“The Financial Jigsaw” has been serialised here and now is replaced by this weekly “Letter from Great Britain.”
NOTE – If anyone would like an electronic copy of the complete book, I should be pleased to email a free PDF on request to: [email protected].
It is a difficult time for the UK and the rest of the world during the battle to overcome the coronavirus outbreak. We have not been handling it well here in UK and there remain many unknowns about its possible course of development. I live in the rural South West of England where the virus is not so prevalent, it having impacted cities and large population areas much more than in our region. However, although much of the news is almost all about the health crisis, I will try to find items of general interest as the weeks pass by as well as reporting on the effects of the virus.
One website about the UK is always worth reading because the author, Dr Richard North, is an experienced health professional and provides useful information on a daily basis. http://eureferendum.com/
He commented last Sunday: The cases reported yesterday were 5,526, with the deaths at 888. This brings the total, officially recognised cases to 114,217, with 15,464 hospital patients dead – and many more besides. Meanwhile, the Sunday Times insight team is on the case, offering a detailed account of the “38 Days When Britain Sleepwalked Into Disaster”.
Whatever transpires in the future, on the basis of this report, it doesn’t look good for Prime Minister Johnson. The summary reads that he skipped five Cobra meetings on the virus, that calls to order protective gear were ignored and scientists’ warnings fell on deaf ears. Failings in February, says the article, “may have cost thousands of lives”.
For those who have access, this long article is well worth reading. It fills lots of gaps and will be used to fuel the debate about the responsibility for what could accurately be called a debacle. And while there are many elements of interest, one thing that stood out was an assertion, which the writers claim was previously aired in The Times from an anonymous “senior politician”.
He noted that, “All of our planning was for pandemic flu”, reporting that there had been “a divide between scientists in Asia who saw this as a horrible, deadly disease on the lines of SARS, which requires immediate lockdown, and those in the West, particularly in the US and UK, who saw this as flu”. Actually, the origin of this claim was Reuters, which we reported on two days after we had already reached the same conclusion on the basis of evidence in the public domain.
In this case, there is unequivocal evidence that the government’s planning was entirely focussed on pandemic flu. This can be deduced from the simply but unarguable fact that the only plans published were devoted to this type of pandemic. We know there was no specific planning for a SARS pandemic on the simple premise that, had such a plan existed, it would have been published.
In the absence of a vaccine, and no expectations of its early availability, and without the proven antivirals such as Tamiflu which are so useful in mitigating the effects of influenza, controllers have to fall back on time-honoured epidemiological tools, isolating cases, tracking down their contacts, testing them and isolating them as well if they prove positive for the disease. This is where the ST report starts to go wrong, because it states that “a central part of any pandemic plan is to identify anyone who becomes ill, vigorously pursue all their recent contacts and put them into quarantine”.
That, it says, “involves testing and the UK initially seemed to be ahead of the game”. In early, it adds, “February Hancock proudly told the Commons the UK was one of the first countries to develop a new test for the coronavirus”, declaring, “Testing worldwide is being done on equipment designed in Oxford”.
The error here is in asserting that the “test, track and trace” programme is a central part of a pandemic plan. It certainly should have been but, as we have seen by reference to the influenza plan on which the government relied, contact tracing was confined to the initial stages, with a view to demonstrating that community spread had become established. At that point, it was always planned that contact tracing would be abandoned, as indeed it was, as the government ramped up the NHS “surge” capability to deal with the expected torrent of cases.
Thus, even if the government had decided to change tack and major on contact tracing, the infrastructure no longer existed and, even now, months into the epidemic, provision is still not in place and there are plans to develop a completely new and untried system. And then, since there was going to be no systemic contract tracing, there was going to be only minimal testing, so it was never thought necessary to build up a capability for mass testing. And again, as we are seeing, it is not easy from a standing start, to ramp up testing from the low base with which we entered this crisis.
“In early 2019, the UK treasury, together with the business department and the state-owned British Business Bank, laid the groundwork for a loan guarantee system for small businesses in the event of a chaotic Brexit. This meant that when the Covid-19 lockdown began, all the government needed to do was dust off those plans and put them into action. It should have been smooth sailing. Instead, it’s been an unmitigated disaster.”
“BBC News is reporting, with no clear timeline of when lockdowns will dissipate, tens of thousands of pubs across the country have been severely damaged with limited cash flow in the last thirty days. They are holding large sums of beer inventory that could expire if lockdowns continue for the next several months, which would result in over 50 million pints of stale beer being dumped, according to a leading industry body.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/wasted-50-million-pints-down-drain-unless-uk-pubs-reopen-summer
Now that UK has left EUROPE I will comment on relevant EU – UK events as they arise:
“The new coronavirus appears to be tearing apart the fragile framework of the European Union. “Europe” said the former Commission chief and a EU godfather, Jacques Delors, “is in “mortal danger”. If citizens feel themselves abandoned at the heart of the pandemic, said Former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, the EU could “collapse”.
The EU objective was evidently supposed to be an “ever closer union”. But now, if the EU does not show solidarity and strength at a time of global crisis, what is the EU’s purpose? Its ideological supporters have a mantra: each new problem must be solved by more Europe. “Europe is our future, we have no other”, Germany’s former Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher once said.
Although these are important and dramatic statements, each time it is as if something even more important and dramatic needs to happen to shake people awake, as if the European Union is never actually seen as dying. Sadly, these high-flown phrases seem to shrivel into empty slogans.
The truth is that there is no “Union”. There is a conglomerate of European states trying to take advantage of some rules called “the union”. In times of crisis, old European divisions always seem to reopen — and crises are part of the old continent, possibly its epitaph. The coronavirus now has put the European Union and its comfort zone face-to-face with all its weaknesses, decadence and cowardice.” Read on:
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15894/european-union-dead
To be continued next week.
So your ‘Financial Jigsaw’ is now complete and you’re now offering us your ‘Letter From Great Britain’.
Good for you Peter.
I will read and enjoy hearing about the world on the other side of the pond.
Many thanks Steve for your support. This is very much an experiment to see how interested the world is about little ‘ole UK. I hope we do have some useful lessons for others as we navigate these troubled waters.
I have a hunch the EU is in for a major downsizing and reorganization once the euro fails.
I too believe your hunch to be correct, e.d ott, and thank you for your keen observation. I will try to chart the course of the demise of this crazy institution created as it was out of a fear of future conflict after the disaster of WW2.
My guess is that some races and people have varying degrees of immunity to infectious diseases like smallpox, anthrax, colds, etc. CV-19 has minimal effect on maybe 90% of people but kills 0.o5%; it largely depends on your genes like your IQ, fertility rate, height etc. If it gets to the point you need a ventilator to breath, you really need something to actually stop CV-19 viruses like the quinine treatment etc because your body is not up to that task.
Most excellent view Robert thank you, and I wholeheartedly agree. It is becoming clearer by the day that underlying genetic propensities are very much at the heart of this dreadful affliction. I will do my best to keep track of developments as the weeks pass by.