The employees will come off furlough as their employers go bust due to cash flow issues.
Listening to the HOC support is unanimous from across the house and even Caroline Lucas
It applies across the UK and is the best scheme in the world
Your partisanship is truly impressive. Labour were at least the party of Tax & Spend whereas your lot just seem to be the party of "Spend"
Do any of you even remember what Maggie said about spending other people's money?
Interesting to ponder what Maggie would have done in the pandemic.
She might have got her boots on earlier, but as to a wholly different approach? I doubt it...
But Maggie would have taken action earlier as would TMay. Countries with female leaders have fared better. Countries with ultra macho male leaders have fared worse.
The employees will come off furlough as their employers go bust due to cash flow issues.
Listening to the HOC support is unanimous from across the house and even Caroline Lucas
It applies across the UK and is the best scheme in the world
Getting people off this is going to be like lifting the lockdown, Going to be very difficult and there will be plenty of losers. There isn't an easy answer.
We are witnessing a conservative Prime Minister and Chancellor moving into the centre left space left by labour's surrender to Corbynism and reminiscent of the SNP in Scotland when they effectively made labour redundant
Strange days indeed
We're witnessing a pragmatist in the Treasury who also appears to be competent. In sharp contrast with much of the rest of the cabinet.
Mr Yorkshire Tea is both on top of his brief, but also has a human way about him, compared to say Gove, who is on top of his brief, but at best has the tone of a teacher scolding children.
Being Chancellor is easy when you're dishing out the money. Let's see how he does if he ever starts making painful decisions.
He knows these eye-watering amount have to be repaid. He knows this is going to hamper the economy for many years. These ARE painful decisions he's making.
No, the difficult decisions will come when he needs to put 2p on the basic rate and bring the 45p rate down to £70k to pay for all of this and the generally increased spending needed in a post virus economy.
All that is factored in to taking these decisions now.
The employees will come off furlough as their employers go bust due to cash flow issues.
Listening to the HOC support is unanimous from across the house and even Caroline Lucas
It applies across the UK and is the best scheme in the world
Getting people off this is going to be like lifting the lockdown, Going to be very difficult and there will be plenty of losers. There isn't an easy answer.
We are witnessing a conservative Prime Minister and Chancellor moving into the centre left space left by labour's surrender to Corbynism and reminiscent of the SNP in Scotland when they effectively made labour redundant
Strange days indeed
We're witnessing a pragmatist in the Treasury who also appears to be competent. In sharp contrast with much of the rest of the cabinet.
Mr Yorkshire Tea is both on top of his brief, but also has a human way about him, compared to say Gove, who is on top of his brief, but at best has the tone of a teacher scolding children.
Being Chancellor is easy when you're dishing out the money. Let's see how he does if he ever starts making painful decisions.
He knows these eye-watering amount have to be repaid. He knows this is going to hamper the economy for many years. These ARE painful decisions he's making.
No, the difficult decisions will come when he needs to put 2p on the basic rate and bring the 45p rate down to £70k to pay for all of this and the generally increased spending needed in a post virus economy.
My view is that our budget deficit will be soon be so large that such measures would be a drop in the ocean.
If the puritans have their way, places like nightclubs will never open again. "Too risky". "Not safe".
Not never but too long for any sort of furlough scheme. Nightclubs open, a huge infection spike occurs, the risk level goes up and the Gov't has to shut down clothing retailers again ?! Not a very good scenario.
So you close nightclubs forever. Cinemas? Theatres? Comedy clubs? Cafes? Museums? Galleries? Concert halls? Music venues?
What sort of scenario is that?
No, I specifically picked nightclubs because they are out on their own as a potential viral reservoir/infection spreader. The last museum I went to was very different to the last nightclub I went to. They should be kept closed longer in my opinion on any "lifting", perhaps too long for them to survive. Other businesses you've mentioned are in the middle, the Gov't will have some choices to make there.
I presume the 'they should be kept closed longer' refers to nightclubs?
Listening to Nicola Sturgeon I have a feeling that the virus is much more prevelant in Scotland than it is in many parts of England. Where I am in Hampshire hospitals here are returning to normal. Operating theatres have opened, normal operations are being carried out, there are hardly any Covid-19 admissions, yet in Scotland yesterday there was a 165 increase in the number in Hospital with suspected Covid-19
It's almost like they're different countries at different stages of the pandemic.
The great unwashed of Bridgend are furious at Drakeford for keeping us in lockdown. Drakeford's 'indecision' does not compare well to Boris' 'deciseveness' 'Boris gets things done' was the clarion call.
So PB Tories are at one with the proles.
I wouldn't be surprised to see some breaking along Brexit lines.
All my middle class Remain voting friends are very very concerned about sending little Johnny back to school and can continue to work from home, have a garden to chill out in, so think all this is very reckless, poorly thought out and want absolute guarantees before they are willing to move (which they won't get).
Protect the NHS. And there is the issue, EVERYTHING was about stopping the NHS acute care being overwhelmed and by doing so reducing the body count. That appears to have left holes elsewhere in response, in how care homes were addressed.
The decision was partially science but it was also partially political, because the NHS has sainted status. The NHS is a massive institution with a large budget as any sizeable public health service will be but the idea that it is all heroes is balls. There are bound to have been poor decisions there, just as the politicians, the white lab coats and the civil servants in Public Health made mistakes.
Certainly questions about how this strategy seemed to to overwhelmingly focus on acute care in what appears to have been the exclusion of other areas are fair. In many ways the provision of massive additional capacity has been an achievement but I'd wonder where it, and indeed testing would be, if it wasn't for military logisticians and 25 year old squaddies.
Strangely I haven't seen figures for deaths of military personnel working on all this. I hear about transport drivers, i hear about NHS staff and so on. Why is that? Have none died or does it just not make a good story.
Apart from the RAF they tend to be younger, fitter and thinner than the civvie population and therefore less likely to succumb to C19.
The employees will come off furlough as their employers go bust due to cash flow issues.
Listening to the HOC support is unanimous from across the house and even Caroline Lucas
It applies across the UK and is the best scheme in the world
Your partisanship is truly impressive. Labour were at least the party of Tax & Spend whereas your lot just seem to be the party of "Spend"
Do any of you even remember what Maggie said about spending other people's money?
Interesting to ponder what Maggie would have done in the pandemic.
She might have got her boots on earlier, but as to a wholly different approach? I doubt it...
But Maggie would have taken action earlier as would TMay. Countries with female leaders have failed better. Counties with ultra macho male leaders have fared worse.
The employees will come off furlough as their employers go bust due to cash flow issues.
Listening to the HOC support is unanimous from across the house and even Caroline Lucas
It applies across the UK and is the best scheme in the world
Your partisanship is truly impressive. Labour were at least the party of Tax & Spend whereas your lot just seem to be the party of "Spend"
Do any of you even remember what Maggie said about spending other people's money?
Interesting to ponder what Maggie would have done in the pandemic.
She might have got her boots on earlier, but as to a wholly different approach? I doubt it...
But Maggie would have taken action earlier as would TMay. Countries with female leaders have fared better. Counties with ultra macho male leaders have fared worse.
Excoriating piece by AEP, which importantly contains the views of a leading COVID doctor.
“Boris survived because they gave him oxygen. High flow oxygen wasn’t available as a treatment option for all patients.”
“Our policy was to let the virus rip and then ‘cocoon the elderly’,” he wrote. “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you contrast that with what we actually did...We actively seeded this into the very population that was most vulnerable."
Selection of homemade mask materials for preventing transmission of COVID-19: a laboratory study https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20093021v1 ...Referring to the national standard for the "Surgical Mask" of China, 17 materials to be selected for homemade masks were tested in four key indicators: pressure difference, particle filtration efficiency, bacterial filtration efficiency and resistance to surface wetting. Eleven single-layer materials met the standard of pressure difference (≤49 Pa), of which 3 met the standard of resistance to surface wetting (≥3), 1 met the standard of particle filtration efficiency (≥30%), but none met the standard of bacterial filtration efficiency (≥95%). Based on the testing results of single-layer materials, fifteen combinations of paired materials were tested. The results showed that three double-layer materials including double-layer medical non-woven fabric, medical non-woven fabric plus non-woven shopping bag, and medical non-woven fabric plus granular tea towel could meet all the standards of pressure difference, particle filtration efficiency, and resistance to surface wetting, and were close to the standard of the bacterial filtration efficiency. In conclusion, if resources are severely lacking and medical masks cannot be obtained, homemade masks using available materials, based on the results of this study, can minimize the chance of infection to the maximum extent...
The employees will come off furlough as their employers go bust due to cash flow issues.
Listening to the HOC support is unanimous from across the house and even Caroline Lucas
It applies across the UK and is the best scheme in the world
Getting people off this is going to be like lifting the lockdown, Going to be very difficult and there will be plenty of losers. There isn't an easy answer.
We are witnessing a conservative Prime Minister and Chancellor moving into the centre left space left by labour's surrender to Corbynism and reminiscent of the SNP in Scotland when they effectively made labour redundant
Strange days indeed
We're witnessing a pragmatist in the Treasury who also appears to be competent. In sharp contrast with much of the rest of the cabinet.
Mr Yorkshire Tea is both on top of his brief, but also has a human way about him, compared to say Gove, who is on top of his brief, but at best has the tone of a teacher scolding children.
The one downside is that it does tend to reduce the pressure on the rest of government for another couple of months. That is not good.
I have to say I have been quite confused by the choice of the members of the cabinet ...
I too.
They play Eeny Meeny Miny Mo round the Cabinet table....
The employees will come off furlough as their employers go bust due to cash flow issues.
Listening to the HOC support is unanimous from across the house and even Caroline Lucas
It applies across the UK and is the best scheme in the world
Your partisanship is truly impressive. Labour were at least the party of Tax & Spend whereas your lot just seem to be the party of "Spend"
Do any of you even remember what Maggie said about spending other people's money?
Interesting to ponder what Maggie would have done in the pandemic.
She might have got her boots on earlier, but as to a wholly different approach? I doubt it...
Wasn't a fan of Mrs T. but I would guess she would have taken it far more seriously in the first instance, not least as she was a scientist rather than a classics scholar. I also suspect another difference would be that she was probably a fastidious hand washer.
The NHS is a religion and like other things that are religiously loved in Britain (for example the monarchy and the BBC) this results in it being needlessly bad. I don't really get the left's take on this since they always think the Tories are trying to destroy it, but the Tories are in government at least half and maybe 2/3 of the time, so I really think if you value your healthcare system it would be better if it wasn't run directly by the government, which is trying to destroy it.
On the virus, this is a bit weird because the goal of the response should have changed as new data came in. The original thought was to "flatten the curve", ie you let the infection run its course, but spread it out so it doesn't fry your hospital system. But that turned out to be impractical even if your medical system is less living-on-the-edge than the NHS, because the area under the curve is much too big, no matter which shape you squish it in. But it also turned out that you can suppress the virus, as is happening in South Korea and Taiwan, and you can probably do this with much less damage to your economy than you'd incur by living with it. I think generally governments are now pursuing suppression rather than mitigation, but the initial steps are the same and after sharing all those graphs around it's a bit embarrassing to say so, so the whole goal of the intervention has changed, but without really talking about it.
Protect the NHS. And there is the issue, EVERYTHING was about stopping the NHS acute care being overwhelmed and by doing so reducing the body count. That appears to have left holes elsewhere in response, in how care homes were addressed.
The decision was partially science but it was also partially political, because the NHS has sainted status. The NHS is a massive institution with a large budget as any sizeable public health service will be but the idea that it is all heroes is balls. There are bound to have been poor decisions there, just as the politicians, the white lab coats and the civil servants in Public Health made mistakes.
Certainly questions about how this strategy seemed to to overwhelmingly focus on acute care in what appears to have been the exclusion of other areas are fair. In many ways the provision of massive additional capacity has been an achievement but I'd wonder where it, and indeed testing would be, if it wasn't for military logisticians and 25 year old squaddies.
Strangely I haven't seen figures for deaths of military personnel working on all this. I hear about transport drivers, i hear about NHS staff and so on. Why is that? Have none died or does it just not make a good story.
Apart from the RAF they tend to be younger, fitter and thinner than the civvie population and therefore less likely to succumb to C19.
I know i shouldn't be shocked anymore, but the President of the United States is tweeting and promoting a conspiracy theory that a cable TV host killed one of his then congressional interns in the 1990s.....
The employees will come off furlough as their employers go bust due to cash flow issues.
Listening to the HOC support is unanimous from across the house and even Caroline Lucas
It applies across the UK and is the best scheme in the world
Your partisanship is truly impressive. Labour were at least the party of Tax & Spend whereas your lot just seem to be the party of "Spend"
Do any of you even remember what Maggie said about spending other people's money?
Interesting to ponder what Maggie would have done in the pandemic.
She might have got her boots on earlier, but as to a wholly different approach? I doubt it...
Wasn't a fan of Mrs T. but I would guess she would have taken it far more seriously in the first instance, not least as she was a scientist rather than a classics scholar. I also suspect another difference would be that she was probably a fastidious hand washer.
As a chemist she'd have been familiar with exponential maths - from reaction kinetics. As wpould any physicist, and those biologists who didnt' struggle with their maths in the first place (some did).
The RBD Of The Spike Protein Of SARS-Group Coronaviruses Is A Highly Specific Target Of SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies But Not Other Pathogenic Human and Animal Coronavirus Antibodies https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20093377v1 ...There is an urgent need for SARS-CoV-2 serologic tests to identify all infected individuals, irrespective of clinical symptoms, to conduct surveillance and implement strategies to contain spread. As the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the viral spike (S) protein is poorly conserved between SARS-CoVs and other pathogenic human coronaviruses, the RBD represents a promising antigen for detecting CoV specific antibodies in people. Here we use a large panel of human sera (70 SARS-CoV-2 patients and 71 control subjects) and hyperimmune sera from animals exposed to zoonotic CoVs to evaluate the performance of the RBD as an antigen for accurate detection of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies. By day 9 after the onset of symptoms, the recombinant SARS-CoV-2 RBD antigen was highly sensitive (98%) and specific (100%) to antibodies induced by SARS-CoVs. We observed a robust correlation between levels of RBD binding antibodies and SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies in patients. Our results, which reveal the early kinetics of SARS-CoV-2 antibody responses, strongly support the use of RBD-based antibody assays for population-level surveillance and as a correlate of neutralizing antibody levels in people who have recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infections...
The employees will come off furlough as their employers go bust due to cash flow issues.
Listening to the HOC support is unanimous from across the house and even Caroline Lucas
It applies across the UK and is the best scheme in the world
Your partisanship is truly impressive. Labour were at least the party of Tax & Spend whereas your lot just seem to be the party of "Spend"
Do any of you even remember what Maggie said about spending other people's money?
Interesting to ponder what Maggie would have done in the pandemic.
She might have got her boots on earlier, but as to a wholly different approach? I doubt it...
But Maggie would have taken action earlier as would TMay. Countries with female leaders have fared better. Countries with ultra macho male leaders have fared worse.
hmmmm
that's a bit like calling an election before any votes have been counted. Personally I don't think we'll understand the "scoreboard" for two or three years.
Protect the NHS. And there is the issue, EVERYTHING was about stopping the NHS acute care being overwhelmed and by doing so reducing the body count. That appears to have left holes elsewhere in response, in how care homes were addressed.
The decision was partially science but it was also partially political, because the NHS has sainted status. The NHS is a massive institution with a large budget as any sizeable public health service will be but the idea that it is all heroes is balls. There are bound to have been poor decisions there, just as the politicians, the white lab coats and the civil servants in Public Health made mistakes.
Certainly questions about how this strategy seemed to to overwhelmingly focus on acute care in what appears to have been the exclusion of other areas are fair. In many ways the provision of massive additional capacity has been an achievement but I'd wonder where it, and indeed testing would be, if it wasn't for military logisticians and 25 year old squaddies.
Strangely I haven't seen figures for deaths of military personnel working on all this. I hear about transport drivers, i hear about NHS staff and so on. Why is that? Have none died or does it just not make a good story.
Apart from the RAF they tend to be younger, fitter and thinner than the civvie population and therefore less likely to succumb to C19.
The great unwashed of Bridgend are furious at Drakeford for keeping us in lockdown. Drakeford's 'indecision' does not compare well to Boris' 'deciseveness' 'Boris gets things done' was the clarion call.
So PB Tories are at one with the proles.
Just out of curiosity i have not been in a bank branch for >3 years i estimate. Would not dream of going in one with Corona...why do you need to go in?
sorry if this is a dumb q but other than businesses who get paid in cash a lot why do we need bank branches at all any more? I am more surprised to see one than i am to hear of them closing down to be honest!
Excoriating piece by AEP, which importantly contains the views of a leading COVID doctor.
“Boris survived because they gave him oxygen. High flow oxygen wasn’t available as a treatment option for all patients.”
“Our policy was to let the virus rip and then ‘cocoon the elderly’,” he wrote. “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you contrast that with what we actually did...We actively seeded this into the very population that was most vulnerable."
It's actually extremely angering to think that basically all of the poor decision making stems from our lack of testing capacity at the beginning of this crisis and our "experts" telling the government that they have it under control. The delay in getting testing capacity to at least 20k per day is why we couldn't mass test all of the care patients before sending them back, it's why we stopped testing community transmission and why we're so late to the party with track and trace.
As I've said before it's Hancock that is ultimately at fault, but our experts have been lacking in judgement on far too many occasions. Especially given that there have been successful models in other countries and not just in Asia, similar European countries/cultures have made it work a lot better but the commonality among those countries was decentralised mass testing capacity.
And more empirical evidence that Hitchens is clueless..
Pandemic, Shutdown and Consumer Spending: Lessons from Scandinavian Policy Responses to COVID-19 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.04630 ..This paper uses transaction data from a large bank in Scandinavia to estimate the effect of social distancing laws on consumer spending in the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis exploits a natural experiment to disentangle the effects of the virus and the laws aiming to contain it: Denmark and Sweden were similarly exposed to the pandemic but only Denmark imposed significant restrictions on social and economic activities. We estimate that aggregate spending dropped by around 25 percent in Sweden and, as a result of the shutdown, by 4 additional percentage points in Denmark. This implies that most of the economic contraction is caused by the virus itself and occurs regardless of social distancing laws. The age gradient in the estimates suggest that social distancing reinforces the virus-induced drop in spending for low health-risk individuals but attenuates it for high-risk individuals by lowering the overall prevalence of the virus in the society...
Protect the NHS. And there is the issue, EVERYTHING was about stopping the NHS acute care being overwhelmed and by doing so reducing the body count. That appears to have left holes elsewhere in response, in how care homes were addressed.
The decision was partially science but it was also partially political, because the NHS has sainted status. The NHS is a massive institution with a large budget as any sizeable public health service will be but the idea that it is all heroes is balls. There are bound to have been poor decisions there, just as the politicians, the white lab coats and the civil servants in Public Health made mistakes.
Certainly questions about how this strategy seemed to to overwhelmingly focus on acute care in what appears to have been the exclusion of other areas are fair. In many ways the provision of massive additional capacity has been an achievement but I'd wonder where it, and indeed testing would be, if it wasn't for military logisticians and 25 year old squaddies.
Strangely I haven't seen figures for deaths of military personnel working on all this. I hear about transport drivers, i hear about NHS staff and so on. Why is that? Have none died or does it just not make a good story.
Apart from the RAF they tend to be younger, fitter and thinner than the civvie population and therefore less likely to succumb to C19.
I recall from some article or other on the Falklands war that the Welsh Guards fared worst out of all the British units due to lack of fitness and too much blubber. Things have probably improved in 38 years I imagine.
Protect the NHS. And there is the issue, EVERYTHING was about stopping the NHS acute care being overwhelmed and by doing so reducing the body count. That appears to have left holes elsewhere in response, in how care homes were addressed.
The decision was partially science but it was also partially political, because the NHS has sainted status. The NHS is a massive institution with a large budget as any sizeable public health service will be but the idea that it is all heroes is balls. There are bound to have been poor decisions there, just as the politicians, the white lab coats and the civil servants in Public Health made mistakes.
Certainly questions about how this strategy seemed to to overwhelmingly focus on acute care in what appears to have been the exclusion of other areas are fair. In many ways the provision of massive additional capacity has been an achievement but I'd wonder where it, and indeed testing would be, if it wasn't for military logisticians and 25 year old squaddies.
Strangely I haven't seen figures for deaths of military personnel working on all this. I hear about transport drivers, i hear about NHS staff and so on. Why is that? Have none died or does it just not make a good story.
Apart from the RAF they tend to be younger, fitter and thinner than the civvie population and therefore less likely to succumb to C19.
Despite drinking tankards of vomit?
Or collapsing marquees...
I freely admit, I collapse after drinking a tankard of vomit....
The great unwashed of Bridgend are furious at Drakeford for keeping us in lockdown. Drakeford's 'indecision' does not compare well to Boris' 'deciseveness' 'Boris gets things done' was the clarion call.
So PB Tories are at one with the proles.
Just out of curiosity i have not been in a bank branch for >3 years i estimate. Would not dream of going in one with Corona...why do you need to go in?
sorry if this is a dumb q but other than businesses who get paid in cash a lot why do we need bank branches at all any more? I am more surprised to see one than i am to hear of them closing down to be honest!
(a) dealing with new accounts, loans, etc. (b) dealing with cheques, etc. (some companies insist on paying them for added security) (c) old/disabled - can't cope with even voice telephones or computers or own a secure PC
(edit) (d) somewhere to put as cashpoint (e) somewhere to sell mortgages etc.
Mr. Max, learning vicariously from foreign nations (and the past) allows us to profit from the knowledge earnt without paying the cost of the tuition. It's one of the reasons I like history.
The lack of a willingness to take onboard lessons from overseas (or our own past, perhaps) is disappointing.
Bidirectional contact tracing is required for reliable COVID-19 control https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20093369v1 ...Contact tracing is critical to limiting the spread of pandemics such as COVID-19, but most protocols only "forward-trace" to notify people who were recently exposed. Using a stochastic branching process model, we find that "bidirectional" tracing to identify infector individuals robustly outperforms forward-only approaches across a wide range of scenarios. The addition of rapid smartphone-based exposure notification offers few benefits over conventional manual tracing alone unless uptake of the digital system is near-universal. However, as long as exposure events can be detected by nearly all smartphones, the combination of manual and digital with bidirectional tracing more than doubles the probability of controlling outbreaks across three epidemiological scenarios. Implementing combined bidirectional tracing may be critical to controlling COVID-19 without more costly interventions...
The employees will come off furlough as their employers go bust due to cash flow issues.
Listening to the HOC support is unanimous from across the house and even Caroline Lucas
It applies across the UK and is the best scheme in the world
Getting people off this is going to be like lifting the lockdown, Going to be very difficult and there will be plenty of losers. There isn't an easy answer.
We are witnessing a conservative Prime Minister and Chancellor moving into the centre left space left by labour's surrender to Corbynism and reminiscent of the SNP in Scotland when they effectively made labour redundant
Strange days indeed
In economic terms Boris is running a more left-wing government than Blair did and Starmer is still basically following Ed Miliband on economics.
There is no cut spending party at the moment, indeed the LDs under Ed Davey are closer to that than the two main parties.
The top income tax rate at 45% is also still higher than the 40% rate under Blair
The employees will come off furlough as their employers go bust due to cash flow issues.
Listening to the HOC support is unanimous from across the house and even Caroline Lucas
It applies across the UK and is the best scheme in the world
Your partisanship is truly impressive. Labour were at least the party of Tax & Spend whereas your lot just seem to be the party of "Spend"
Do any of you even remember what Maggie said about spending other people's money?
Interesting to ponder what Maggie would have done in the pandemic.
She might have got her boots on earlier, but as to a wholly different approach? I doubt it...
But Maggie would have taken action earlier as would TMay. Countries with female leaders have fared better. Countries with ultra macho male leaders have fared worse.
hmmmm
that's a bit like calling an election before any votes have been counted. Personally I don't think we'll understand the "scoreboard" for two or three years.
Yes, I agree. Bill Gates thought no country would get an A+, although New Zealand might prove him wrong. Looks like we'll be mid-division at best, but we do need to wait a bit to see how it all shakes down in the end.
I know i shouldn't be shocked anymore, but the President of the United States is tweeting and promoting a conspiracy theory that a cable TV host killed one of his then congressional interns in the 1990s.....
Extraordinary.
Trump had a moment of self examination and introspection. In the closing 2 sentences.
I know i shouldn't be shocked anymore, but the President of the United States is tweeting and promoting a conspiracy theory that a cable TV host killed one of his then congressional interns in the 1990s.....
Extraordinary.
No, it would be extraordinary if he shut up for a couple of days.
The employees will come off furlough as their employers go bust due to cash flow issues.
Listening to the HOC support is unanimous from across the house and even Caroline Lucas
It applies across the UK and is the best scheme in the world
Your partisanship is truly impressive. Labour were at least the party of Tax & Spend whereas your lot just seem to be the party of "Spend"
Do any of you even remember what Maggie said about spending other people's money?
Interesting to ponder what Maggie would have done in the pandemic.
She might have got her boots on earlier, but as to a wholly different approach? I doubt it...
But Maggie would have taken action earlier as would TMay. Countries with female leaders have fared better. Countries with ultra macho male leaders have fared worse.
hmmmm
that's a bit like calling an election before any votes have been counted. Personally I don't think we'll understand the "scoreboard" for two or three years.
Yes, I agree. Bill Gates thought no country would get an A+, although New Zealand might prove him wrong. Looks like we'll be mid-division at best, but we do need to wait a bit to see how it all shakes down in the end.
I would have thought Australia would. They don't have the advantages of New Zealand, with much larger population density, much more connected to China, etc etc etc, but basically controlled it.
Listening to Nicola Sturgeon I have a feeling that the virus is much more prevelant in Scotland than it is in many parts of England. Where I am in Hampshire hospitals here are returning to normal. Operating theatres have opened, normal operations are being carried out, there are hardly any Covid-19 admissions, yet in Scotland yesterday there was a 165 increase in the number in Hospital with suspected Covid-19
It's almost like they're different countries at different stages of the pandemic.
You would also think they may read the info and see it has far lower death rate than England but is a few weeks behind, rather than just talking out their jacksie.
The great unwashed of Bridgend are furious at Drakeford for keeping us in lockdown. Drakeford's 'indecision' does not compare well to Boris' 'deciseveness' 'Boris gets things done' was the clarion call.
So PB Tories are at one with the proles.
Just out of curiosity i have not been in a bank branch for >3 years i estimate. Would not dream of going in one with Corona...why do you need to go in?
sorry if this is a dumb q but other than businesses who get paid in cash a lot why do we need bank branches at all any more? I am more surprised to see one than i am to hear of them closing down to be honest!
I always need large amounts of cash for buying cars and parts. A large Cali Cartel style stack often motivates the seller to take a less than ideal offer.
Sunak's announcement makes a wealth tax now almost certai, I would have thought.
The disincentives to working and economic activity are so large, the government simply will not be able to get anywhere near its current spending levels with revenue from what remains of the economy. Not even in same ballpark. Not even in the same county.
Johnson will never cut a public sector he clearly worships, and so the only answer is to take wealth from the middle classes.
The great unwashed of Bridgend are furious at Drakeford for keeping us in lockdown. Drakeford's 'indecision' does not compare well to Boris' 'deciseveness' 'Boris gets things done' was the clarion call.
So PB Tories are at one with the proles.
Just out of curiosity i have not been in a bank branch for >3 years i estimate. Would not dream of going in one with Corona...why do you need to go in?
sorry if this is a dumb q but other than businesses who get paid in cash a lot why do we need bank branches at all any more? I am more surprised to see one than i am to hear of them closing down to be honest!
The great unwashed of Bridgend are furious at Drakeford for keeping us in lockdown. Drakeford's 'indecision' does not compare well to Boris' 'deciseveness' 'Boris gets things done' was the clarion call.
So PB Tories are at one with the proles.
Just out of curiosity i have not been in a bank branch for >3 years i estimate. Would not dream of going in one with Corona...why do you need to go in?
sorry if this is a dumb q but other than businesses who get paid in cash a lot why do we need bank branches at all any more? I am more surprised to see one than i am to hear of them closing down to be honest!
I needed to make a SWIFT payment to Japan.
And they made you queue for it? I'd ask for my money back.
The great unwashed of Bridgend are furious at Drakeford for keeping us in lockdown. Drakeford's 'indecision' does not compare well to Boris' 'deciseveness' 'Boris gets things done' was the clarion call.
So PB Tories are at one with the proles.
The morons are queuing for a bank.
Why?
Do they not have phones, computers or a functioning brain?
I see they think Boris is decisive so its a no on the functioning brain front.
I thought everybody on here had a personal banker? No? They let anybody post on here these days.
I have mine visit me. Far more convenient.
You shouldn't use loan sharks. Sure, they make house calls, but still - not recommended.
Protect the NHS. And there is the issue, EVERYTHING was about stopping the NHS acute care being overwhelmed and by doing so reducing the body count. That appears to have left holes elsewhere in response, in how care homes were addressed.
The decision was partially science but it was also partially political, because the NHS has sainted status. The NHS is a massive institution with a large budget as any sizeable public health service will be but the idea that it is all heroes is balls. There are bound to have been poor decisions there, just as the politicians, the white lab coats and the civil servants in Public Health made mistakes.
Certainly questions about how this strategy seemed to to overwhelmingly focus on acute care in what appears to have been the exclusion of other areas are fair. In many ways the provision of massive additional capacity has been an achievement but I'd wonder where it, and indeed testing would be, if it wasn't for military logisticians and 25 year old squaddies.
Strangely I haven't seen figures for deaths of military personnel working on all this. I hear about transport drivers, i hear about NHS staff and so on. Why is that? Have none died or does it just not make a good story.
Apart from the RAF they tend to be younger, fitter and thinner than the civvie population and therefore less likely to succumb to C19.
I recall from some article or other on the Falklands war that the Welsh Guards fared worst out of all the British units due to lack of fitness and too much blubber. Things have probably improved in 38 years I imagine.
No. The army has quite a few lard arses as they had to abandon the fitness tests and standards due to their massive retention issues. The RN has less of an issue as if you can get fat on the food served on HM's war canoes there is something radically wrong with you. Both physically and mentally.
The great unwashed of Bridgend are furious at Drakeford for keeping us in lockdown. Drakeford's 'indecision' does not compare well to Boris' 'deciseveness' 'Boris gets things done' was the clarion call.
So PB Tories are at one with the proles.
The morons are queuing for a bank.
Why?
Do they not have phones, computers or a functioning brain?
I see they think Boris is decisive so its a no on the functioning brain front.
For some people going to the bank is a social activity, an opportunity to chat to people.
My wife was like that - finally gave in to online banking, just before this started.
When I insisted she pay in a cheque by post, it was as if I was destroying something.
We are dealing with a once in a hundred year pandemic.
The Government managed to persuade people to accept the largest reduction in freedoms in the history of the country and the people have 99.9999% complied with it.
They have instigated an astonishing and generousFurlough Scheme to keep peoples livelihood's going, probably the most generous in the world.
The NHS has dealt comfortably with the pandemic.(No one gave it a chance in ealry March)
They have provided detailed advice and guidance throughout the lockdown. It was easily accessible and clearly written.
Their major error has been the carehome issue, they got carried away with discharging people from hospital when they should have been isolated.
Now, they are making a tiny change to the lockdown to give people a tiny bit more freedom and have provided a plan on the way forward and people are claiming they don't understand what seems simple to me. In terms of returning to work for those on Furlough I have just had an email from a marble supplier telling me that following Boris's chat they are re-opening tomorrow. They have said they have spent the last six weeks changing their factory and putting into place the following procedures.
All employees have a temperature check upon arrival each morning. Strict 2 metre distancing on the factory floor and at workstations Staggered breaks Hand sanitiser stations Face masks to be worn at all times Visitors to the factory/showroom are strictly by pre appointment only
I wonder how they managed to do this seeing as the only Government advice is so muddled and confusing.
But this is politics. Governments get punished for presiding over tough times. Gordon Brown brought the developed world together after the GFC and was instrumental in mitigating the damage. Fat lot of good it did him.
You know full well that's not what Brown is blamed for. Gordon Brown screwed up the economy before the crash and paid the price when the GFC exposed what he had already done.
If he hadn't been so hubristic as to think he had "eliminated boom and bust" he wouldn't have left the nation so exposed to see the deficit blow up because it was already high pre-crash.
I'm not engaging with "Tory Story" propaganda today.
The employees will come off furlough as their employers go bust due to cash flow issues.
Listening to the HOC support is unanimous from across the house and even Caroline Lucas
It applies across the UK and is the best scheme in the world
Your partisanship is truly impressive. Labour were at least the party of Tax & Spend whereas your lot just seem to be the party of "Spend"
Do any of you even remember what Maggie said about spending other people's money?
Interesting to ponder what Maggie would have done in the pandemic.
She might have got her boots on earlier, but as to a wholly different approach? I doubt it...
But Maggie would have taken action earlier as would TMay. Countries with female leaders have fared better. Countries with ultra macho male leaders have fared worse.
hmmmm
that's a bit like calling an election before any votes have been counted. Personally I don't think we'll understand the "scoreboard" for two or three years.
Yes, I agree. Bill Gates thought no country would get an A+, although New Zealand might prove him wrong. Looks like we'll be mid-division at best, but we do need to wait a bit to see how it all shakes down in the end.
I would have thought Australia would. They don't have the advantages of New Zealand, with much larger population density, much more connected to China, etc etc etc, but basically controlled it.
I believe they have a total of 98 dead.
Fascinating one for me is that South Africa have far, far fewer deaths than they normally would because the lockdown means far few murders.
Protect the NHS. And there is the issue, EVERYTHING was about stopping the NHS acute care being overwhelmed and by doing so reducing the body count. That appears to have left holes elsewhere in response, in how care homes were addressed.
The decision was partially science but it was also partially political, because the NHS has sainted status. The NHS is a massive institution with a large budget as any sizeable public health service will be but the idea that it is all heroes is balls. There are bound to have been poor decisions there, just as the politicians, the white lab coats and the civil servants in Public Health made mistakes.
Certainly questions about how this strategy seemed to to overwhelmingly focus on acute care in what appears to have been the exclusion of other areas are fair. In many ways the provision of massive additional capacity has been an achievement but I'd wonder where it, and indeed testing would be, if it wasn't for military logisticians and 25 year old squaddies.
Strangely I haven't seen figures for deaths of military personnel working on all this. I hear about transport drivers, i hear about NHS staff and so on. Why is that? Have none died or does it just not make a good story.
Apart from the RAF they tend to be younger, fitter and thinner than the civvie population and therefore less likely to succumb to C19.
Despite drinking tankards of vomit?
Or collapsing marquees...
I freely admit, I collapse after drinking a tankard of vomit....
I know i shouldn't be shocked anymore, but the President of the United States is tweeting and promoting a conspiracy theory that a cable TV host killed one of his then congressional interns in the 1990s.....
Extraordinary.
I honestly feel that in the last 3 months he has gone from arrogant, stupid and obnoxious to plain old batshit insane. It's just like the frog in the pan, its crept up on us slowly and we have not all noticed.
Corona virus seems to have driven him over the edge. It destroyed his stock market boom, it showed the consequences of his vandalism of Federal services, it highlighted how reckless his attacks on the modest progress of Obamacare were and it has already killed more Americans than the Vietnam war.
So Brexit means we will onshore car manufacturing again...
A supplier to Aston Martin and Bentley has become the first significant automotive parts maker to fall into administration during the economic shutdown.
Arlington Automotive Group has hired Duff & Phelps to administer a type of insolvency, putting hundreds of jobs at risk.
The company makes thermostats and assembles vehicle systems and is part of Arlington Industries, which is backed by Cartesian Capital, a US private equity firm. It employs 600 people at several locations in Britain, including Coventry, Birmingham and Manchester. Its customers include Jaguar Land Rover, Ford and Nissan.
We are dealing with a once in a hundred year pandemic.
The Government managed to persuade people to accept the largest reduction in freedoms in the history of the country and the people have 99.9999% complied with it.
They have instigated an astonishing and generousFurlough Scheme to keep peoples livelihood's going, probably the most generous in the world.
The NHS has dealt comfortably with the pandemic.(No one gave it a chance in ealry March)
They have provided detailed advice and guidance throughout the lockdown. It was easily accessible and clearly written.
Their major error has been the carehome issue, they got carried away with discharging people from hospital when they should have been isolated.
Now, they are making a tiny change to the lockdown to give people a tiny bit more freedom and have provided a plan on the way forward and people are claiming they don't understand what seems simple to me. In terms of returning to work for those on Furlough I have just had an email from a marble supplier telling me that following Boris's chat they are re-opening tomorrow. They have said they have spent the last six weeks changing their factory and putting into place the following procedures.
All employees have a temperature check upon arrival each morning. Strict 2 metre distancing on the factory floor and at workstations Staggered breaks Hand sanitiser stations Face masks to be worn at all times Visitors to the factory/showroom are strictly by pre appointment only
I wonder how they managed to do this seeing as the only Government advice is so muddled and confusing.
But this is politics. Governments get punished for presiding over tough times. Gordon Brown brought the developed world together after the GFC and was instrumental in mitigating the damage. Fat lot of good it did him.
You know full well that's not what Brown is blamed for. Gordon Brown screwed up the economy before the crash and paid the price when the GFC exposed what he had already done.
If he hadn't been so hubristic as to think he had "eliminated boom and bust" he wouldn't have left the nation so exposed to see the deficit blow up because it was already high pre-crash.
I'm not engaging with "Tory Story" propaganda today.
Its not propaganda its a fact. Actually two facts.
Fact #1: Brown hubristically claimed he'd abolished boom and bust. Fact #2: Brown ran a major counter-cyclical budget deficit during the boom.
They're both facts and you know them both. That you don't like those facts doesn't change them.
The employees will come off furlough as their employers go bust due to cash flow issues.
Listening to the HOC support is unanimous from across the house and even Caroline Lucas
It applies across the UK and is the best scheme in the world
Your partisanship is truly impressive. Labour were at least the party of Tax & Spend whereas your lot just seem to be the party of "Spend"
Do any of you even remember what Maggie said about spending other people's money?
Interesting to ponder what Maggie would have done in the pandemic.
She might have got her boots on earlier, but as to a wholly different approach? I doubt it...
But Maggie would have taken action earlier as would TMay. Countries with female leaders have fared better. Countries with ultra macho male leaders have fared worse.
hmmmm
that's a bit like calling an election before any votes have been counted. Personally I don't think we'll understand the "scoreboard" for two or three years.
Yes, I agree. Bill Gates thought no country would get an A+, although New Zealand might prove him wrong. Looks like we'll be mid-division at best, but we do need to wait a bit to see how it all shakes down in the end.
I would have thought Australia would. They don't have the advantages of New Zealand, with much larger population density, much more connected to China, etc etc etc, but basically controlled it.
I believe they have a total of 98 dead.
Fascinating one for me is that South Africa have far, far fewer deaths than they normally would because the lockdown means far few murders.
Might want to hold fire...
But we are now over six weeks into what remains one of the toughest lockdowns on earth, the government's health experts are predicting that the peak of the epidemic may still be two or three months away, infection numbers are surging in some regions, and the shocked silence and prompt conformity that greeted Mr Ramaphosa's early diktats has been replaced by an increasingly sceptical, angry, and politicised debate.
Sunak's announcement makes a wealth tax now almost certai, I would have thought.
The disincentives to working and economic activity are so large, the government simply will not be able to get anywhere near its current spending levels with revenue from what remains of the economy. Not even in same ballpark. Not even in the same county.
Johnson will never cut a public sector he clearly worships, and so the only answer is to take wealth from the middle classes.
Yes. Housing wealth is £6 trillion. Some of that will have to be liberated.
I honestly feel that in the last 3 months he has gone from arrogant, stupid and obnoxious to plain old batshit insane. It's just like the frog in the pan, its crept up on us slowly and we have not all noticed.
It really isn't anything new. Obama is a secret muslim Kenyan? Ted Cruz's dad killed Kennedy? He's always been a conspira-nut.
Excoriating piece by AEP, which importantly contains the views of a leading COVID doctor.
“Boris survived because they gave him oxygen. High flow oxygen wasn’t available as a treatment option for all patients.”
“Our policy was to let the virus rip and then ‘cocoon the elderly’,” he wrote. “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you contrast that with what we actually did...We actively seeded this into the very population that was most vulnerable."
It's actually extremely angering to think that basically all of the poor decision making stems from our lack of testing capacity at the beginning of this crisis and our "experts" telling the government that they have it under control. The delay in getting testing capacity to at least 20k per day is why we couldn't mass test all of the care patients before sending them back, it's why we stopped testing community transmission and why we're so late to the party with track and trace.
As I've said before it's Hancock that is ultimately at fault, but our experts have been lacking in judgement on far too many occasions. Especially given that there have been successful models in other countries and not just in Asia, similar European countries/cultures have made it work a lot better but the commonality among those countries was decentralised mass testing capacity.
I'm supportive of Boris at the moment but we were piss-poor early on. Nothing to do with hindsight. Anyone prepared to lift their eyes to the east could see what was happening. That scientists and politicians refused to pay attention is a scandal.
That having been written, from the beginning of April onwards they did get their act together. By that time the virus had spread willy-nilly and the result was 30,000 deaths, 25,000 of which were preventable. So, not great.
On the other hand, without wishing to go all 'herd immunity' (remember that?) by this time next year we may be in a better position than somewhere like, say, New Zealand. The more people are exposed to this the faster we exit it.
Sunak's announcement makes a wealth tax now almost certai, I would have thought.
The disincentives to working and economic activity are so large, the government simply will not be able to get anywhere near its current spending levels with revenue from what remains of the economy. Not even in same ballpark. Not even in the same county.
Johnson will never cut a public sector he clearly worships, and so the only answer is to take wealth from the middle classes.
Yes. Housing wealth is £6 trillion. Some of that will have to be liberated.
What you mean of course is stolen. But this is a government that has completely ridden roughshod over rights we have had for centuries, so they might well do it.
I honestly feel that in the last 3 months he has gone from arrogant, stupid and obnoxious to plain old batshit insane. It's just like the frog in the pan, its crept up on us slowly and we have not all noticed.
It really isn't anything new. Obama is a secret muslim Kenyan? Ted Cruz's dad killed Kennedy? He's always been a conspira-nut.
See that's what he wants you to think. Its the method in the madness.
Bidirectional contact tracing is required for reliable COVID-19 control https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20093369v1 ...Contact tracing is critical to limiting the spread of pandemics such as COVID-19, but most protocols only "forward-trace" to notify people who were recently exposed. Using a stochastic branching process model, we find that "bidirectional" tracing to identify infector individuals robustly outperforms forward-only approaches across a wide range of scenarios. The addition of rapid smartphone-based exposure notification offers few benefits over conventional manual tracing alone unless uptake of the digital system is near-universal. However, as long as exposure events can be detected by nearly all smartphones, the combination of manual and digital with bidirectional tracing more than doubles the probability of controlling outbreaks across three epidemiological scenarios. Implementing combined bidirectional tracing may be critical to controlling COVID-19 without more costly interventions...
I would emphasise the bidirectional tracing as being particularly important with asymptomatic cases spreading infection. You want to trace backwards to identify the source of infection so that you can then trace forwards from that source.
I don't know if the APIs developed by Apple/Google will support that but it's a problem if they don't.
The great unwashed of Bridgend are furious at Drakeford for keeping us in lockdown. Drakeford's 'indecision' does not compare well to Boris' 'deciseveness' 'Boris gets things done' was the clarion call.
So PB Tories are at one with the proles.
Just out of curiosity i have not been in a bank branch for >3 years i estimate. Would not dream of going in one with Corona...why do you need to go in?
sorry if this is a dumb q but other than businesses who get paid in cash a lot why do we need bank branches at all any more? I am more surprised to see one than i am to hear of them closing down to be honest!
Last time I was in a branch it was to arrange payment of the deposit on the house I was buying. The sum being too large for ebanking, and needing verification of photo-id & other details and by two members of staff...
Sunak's announcement makes a wealth tax now almost certai, I would have thought.
The disincentives to working and economic activity are so large, the government simply will not be able to get anywhere near its current spending levels with revenue from what remains of the economy. Not even in same ballpark. Not even in the same county.
Johnson will never cut a public sector he clearly worships, and so the only answer is to take wealth from the middle classes.
No, he will keep borrowing.
He is not going to impose a wealth tax on wealthy property owners in London and the Home Counties he needs to be re elected.
At most there may be an expansion in the council tax bands
The thing that continues to bug me is our ambivalence on face masks. Pratt Hancock is partly to blame and it has BUGGER ALL to do with science.
Yes yes the scientific evidence is 'weak' blah blah. That's drivel. All that means is there have never been, nor will there ever be, double blind randomised tests on face masks for CV-19.
It's a complete no brainer that you should wear a good mask, especially in confined spaces. They help prevent the spread.
The driver behind the Government's ambivalence is twofold.
1. Racism. We don't like these funny little slit-eyed people in their silly little face masks. Think that's outrageous? It's what Jonathan Van-Tam, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer implied on 22nd April when speaking about the Japanese propensity for wearing them.
2. Insufficient supply. The real driver. We don't have enough of them to keep the NHS safe. Hence we now hear talk of 'face coverings' and are given lessons on how to make our own. If the Government had begun ordering FFP2 and FFP3 masks when I did - January 23rd - the whole country would be covered by now.
The employees will come off furlough as their employers go bust due to cash flow issues.
Listening to the HOC support is unanimous from across the house and even Caroline Lucas
It applies across the UK and is the best scheme in the world
Your partisanship is truly impressive. Labour were at least the party of Tax & Spend whereas your lot just seem to be the party of "Spend"
Do any of you even remember what Maggie said about spending other people's money?
Interesting to ponder what Maggie would have done in the pandemic.
She might have got her boots on earlier, but as to a wholly different approach? I doubt it...
But Maggie would have taken action earlier as would TMay. Countries with female leaders have fared better. Countries with ultra macho male leaders have fared worse.
hmmmm
that's a bit like calling an election before any votes have been counted. Personally I don't think we'll understand the "scoreboard" for two or three years.
Yes, I agree. Bill Gates thought no country would get an A+, although New Zealand might prove him wrong. Looks like we'll be mid-division at best, but we do need to wait a bit to see how it all shakes down in the end.
The thing that continues to bug me is our ambivalence on face masks. Pratt Hancock is partly to blame and it has BUGGER ALL to do with science.
Yes yes the scientific evidence is 'weak' blah blah. That's drivel. All that means is there have never been, nor will there ever be, double blind randomised tests on face masks for CV-19.
It's a complete no brainer that you should wear a good mask, especially in confined spaces. They help prevent the spread.
The driver behind the Government's ambivalence is twofold.
1. Racism. We don't like these funnily little slit-eyed people in their silly little face masks. Think that's outrageous? It's what Jonathan Van-Tam, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer implied on 22nd April when speaking about the Japanese propensity for wearing them.
2. Insufficient supply. The real driver. We don't have enough of them to keep the NHS safe. Hence we now hear talk of 'face coverings' and are given lessons on how to make your own. If the Government had begun ordering FFP2 and FFP3 masks when I did - January 23rd - the whole country would be covered by now.
I notice from the footage showing Europe "opening up", there were people handing out free masks at train stations etc. I presume we aren't doing that here.
I see Sunak has pulled the wool over people's eyes re the furlough, saying he's extended it until October. No you haven't mate, after July no employer is going to pay staff to stay at home
We are dealing with a once in a hundred year pandemic.
The Government managed to persuade people to accept the largest reduction in freedoms in the history of the country and the people have 99.9999% complied with it.
They have instigated an astonishing and generousFurlough Scheme to keep peoples livelihood's going, probably the most generous in the world.
The NHS has dealt comfortably with the pandemic.(No one gave it a chance in ealry March)
They have provided detailed advice and guidance throughout the lockdown. It was easily accessible and clearly written.
Their major error has been the carehome issue, they got carried away with discharging people from hospital when they should have been isolated.
Now, they are making a tiny change to the lockdown to give people a tiny bit more freedom and have provided a plan on the way forward and people are claiming they don't understand what seems simple to me. In terms of returning to work for those on Furlough I have just had an email from a marble supplier telling me that following Boris's chat they are re-opening tomorrow. They have said they have spent the last six weeks changing their factory and putting into place the following procedures.
All employees have a temperature check upon arrival each morning. Strict 2 metre distancing on the factory floor and at workstations Staggered breaks Hand sanitiser stations Face masks to be worn at all times Visitors to the factory/showroom are strictly by pre appointment only
I wonder how they managed to do this seeing as the only Government advice is so muddled and confusing.
But this is politics. Governments get punished for presiding over tough times. Gordon Brown brought the developed world together after the GFC and was instrumental in mitigating the damage. Fat lot of good it did him.
You know full well that's not what Brown is blamed for. Gordon Brown screwed up the economy before the crash and paid the price when the GFC exposed what he had already done.
If he hadn't been so hubristic as to think he had "eliminated boom and bust" he wouldn't have left the nation so exposed to see the deficit blow up because it was already high pre-crash.
I'm not engaging with "Tory Story" propaganda today.
Its not propaganda its a fact. Actually two facts.
Fact #1: Brown hubristically claimed he'd abolished boom and bust. Fact #2: Brown ran a major counter-cyclical budget deficit during the boom.
They're both facts and you know them both. That you don't like those facts doesn't change them.
Abolishing boom and bust was indeed said by Brown, though he later claimed he meant Tory boom and bust. And I think one of the recent Conservative Chancellors had also said something along those lines. However, who said what is irrelevant because it does not effect anything at all.
Second is the question of whether fiscal policy could have been tighter (mending the roof and all that). Let's say it could. Let's say Brown was wrong there. The trouble is, even this deficit was low by international standards and by historical comparison with previous British deficits under Conservative Chancellors.
So even if you are right, neither had the slightest impact on the global financial crisis or our ability to withstand or recover from it. So even if you are right, you are wrong.
So Brexit means we will onshore car manufacturing again...
A supplier to Aston Martin and Bentley has become the first significant automotive parts maker to fall into administration during the economic shutdown.
Arlington Automotive Group has hired Duff & Phelps to administer a type of insolvency, putting hundreds of jobs at risk.
The company makes thermostats and assembles vehicle systems and is part of Arlington Industries, which is backed by Cartesian Capital, a US private equity firm. It employs 600 people at several locations in Britain, including Coventry, Birmingham and Manchester. Its customers include Jaguar Land Rover, Ford and Nissan.
The Fukushima tsunami caused several car factories in Europe to shut down for a time. Car factories rely on just in time deliveries of literally thousands of parts. Many of these are supplied by companies who are the only supplier (in a reasonable timeframe) of such parts. If just one part of the car does not turn up, the line stops, obviously.
A "linestop" is a dread phrase in my industry as the car company typically charges you several tens of thousands of £ PER HOUR. We have come close a few times...
If lots of companies like this go under it will have immense knock-on effects.
This hospital, 50 yards away from where I grew up, laid empty for years when it could be being used for social care. In the early eighties, when I was at infant school, we used to take flowers to the old people that were in there. Now it has been sold to housing developers
I honestly feel that in the last 3 months he has gone from arrogant, stupid and obnoxious to plain old batshit insane. It's just like the frog in the pan, its crept up on us slowly and we have not all noticed.
It really isn't anything new. Obama is a secret muslim Kenyan? Ted Cruz's dad killed Kennedy? He's always been a conspira-nut.
See that's what he wants you to think. Its the method in the madness.
I know i shouldn't be shocked anymore, but the President of the United States is tweeting and promoting a conspiracy theory that a cable TV host killed one of his then congressional interns in the 1990s.....
Extraordinary.
I honestly feel that in the last 3 months he has gone from arrogant, stupid and obnoxious to plain old batshit insane. It's just like the frog in the pan, its crept up on us slowly and we have not all noticed.
Corona virus seems to have driven him over the edge. It destroyed his stock market boom, it showed the consequences of his vandalism of Federal services, it highlighted how reckless his attacks on the modest progress of Obamacare were and it has already killed more Americans than the Vietnam war.
Is a president immune from libel? The 'isn't it obvious' is a killer (unintentional pun) phrase surely.
I wondered to myself a month or two ago.. is it really the government or the NHS's job to prevent people dying from pandemics? It was set up so people didn't die of everday preventable ills I thought
We are dealing with a once in a hundred year pandemic.
The Government managed to persuade people to accept the largest reduction in freedoms in the history of the country and the people have 99.9999% complied with it.
They have instigated an astonishing and generousFurlough Scheme to keep peoples livelihood's going, probably the most generous in the world.
The NHS has dealt comfortably with the pandemic.(No one gave it a chance in ealry March)
They have provided detailed advice and guidance throughout the lockdown. It was easily accessible and clearly written.
Their major error has been the carehome issue, they got carried away with discharging people from hospital when they should have been isolated.
Now, they are making a tiny change to the lockdown to give people a tiny bit more freedom and have provided a plan on the way forward and people are claiming they don't understand what seems simple to me. In terms of returning to work for those on Furlough I have just had an email from a marble supplier telling me that following Boris's chat they are re-opening tomorrow. They have said they have spent the last six weeks changing their factory and putting into place the following procedures.
All employees have a temperature check upon arrival each morning. Strict 2 metre distancing on the factory floor and at workstations Staggered breaks Hand sanitiser stations Face masks to be worn at all times Visitors to the factory/showroom are strictly by pre appointment only
I wonder how they managed to do this seeing as the only Government advice is so muddled and confusing.
But this is politics. Governments get punished for presiding over tough times. Gordon Brown brought the developed world together after the GFC and was instrumental in mitigating the damage. Fat lot of good it did him.
You know full well that's not what Brown is blamed for. Gordon Brown screwed up the economy before the crash and paid the price when the GFC exposed what he had already done.
If he hadn't been so hubristic as to think he had "eliminated boom and bust" he wouldn't have left the nation so exposed to see the deficit blow up because it was already high pre-crash.
I'm not engaging with "Tory Story" propaganda today.
Its not propaganda its a fact. Actually two facts.
Fact #1: Brown hubristically claimed he'd abolished boom and bust. Fact #2: Brown ran a major counter-cyclical budget deficit during the boom.
They're both facts and you know them both. That you don't like those facts doesn't change them.
Abolishing boom and bust was indeed said by Brown, though he later claimed he meant Tory boom and bust. And I think one of the recent Conservative Chancellors had also said something along those lines. However, who said what is irrelevant because it does not effect anything at all.
Second is the question of whether fiscal policy could have been tighter (mending the roof and all that). Let's say it could. Let's say Brown was wrong there. The trouble is, even this deficit was low by international standards and by historical comparison with previous British deficits under Conservative Chancellors.
So even if you are right, neither had the slightest impact on the global financial crisis or our ability to withstand or recover from it. So even if you are right, you are wrong.
The deficit was not for that stage of the cycle low by historical standards or compared with previous British deficits under Conservative Chancellors. For that stage of the economic cycle it was unprecedentedly high.
We are dealing with a once in a hundred year pandemic.
The Government managed to persuade people to accept the largest reduction in freedoms in the history of the country and the people have 99.9999% complied with it.
They have instigated an astonishing and generousFurlough Scheme to keep peoples livelihood's going, probably the most generous in the world.
The NHS has dealt comfortably with the pandemic.(No one gave it a chance in ealry March)
They have provided detailed advice and guidance throughout the lockdown. It was easily accessible and clearly written.
Their major error has been the carehome issue, they got carried away with discharging people from hospital when they should have been isolated.
Now, they are making a tiny change to the lockdown to give people a tiny bit more freedom and have provided a plan on the way forward and people are claiming they don't understand what seems simple to me. In terms of returning to work for those on Furlough I have just had an email from a marble supplier telling me that following Boris's chat they are re-opening tomorrow. They have said they have spent the last six weeks changing their factory and putting into place the following procedures.
All employees have a temperature check upon arrival each morning. Strict 2 metre distancing on the factory floor and at workstations Staggered breaks Hand sanitiser stations Face masks to be worn at all times Visitors to the factory/showroom are strictly by pre appointment only
I wonder how they managed to do this seeing as the only Government advice is so muddled and confusing.
But this is politics. Governments get punished for presiding over tough times. Gordon Brown brought the developed world together after the GFC and was instrumental in mitigating the damage. Fat lot of good it did him.
You know full well that's not what Brown is blamed for. Gordon Brown screwed up the economy before the crash and paid the price when the GFC exposed what he had already done.
If he hadn't been so hubristic as to think he had "eliminated boom and bust" he wouldn't have left the nation so exposed to see the deficit blow up because it was already high pre-crash.
I'm not engaging with "Tory Story" propaganda today.
Its not propaganda its a fact. Actually two facts.
Fact #1: Brown hubristically claimed he'd abolished boom and bust. Fact #2: Brown ran a major counter-cyclical budget deficit during the boom.
They're both facts and you know them both. That you don't like those facts doesn't change them.
Abolishing boom and bust was indeed said by Brown, though he later claimed he meant Tory boom and bust. And I think one of the recent Conservative Chancellors had also said something along those lines. However, who said what is irrelevant because it does not effect anything at all.
Second is the question of whether fiscal policy could have been tighter (mending the roof and all that). Let's say it could. Let's say Brown was wrong there. The trouble is, even this deficit was low by international standards and by historical comparison with previous British deficits under Conservative Chancellors.
So even if you are right, neither had the slightest impact on the global financial crisis or our ability to withstand or recover from it. So even if you are right, you are wrong.
Nope - claiming to have abolished boom and bust (of any kind) was simply hubris.
He was running a deficit when there were serious concerns about the economy over heating, due to a mad boom.
This meant that the deficit became massive when the boom ended and the tax receipts from the bank et al vanished.
I honestly feel that in the last 3 months he has gone from arrogant, stupid and obnoxious to plain old batshit insane. It's just like the frog in the pan, its crept up on us slowly and we have not all noticed.
It really isn't anything new. Obama is a secret muslim Kenyan? Ted Cruz's dad killed Kennedy? He's always been a conspira-nut.
I think he works on the theory that by dominating every news cycle, with whatever random thought comes into his head, he will get re-elected. I shouldn't think he really cares about the conspiracies, they're just another distraction to rant about.
Unfortunately, it's quite possible that it's a winning strategy. Probably not, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Excoriating piece by AEP, which importantly contains the views of a leading COVID doctor.
“Boris survived because they gave him oxygen. High flow oxygen wasn’t available as a treatment option for all patients.”
“Our policy was to let the virus rip and then ‘cocoon the elderly’,” he wrote. “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you contrast that with what we actually did...We actively seeded this into the very population that was most vulnerable."
It's actually extremely angering to think that basically all of the poor decision making stems from our lack of testing capacity at the beginning of this crisis and our "experts" telling the government that they have it under control. The delay in getting testing capacity to at least 20k per day is why we couldn't mass test all of the care patients before sending them back, it's why we stopped testing community transmission and why we're so late to the party with track and trace.
As I've said before it's Hancock that is ultimately at fault, but our experts have been lacking in judgement on far too many occasions. Especially given that there have been successful models in other countries and not just in Asia, similar European countries/cultures have made it work a lot better but the commonality among those countries was decentralised mass testing capacity.
I'm supportive of Boris at the moment but we were piss-poor early on. Nothing to do with hindsight. Anyone prepared to lift their eyes to the east could see what was happening. That scientists and politicians refused to pay attention is a scandal.
That having been written, from the beginning of April onwards they did get their act together. By that time the virus had spread willy-nilly and the result was 30,000 deaths, 25,000 of which were preventable. So, not great.
On the other hand, without wishing to go all 'herd immunity' (remember that?) by this time next year we may be in a better position than somewhere like, say, New Zealand. The more people are exposed to this the faster we exit it.
I am thinking more and more that people judging and ranking global governments' responses now are at least 12 possibly 18-24 months too early.
"They are also being asked to wait for others to get off before boarding and to be prepared to queue or use a different entrance or exit at stations."
Have they ever been on the Tube? That's going to last all of about 5s.
The fact that people are allowed to cram on the tube in a manner that would be illegal if they were cattle is a constant bafflement to me. "No standing" should be the new rule
I wondered to myself a month or two ago.. is it really the government or the NHS's job to prevent people dying from pandemics? It was set up so people didn't die of everday preventable ills I thought
Is any health service set up in such a way? I thought they were all to treat the sick.
I see Sunak has pulled the wool over people's eyes re the furlough, saying he's extended it until October. No you haven't mate, after July no employer is going to pay staff to stay at home
Some will, some won't.
If you're an employer who has very valued employees who can only find part time work to do with your employees now but expects full time work to return later then it would make sense to pay your employees to work part time while furloughing them part time.
If you're an employer that doesn't value their employees and/or is incapable of raising cash due to lack of trade then why keep staff on furlough?
I honestly feel that in the last 3 months he has gone from arrogant, stupid and obnoxious to plain old batshit insane. It's just like the frog in the pan, its crept up on us slowly and we have not all noticed.
It really isn't anything new. Obama is a secret muslim Kenyan? Ted Cruz's dad killed Kennedy? He's always been a conspira-nut.
See that's what he wants you to think. Its the method in the madness.
I see Sunak has pulled the wool over people's eyes re the furlough, saying he's extended it until October. No you haven't mate, after July no employer is going to pay staff to stay at home
They are if the government provides the funds.
They can also pay the remaining 20% for those who restart work
The thing that continues to bug me is our ambivalence on face masks. Pratt Hancock is partly to blame and it has BUGGER ALL to do with science.
Yes yes the scientific evidence is 'weak' blah blah. That's drivel. All that means is there have never been, nor will there ever be, double blind randomised tests on face masks for CV-19.
It's a complete no brainer that you should wear a good mask, especially in confined spaces. They help prevent the spread.
The driver behind the Government's ambivalence is twofold.
1. Racism. We don't like these funnily little slit-eyed people in their silly little face masks. Think that's outrageous? It's what Jonathan Van-Tam, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer implied on 22nd April when speaking about the Japanese propensity for wearing them.
2. Insufficient supply. The real driver. We don't have enough of them to keep the NHS safe. Hence we now hear talk of 'face coverings' and are given lessons on how to make your own. If the Government had begun ordering FFP2 and FFP3 masks when I did - January 23rd - the whole country would be covered by now.
I notice from the footage showing Europe "opening up", there were people handing out free masks at train stations etc. I presume we aren't doing that here.
Watching Spanish news they are handing them out like confetti everywhere you go.
Comments
Good, and actually quite accurate, typo.
I suppose it depends what you call safe
“Boris survived because they gave him oxygen. High flow oxygen wasn’t available as a treatment option for all patients.”
“Our policy was to let the virus rip and then ‘cocoon the elderly’,” he wrote. “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you contrast that with what we actually did...We actively seeded this into the very population that was most vulnerable."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/05/12/governments-handling-covid-19-british-disaster/
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20093021v1
...Referring to the national standard for the "Surgical Mask" of China, 17 materials to be selected for homemade masks were tested in four key indicators: pressure difference, particle filtration efficiency, bacterial filtration efficiency and resistance to surface wetting. Eleven single-layer materials met the standard of pressure difference (≤49 Pa), of which 3 met the standard of resistance to surface wetting (≥3), 1 met the standard of particle filtration efficiency (≥30%), but none met the standard of bacterial filtration efficiency (≥95%). Based on the testing results of single-layer materials, fifteen combinations of paired materials were tested. The results showed that three double-layer materials including double-layer medical non-woven fabric, medical non-woven fabric plus non-woven shopping bag, and medical non-woven fabric plus granular tea towel could meet all the standards of pressure difference, particle filtration efficiency, and resistance to surface wetting, and were close to the standard of the bacterial filtration efficiency. In conclusion, if resources are severely lacking and medical masks cannot be obtained, homemade masks using available materials, based on the results of this study, can minimize the chance of infection to the maximum extent...
scientist rather than a classics scholar. I also suspect another difference would be that she was probably a fastidious hand washer.
The NHS is a religion and like other things that are religiously loved in Britain (for example the monarchy and the BBC) this results in it being needlessly bad. I don't really get the left's take on this since they always think the Tories are trying to destroy it, but the Tories are in government at least half and maybe 2/3 of the time, so I really think if you value your healthcare system it would be better if it wasn't run directly by the government, which is trying to destroy it.
On the virus, this is a bit weird because the goal of the response should have changed as new data came in. The original thought was to "flatten the curve", ie you let the infection run its course, but spread it out so it doesn't fry your hospital system. But that turned out to be impractical even if your medical system is less living-on-the-edge than the NHS, because the area under the curve is much too big, no matter which shape you squish it in. But it also turned out that you can suppress the virus, as is happening in South Korea and Taiwan, and you can probably do this with much less damage to your economy than you'd incur by living with it. I think generally governments are now pursuing suppression rather than mitigation, but the initial steps are the same and after sharing all those graphs around it's a bit embarrassing to say so, so the whole goal of the intervention has changed, but without really talking about it.
I know i shouldn't be shocked anymore, but the President of the United States is tweeting and promoting a conspiracy theory that a cable TV host killed one of his then congressional interns in the 1990s.....
Extraordinary.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20093377v1
...There is an urgent need for SARS-CoV-2 serologic tests to identify all infected individuals, irrespective of clinical symptoms, to conduct surveillance and implement strategies to contain spread. As the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the viral spike (S) protein is poorly conserved between SARS-CoVs and other pathogenic human coronaviruses, the RBD represents a promising antigen for detecting CoV specific antibodies in people. Here we use a large panel of human sera (70 SARS-CoV-2 patients and 71 control subjects) and hyperimmune sera from animals exposed to zoonotic CoVs to evaluate the performance of the RBD as an antigen for accurate detection of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies. By day 9 after the onset of symptoms, the recombinant SARS-CoV-2 RBD antigen was highly sensitive (98%) and specific (100%) to antibodies induced by SARS-CoVs. We observed a robust correlation between levels of RBD binding antibodies and SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies in patients. Our results, which reveal the early kinetics of SARS-CoV-2 antibody responses, strongly support the use of RBD-based antibody assays for population-level surveillance and as a correlate of neutralizing antibody levels in people who have recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infections...
that's a bit like calling an election before any votes have been counted. Personally I don't think we'll understand the "scoreboard" for two or three years.
Available from Ryanair check-in priced at £9.99....
sorry if this is a dumb q but other than businesses who get paid in cash a lot why do we need bank branches at all any more? I am more surprised to see one than i am to hear of them closing down to be honest!
As I've said before it's Hancock that is ultimately at fault, but our experts have been lacking in judgement on far too many occasions. Especially given that there have been successful models in other countries and not just in Asia, similar European countries/cultures have made it work a lot better but the commonality among those countries was decentralised mass testing capacity.
Pandemic, Shutdown and Consumer Spending: Lessons from Scandinavian Policy Responses to COVID-19
https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.04630
..This paper uses transaction data from a large bank in Scandinavia to estimate the effect of social distancing laws on consumer spending in the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis exploits a natural experiment to disentangle the effects of the virus and the laws aiming to contain it: Denmark and Sweden were similarly exposed to the pandemic but only Denmark imposed significant restrictions on social and economic activities. We estimate that aggregate spending dropped by around 25 percent in Sweden and, as a result of the shutdown, by 4 additional percentage points in Denmark. This implies that most of the economic contraction is caused by the virus itself and occurs regardless of social distancing laws. The age gradient in the estimates suggest that social distancing reinforces the virus-induced drop in spending for low health-risk individuals but attenuates it for high-risk individuals by lowering the overall prevalence of the virus in the society...
(b) dealing with cheques, etc. (some companies insist on paying them for added security)
(c) old/disabled - can't cope with even voice telephones or computers or own a secure PC
(edit)
(d) somewhere to put as cashpoint
(e) somewhere to sell mortgages etc.
The lack of a willingness to take onboard lessons from overseas (or our own past, perhaps) is disappointing.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20093369v1
...Contact tracing is critical to limiting the spread of pandemics such as COVID-19, but most protocols only "forward-trace" to notify people who were recently exposed. Using a stochastic branching process model, we find that "bidirectional" tracing to identify infector individuals robustly outperforms forward-only approaches across a wide range of scenarios. The addition of rapid smartphone-based exposure notification offers few benefits over conventional manual tracing alone unless uptake of the digital system is near-universal. However, as long as exposure events can be detected by nearly all smartphones, the combination of manual and digital with bidirectional tracing more than doubles the probability of controlling outbreaks across three epidemiological scenarios. Implementing combined bidirectional tracing may be critical to controlling COVID-19 without more costly interventions...
There is no cut spending party at the moment, indeed the LDs under Ed Davey are closer to that than the two main parties.
The top income tax rate at 45% is also still higher than the 40% rate under Blair
In the closing 2 sentences.
I believe they have a total of 98 dead.
The disincentives to working and economic activity are so large, the government simply will not be able to get anywhere near its current spending levels with revenue from what remains of the economy. Not even in same ballpark. Not even in the same county.
Johnson will never cut a public sector he clearly worships, and so the only answer is to take wealth from the middle classes.
https://youtu.be/7kmEEkECFQw
*gets coat*
Corona virus seems to have driven him over the edge. It destroyed his stock market boom, it showed the consequences of his vandalism of Federal services, it highlighted how reckless his attacks on the modest progress of Obamacare were and it has already killed more Americans than the Vietnam war.
A supplier to Aston Martin and Bentley has become the first significant automotive parts maker to fall into administration during the economic shutdown.
Arlington Automotive Group has hired Duff & Phelps to administer a type of insolvency, putting hundreds of jobs at risk.
The company makes thermostats and assembles vehicle systems and is part of Arlington Industries, which is backed by Cartesian Capital, a US private equity firm. It employs 600 people at several locations in Britain, including Coventry, Birmingham and Manchester. Its customers include Jaguar Land Rover, Ford and Nissan.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/business/coronavirus-shutdown-leads-to-collapse-of-arlington-automotive-group-72bzqrt67
Fact #1: Brown hubristically claimed he'd abolished boom and bust.
Fact #2: Brown ran a major counter-cyclical budget deficit during the boom.
They're both facts and you know them both. That you don't like those facts doesn't change them.
But we are now over six weeks into what remains one of the toughest lockdowns on earth, the government's health experts are predicting that the peak of the epidemic may still be two or three months away, infection numbers are surging in some regions, and the shocked silence and prompt conformity that greeted Mr Ramaphosa's early diktats has been replaced by an increasingly sceptical, angry, and politicised debate.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-52619308
https://reneweconomy.com.au/worlds-largest-solar-pv-module-factory-planned-for-china-98364/
That having been written, from the beginning of April onwards they did get their act together. By that time the virus had spread willy-nilly and the result was 30,000 deaths, 25,000 of which were preventable. So, not great.
On the other hand, without wishing to go all 'herd immunity' (remember that?) by this time next year we may be in a better position than somewhere like, say, New Zealand. The more people are exposed to this the faster we exit it.
I don't know if the APIs developed by Apple/Google will support that but it's a problem if they don't.
He is not going to impose a wealth tax on wealthy property owners in London and the Home Counties he needs to be re elected.
At most there may be an expansion in the council tax bands
Beetle penis field investigations lead to new species discovery in Norway
https://phys.org/news/2020-05-beetle-penis-field-species-discovery.html
Yes yes the scientific evidence is 'weak' blah blah. That's drivel. All that means is there have never been, nor will there ever be, double blind randomised tests on face masks for CV-19.
It's a complete no brainer that you should wear a good mask, especially in confined spaces. They help prevent the spread.
The driver behind the Government's ambivalence is twofold.
1. Racism. We don't like these funny little slit-eyed people in their silly little face masks. Think that's outrageous? It's what Jonathan Van-Tam, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer implied on 22nd April when speaking about the Japanese propensity for wearing them.
2. Insufficient supply. The real driver. We don't have enough of them to keep the NHS safe. Hence we now hear talk of 'face coverings' and are given lessons on how to make our own. If the Government had begun ordering FFP2 and FFP3 masks when I did - January 23rd - the whole country would be covered by now.
Yeah right.
Second is the question of whether fiscal policy could have been tighter (mending the roof and all that). Let's say it could. Let's say Brown was wrong there. The trouble is, even this deficit was low by international standards and by historical comparison with previous British deficits under Conservative Chancellors.
So even if you are right, neither had the slightest impact on the global financial crisis or our ability to withstand or recover from it. So even if you are right, you are wrong.
A "linestop" is a dread phrase in my industry as the car company typically charges you several tens of thousands of £ PER HOUR. We have come close a few times...
If lots of companies like this go under it will have immense knock-on effects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_George's_Hospital,_Havering
https://ezitis.myzen.co.uk/stgeorgehornchurch.html
He was running a deficit when there were serious concerns about the economy over heating, due to a mad boom.
This meant that the deficit became massive when the boom ended and the tax receipts from the bank et al vanished.
Unfortunately, it's quite possible that it's a winning strategy. Probably not, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Last 3 days, 44 / 90 / 44
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/COVID-19-daily-announced-deaths-12-May-2020.xlsx
If you're an employer who has very valued employees who can only find part time work to do with your employees now but expects full time work to return later then it would make sense to pay your employees to work part time while furloughing them part time.
If you're an employer that doesn't value their employees and/or is incapable of raising cash due to lack of trade then why keep staff on furlough?
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
They can also pay the remaining 20% for those who restart work