictions are removed. If they ever will be. Because even months after that happens there will be scares (monkeypox, you name it) which will provoke deep anxiety in many people with the thought that there will be further lockdowns.
Unfortunately the Government has ceased the data collection and ended our funding, although we have been funded to do some separate work on monkeypox, and there are other data collection exercises, e.g. by the ONS. More research will, I’m sure, shed more light on what is driving this phenomenon.
I should’ve said all Government restrictions have been lifted. Boots is a private company and can do what it wants.
There's quite an aggressive message on our Surgery answerphone to the fact that changes to mask wearing do not (by implication capital letters) apply at our surgery. Masks still have to be worn. Furthermore I've been making quite frequent visits to far too many other Health professionals premises recently and generally speaking masks are required.
My sympathies that you’re having to have so many experiences of healthcare premises of late!
I am sceptical that continuing precautions at health premises are what’s driving continued poor mental health in the country.
To be honest, getting sick people (we can assume GP surgeries and hospital admissions contain them) to wear masks around others when in a confined space is not the worst piece of public policy whatever they are sick with.
You could make the same argument for disposable gloves given surface contamination. People in any case shouldnt be visiting the GP for feeling 'under the weather' which is the most likely communicable threat at a GPs surgery. Thats what 111 etc is for.
What do 111 tell you if you ring them to say you feel under the weather?
They give generic advice unless your symptoms red flag anything and give you a timescale to seek further adbuce if it diesnt improve. It keeps hypochondriacs, people with a sniffle and the worried well out of the way whilst checking for anything more sinister symptoms wise
Our 33rd anniversary shortly, so yes a bit of toleration and respect for each others interests and views is a large part of the reason we have had such a successful marriage.
Kipling said marriage teaches the hard virtues; humility, restraint and forethought.
He was definitely right.
That will be why Boris with multiple marriages and relationships displays these virtues so well.
In religious terms marriage is supposed to be for life, Boris has many qualities but having successful marriages is not one of them
He's more of a be fruitful and multiply kind of guy.
He's happy, on his own terms that's probably how he defines the success.
The problem isn't the Tory party, its the voters. People want contradictory things but refuse to accept there is a contradiction. A series of events have empowered them to believe their genuine ignorance on a subject holds the same weight as actual knowledge and experience. They aren't wrong, the experts are wrong.
There is a way through though - find us a new Blair or Thatcher, someone who does know what they are talking about and has political umph. People said "that is Boris" but as all but the remaining holdouts now accept Boris stood for nothing, with no great policies delivered and settled in his time.
Ummm, BoZo was the politician more than any other in my lifetime that told voters they could have contradictory things. Denied the contradictions. That experts were to be derided.
He was the problem
The fact his opponents failed to make their case shows how poor they were
Not entirely.
If you are in a debate with someone shameless and dishonest enough, it can be really hard to persuade an audience.
It tends to go this;
BORIS-ALIKE Something involving cake and eat it
RORY-ALIKE (because he at least tried) That's not possible- once you have eaten your cake, it's gone...
BORIS-ALIKE There you go, with your doomy gloomy negativity. Remember we are Great Britain! We are being held back by your fears... (Continues ad nauseum.)
Boris style cakeism is a really attractive prospectus. It's awfully hard to argue against, because deep down we want it to be true, and want to believe that there's some meanie stopping it being true for us. That's been the case since the apple/snake/Eve fiasco in Genesis.
It would have been better for the UK had someone successfully argued us out of Borisism, but I'm not convinced that was possible.
It would have been better for the Conservatives and the UK to have not fallen for Borisism, but that required human nature to be something it isn't.
The culpability for (gestures round) all of this belongs with the clique who proposed it, who lied to the public about it, who smeared and deposed those who questioned it.
Not particularly with those who fell for it, and certainly not with those who did their best to argue against it.
Unless you had a better plan to argue against Boris, in which case I'm all ears.
And unless he didn't vote for the Conservatives when Mr Johnson was their leader.
I want to make this clear
I supported Johnson on brexit, covid and Ukraine but he lost me from Paterson onwards
Starmer would have had our economy in lockdown forever if he could, and it is to Johnson's credit he opened the economy when he did
That's a very silly thing to write. Starmer wanted us "in lockdown forever"?
Profoundly stupid read of the situation that isn't worthy of yours usual sage analysis.
Forever is a stretch, but Starmer was ALWAYS on the side of more and longer restrictions.
I accept forever was one of my rather exaggerated comments but there is no doubt Starmer favoured a much stricter and longer lockdown and it was Johnson who made the correct decision and it has been proven as the right thing to do
It is rather hot and I apologise for my exaggeration
Boris caused longer lockdowns by always being slow to initiate a lockdown. Had we acted promptly, we would have better controlled infection rates and could’ve come out of lockdown sooner. It’s yet more short term thinking.
Oh what nonsense. Claimed by people who want to justify lockdowns. Taking away civil liberties as a precautionary measure is unacceptable and the virus would still be prevalent on our continent after any lockdown it wasn't a magic pill that would get rid of it.
What country in Europe successfully had a short, sharp lockdown that was rapidly ended and not repeated?
I can in hindsight point at a country and say we should have done that, Sweden. Can you name any country that had a rapid premature lockdown that worked, fixed things and meant coming out of lockdown sooner?
Following the Swedish model would have been utterly catastrophic. Look at their death rates compared to their immediate neighbours. Thousands of additional people died in Sweden who did not need to because of the route they chose. And that is in spite of the fact that far more people in Sweden work from home anyway so the effects of a lockdown would have been considerably less on their economy.
Many - if not all - European countries got their policies wrong in the pandemic in one way or another. Sweden is certainly no exception.
Thousands extra dying, almost all of whom would have died soon anyway, is better than stripping tens of millions of two years of civil liberties, trashing education and development for years that will have consequences for generations to come, spending hundreds of billions and creating NHS waiting lists for years to come.
The price we paid to keep people alive was not a price worth paying. There's more to life than a mortuary league table.
If the vulnerable wishes to shield that should be there prerogative but not at the price of trashing children's education etc
Bolded: incorrect, and pointed out to you repeatedly before.
Half of those in ICUs were under 60. A quarter were under 50.
Using averages of deaths is as irrelevant as using the average age of people locked down (which was over 40, so why are we worrying about childrens education when none of them are anywhere near 40. Which would be an absurd argument, but is just as true).
Over 13,000 children lost a parent to covid. Under your plan, that number would be several times higher. And we'd still have had a large (if not larger) economic impact.
In ICU doesn't mean dead.
Some extra casualties is still better than the alternative. Life is for living, even if some people die, we all die eventually.
Shutting down life in fear of death was not a price worth paying. Simply saying "more would die" isn't an argument winner against someone saying death is acceptable.
People go to ICU when there's a very significant chance that they could die without the assistance. Should there be no more capacity in ICU, no-one else could go to ICU. Those who would have survived with ICU assistance would therefore be dead.
Even "lesser" hospitalisation would see far more dead without hospital assistance. It's a key reason we have hospitals and healthcare in the first place.
Both ICUs and hospitals were maxed out and beyond maxed out. It was the hospital loadings and ICU loadings that governed the call for lockdowns.
Yes, it's true that everyone dies. We do consider it civilized to minimize avoidable deaths. We could close the deficit and cut taxes hugely at a stroke by abolishing all healthcare spending and pension spending, for example, on the grounds that yes, loads of people would die due to lack of healthcare and/or starve to death in old age, but hey - people die, right?
That is, to me, an absurd case to make, but not far off of your argument.
You're right its not far off the argument and make it less ridiculous and its not unreasonable either.
A budget should be available to the NHS for healthcare and the best available treatment based upon what is affordable - the NHS should not have a blank cheque.
If the NHS not having a blank cheque means more die and fewer receive pensions, then so be it. We can't afford to keep everyone alive forever, nor should we.
The NHS has never had a blank cheque and is never going to, so why this straw man argument?
Because Andy made the extreme argument of abolishing the budget entirely, so I retorted with the opposite extreme.
So is it fair to say we both agree that a budget is acceptable and we both agree that it is acceptable for avoidable deaths to occur if they're not viably avoidable within the budget.
Well if so, I consider the lockdown an unacceptable price to pay and if that means extra deaths then so be it, that's the price you pay for not having a blank cheque.
When it comes to what the NHS should spend money on, we have agreed cut-offs used by NICE in terms of £ per quality-adjusted life year gained. Have you or anyone else tried to systematise this argument you are making in terms of what was gained by lockdown in terms of QALYs saved and what it cost, turning all the costs of lockdown into a monetary equivalent amount?
Or are you just saying that lockdown was so awful that no number of QALYs saved would ever justify it?
The former would be interesting to read. The latter seems somewhat absolutist. Your insistence that lockdown should never be done again in any circumstance seems to either assign too much cost to lockdown or to suggest a lack of epidemiological imagination in terms of future pandemics.
I would absolutely love to see a QALY-style calculation, with the cost of lockdowns economically combined with as you suggest a monetary equivalent amount for the loss of liberty and disruption to education. I would assign a very high monetary equivalent 'cost' for education, liberty etc to be curtailed.
This is not my area of expertise but I fully expect that such a QALY calculation would categorically show that lockdown was not remotely "worth" it by pre-existing standards.
Comparing what happened with the range of what might have happened without lockdowns could be done in terms of QALYs without any reference to money, bearing in mind that being locked down reduces the quality of life measurably similarly to how it can be reduced due to physical weakness etc. - at least for most people. Personally I still ran 5km every day outside which was lawful throughout.
Compared with a lingering death through debilitating illness and chronic pain, not being allowed to sit on a park bench for a couple of months during lockdown is of nothing. Check your privilege, as the Wokeists say. Remember David Cameron's remark, after Ivan's death, that he did not know if his son had ever been happy for a single day.
I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
It would be interesting, if complex, to try and put the calculation all together, although perhaps Bart has already made up his mind as to the answer.
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Besides, imagine that we hadn't called lockdowns March, November and January.
Unless you think that cases would have just stopped rising, we would pretty rapidly have ended up at health system collapse. It's just maths.
What would that have done for the mental state of the country?
We will never know of course what might have happened. The Guardian calls a health system collapse every year and has done for the past 10 years. Famously.
My general takeaway. Affluent, not necessarily posh, men who don't like taxes, rules and public officialdom. Libertarian with a dash of pro-British sentiment.
If the Tories are as obsessed with the "woke media" as they are here, they are going to lose in a landslide. Totally out of touch
Policies that are popular but not really salient can be quite dangerous. Cameron positioned himself as a Eurosceptic but didn't really bang on about it pre-2010.
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He was definitely right.
The planning permission granted does involve the shared access lane - because of things like water run off. But the signed-off plans have a turning area which provides access both to parking spaces being created by the new house and to our existing driveways.
So providing the person who develops this isn't an anus, it all looks fine. "You can park on the road" just makes me laugh. Had enough of shared access have we? Because you are an anus? Don't spend £stupid to buy this plot and then £lots to build a house as we'll have you in court endlessly. Better to buy something else love.
He was wrong about that.
Covid spending was financed by and large by quantitative easing (so 'printing money'), which is now going into reverse with quantitative tightening ('burning money'?). Interest costs are higher for any new debt or old inflation-linked debt. We're going to end up pushing things to their breaking point.
We need to be honest with voters that energy prices going up will make us all a bit poorer, and say we are going to do XYZ to improve our energy security and stop this happening again - nuclear, wind and tidal at 10x the current pace.
In the meantime, support for gas price rises should be targeted and form a part of universal credit. Or perhaps something to help phase payments. Anything else is fantasy politics that will backfire.
BREAKING: Liz Truss says that although she does not believe in handouts, she won't be paying back the expenses she claimed for her heating bills for the past 3 years x
https://twitter.com/BBCLauraKT/status/1558516646771302405
On the substantive point raised, there’s a limit to how much an MP can claim in total for their housing expenses, so they definitely will be affected by the cost of energy bills.
Hoewver progressive, anti nationalism SKS frequently comes to Scotland to tell us what's best for us..
The mental health of the country has been poor since the pandemic, but it’s hard to tease apart what of that was caused by lockdowns or other restrictions, and what of that could have been ameliorated by simple tweaks to the rules or the provision of better support for people, versus what of the deterioration in mental health was caused by the pandemic itself, the anxiety associated with it, the morbidity and mortality caused.
The likes of Sajid Javid when Health Secretary offered a rather simplistic take that mental health would improve when all the restrictions were removed, a position some here endorsed. Yet that definitely hasn’t happened: see our recent paper, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022395622003466
Unless you think that cases would have just stopped rising, we would pretty rapidly have ended up at health system collapse. It's just maths.
What would that have done for the mental state of the country?
All the restrictions haven't been removed so your paper is premature.
You will need to write it in five or 10 years time as there will of course be aftershocks even when all restrictions are removed. If they ever will be. Because even months after that happens there will be scares (monkeypox, you name it) which will provoke deep anxiety in many people with the thought that there will be further lockdowns.
Also, re other comments: You have to find very old Germans to find any who feel guilty about the war.
The difference with younger Germans (eg under 35) is they don't have the sympathetic view of Russia that many Germans had from the events around German reunification, way more important to attitudes than "war guilt" so far as I can tell.
I'm left with two thoughts about Truss - she is either going to take the votes of the membership and then screw them over by going back to the centre or she is what she seems to be - an unreconstructed Thatcherite who genuinely believes if taxes are cut, everyone will be happy, the economy will grow and the small matter of £95 billion of debt interest will be hardly worth worrying about as we all frolic in the sunlit uplands of new Conservative prosperity.
Back in the real world, I'm much more sceptical - she looks seriously out of her depth and whether, when faced with a real problem, she has anything other than bargain basement blustering remains to be seen.
I should’ve said all Government restrictions have been lifted. Boots is a private company and can do what it wants.
He's probably doing it to wind you up but doing so shows you're a good sport and that both you and he have a sense of humour.
But I wasn't there obvs.
Did Javed make the distinction? Irrelevant of course but do you happen to know?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4W7BpwOoL0
Big chungus. Apparently.
Of course if the Tories got 45% in a GE under FPTP they'll have a majority, so how many of these forced choicers who get actually squeezed is a key question.
I think the argument that Boots optician asking people to wear masks and everyone ignoring their signs represents a significant ongoing restriction to UK society is a bit weak.
But, anyway, it’s not a paper on restrictions: it’s a paper on national mental health. Within that, we consider the role of lockdowns and other Government restrictions, although we don’t offer any firm conclusions given the difficulties in teasing apart different possible factors. We also cite some other literature on the matter. Overall, this suggests that there isn’t a simple relationship between lockdowns and poor mental health. The point of that was to illustrate the broader difficulty of doing QALY calculations on events over the pandemic.
I am sceptical that continuing precautions at health premises are what’s driving continued poor mental health in the country.
Because they aren't "government restrictions".
Thank god your funding ran out.
This is an aspect of Christianity that puzzles me. In general the religion recognises that people are flawed beings who can't avoid making mistakes and being sinful, but that's kinda okay if you apologise for it, because Jesus sacrificed himself so that you would be forgiven for your sins. But make a mistake in marriage and you're expected to top punish yourself for that mistake for the rest of your life. No forgiveness there.
It's a curious inconsistency.
Its the new 'bailing out the banks and nobody is held to account'.
If youre struggling and prices are 'frozen' at struggling to pay levels and the energy company taking 200 a month off you gets compensated for not taking 400, the CEO and shareholders all get fat payouts and nothing changes then theres a problem
On that point, we've had several quotes for work to be done on our bathroom in the last few days. We need to turn it into a wet room, now that I'm not as mobile as I'd like to be. However none of the plumbers or wetroom converters have been masked, but the occupational therapist, who is also visiting us, always wears a mask!
The only person who actually knows what he is going to vote, and who has attempted to persuade me too, is our older son. It is his second GE and he is strongly Liberal.
He did actually get me seriously thinking about that party. I have a few friends who are Liberals, one an MP who has been a strong pro-Ukrainian voice in our country ever since I met her about ten years ago.
Edit - “Mulled”! Mulled it over. Ducking autocorrect.
'How do you get to be Head Boy? By sucking up to the headmaster, sucking up to the establishment.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePwRtGxYG28
My general takeaway. Affluent, not necessarily posh, men who don't like taxes, rules and public officialdom. Libertarian with a dash of pro-British sentiment.
So, wait it out and see what happens - is my advice.
People in any case shouldnt be visiting the GP for feeling 'under the weather' which is the most likely communicable threat at a GPs surgery. Thats what 111 etc is for.
FPT
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I take your point, @DecrepiterJohnL . I am not complaining about my own experience. And there is something brutal about the whole idea of society-wide QALY calculations. But a calculation can nonetheless be done, and the effects of lockdown for some people included not just a decrease in their QOL by 0.001% for a few months but a deterioration in their health such as to lop an appreciable amount of time off their life expectancy, e.g. as a result of depression. So if Britain's per capita QALY score in 2020 was say 50.0y (??), one could make a few assumptions and say that lockdown "in itself" reduced it by say 0.20y (??), and that had lockdown not been imposed then that 0.20y drop would not have occurred but an estimated drop of ???y +/- ###y would have occurred because of the trouble that would have been caused by a greater spread of SARSCoV2, and it would be interesting to know if ??? was smaller than or greater than 0.20. Someone should do that calculation, and there is no need to bring money into it.
I'd not heard David Cameron's terrible quote - makes me think better of him.
I agree with Dynamo that it would be great if QALYs (quality of life years - helps compare extending life and improving it, usually used to assesss the value of medicines) were used more generally. They don't solve ethical dilemmas, but they illuminate the choices one makes and the assumptions that underly them. A lot of the arguments on PB come down to different assumptions of this kind. For example, I'm pretty relaxed about being told what to do in everyday life - wear a mask, don't sit on this bench, don't walk on the grass - so the freedom to do what I please is an 0.1 for me, whereas I think most people in PB would rate it much higher.
By the way, Dynamo, when you first joined I think a few people thought you were a troll, but I'm now finding your contributions really interesting - thanks. (Maybe consider shorter paras for easier reading though?)
Divorce is still a sin, certainly in the Roman Catholic church
Jesus Christ! I think I've got about 4 or 5 years to deprogram her.
https://us4.campaign-archive.com/?e=99cd3aa6df&u=7c92abe0d0d9432cf9c5b98c9&id=1e0b8e8407
They key passage is probably this:
Preferred government
Forced to choose between a Conservative government with Rishi
Sunak as prime minister or a Labour government led by Keir Starmer
(with no option for “neither” or “don’t know”), voters as a whole chose
Starmer and Labour by 56% to 44%. Offered a similar choice but with
Liz Truss as Conservative leader, they chose Starmer and Labour by a
slightly narrower 55% to 45%.
18% of 2019 Conservatives said they would prefer a Starmer-led
Labour government if Sunak were Tory leader, while 17% said the same
if Truss were in charge.
Might change when Truss is actually in office with a honeymoon effect, but that's a lot of potential Tory defectors - one in six actively preferring the opposition.
I will have to beg your forgiveness for not providing an exhaustive treatise at this time.
Boris Johnson, on being sacked by Michael Howard in 2004.
I don't recall Ed M or Corbyn getting these kinds of numbers. As I keep saying, I maintain that boring is an asset for Labour not a negative
The new Tory coalition is broken because Corbyn is out of the picture
The weighted figures for raw party choice suggest a small Labour lead of 4 or 5%
He's happy, on his own terms that's probably how he defines the success.