Letter from Great Britain – 06-06-20

“The Financial Jigsaw” has been serialised here and now is replaced by this weekly “Letter from Great Britain.”

NOTEIf anyone would like an electronic copy of the complete book, I should be pleased to email a free PDF on request to: [email protected].

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/

This week has seen Britain basking in unusually seasonal sunshine.   And in case it goes away all too soon, the Brits have been doing their usual things and sharing with friends and families at beaches and parks as the lockdown is eased.  Many are breaking the rules and I detect a gradual weariness concerning all to do with the coronavirus.

The damage to the UK economy so far is incalculable: estimated at 25% of GDP so far, an extra £300 to 500 billion deficit; (let me help you: 10 to 15 annual Brexit bills, with lockdown now costing a Brexit bill each week) will mean higher taxes, higher borrowing and therefore (the other side of the equation) increased poverty and unemployment levels not seen since before the war.

The statistics don’t lie this time: 14 per cent of people in the UK said they have had friends or family visit them at home, according to a survey conducted between 20 and 22 May by researchers at King’s College London and Ipsos MORI.  Only 5 per cent of people reported having broken lockdown restrictions in this way in a similar survey done between 1 and 3 April.

The poll surveyed 2254 people in the UK aged 16 to 75. Of these, 92 per cent of people said they are maintaining a two metre distance from other people in public spaces in accordance with government guidelines and 38 per cent are wearing a face mask or covering outside.

The survey found that 40 per cent of people think they will catch the coronavirus by the end of the year. 35 per cent of people said they had delayed seeking medical advice or treatment for non-coronavirus conditions and 17 per cent said they’d had to delay or cancel treatment due to disruptions caused by the pandemic. Almost half of those surveyed – 48 per cent – reported feeling more anxious and depressed than usual and there’s no pub in which to express and moderate their growing mental angst.

But is this the end of the affair?  We are no longer at epidemic levels of covid19 prevalence in the UK (0.27% of the population infected, where 0.4% is the low end required to be “epidemic”), and all-cause deaths have slipped back below average.

First: who has the disease killed?  Covid19 targets the old and the sick; this is not to be callous, but to understand the enemy and to provide context. The average age of those dying of covid19 in the UK is over 80, and fully a third are residents of care homes where average “stay” (a euphemism I’m afraid) was only 30 months from admission before the virus anyway.

Our statistics agencies are only now following Italy’s lead and publishing the comorbidities of those dying from covid19, and it is now clear just how extreme is the amplification of risk. 95% of victims dying with covid19 have serious pre-existing conditions: not just background illnesses, but severe enough to be mentioned as causes of death on death certificates.

The most prevalent are dementia and diabetes (a quarter of cases, each), hypertension (a fifth) and serious lung, kidney or heart disease (around a sixth each). In both the UK and Italy, the average victim had three comorbidities severe enough to be causes of death on a certificate.

Second: who hasn’t it killed?  Parents, unions and nervy adults fret about the risk, but there is little need. With no serious pre-existing conditions, the young-ish and healthy are far more likely to be hit by lightning (49 occurrences per annum in UK) than to die of covid19 (33 in England under age 40, of which only 3 under the age of 19).

Panning out, among healthy under 60s (i.e. children and the vast majority of our working population), 253 people have died of covid19 in English hospitals; this compares to 400 (non-suicide) drownings per year in the UK.

And taking all age-groups where there are no pre-existing conditions serious enough to be mentioned as contributory causes of death, covid19 has taken about 2/3rds the lives that British roads do every year, and we wouldn’t think of outlawing driving, swimming or going outside in a storm.

Even taking all deaths where covid19 is mentioned on the death certificate regardless of age or comorbidities, looking at the total toll: 43,000 lives is less than 2018’s excess winter deaths and would count as a bad, but by no means remarkable, influenza year.

But, like all governments around the world, they are trapped in a bubble of their own making.  They can’t admit to making catastrophic mistakes by taking advice from ‘scientists’ in the name of ‘saaaafty’ and who claim to know and rely on their flawed computer models using imaginary data for fear of losing credibility – so they can’t go back and say “we were wrong”.  This has been the greatest global FUBAR I have ever witnessed in my lifetime.

For now we are bamboozled with daily changes to the semi-mystical ‘R’ number (others are using Z-scores), but dig below the surface and it’s clear that transmission is now mostly within care homes and hospitals and even there it is in rapid retreat.  We can only wait and see what the next three weeks brings although I have little hope that my local pub will rise from the dead, and that is a tragedy of immense importance to me personally and too many of my friends and colleagues.

Where did all this government panic come from?  For many decades our ruling elite have been responding to the ‘snowflake’ generation’s demands to create a totally safe living environment, removing all risks, and reinforced through their social media trolls.

So now, anything that smells of an impact on our ‘Health & Safety’ is remorsefully hunted down and extinguished with draconian rules and regulations, embodied in the laws of the land, such that we now find ourselves in a social straightjacket, unable to move in any direction and beholden to overarching government largesse.

They have effectively wrecked our concept of normal living and now we enter a new, sanitised age of social distancing – forever – because viruses don’t go away.  We have to live with them, as ever has been the case in the past, but for our poor, pampered younger generations, this can never be – welcome to the New Normal.

 

Now that UK has left EUROPE I will comment on relevant EU – UK events as they arise:

The reality of no trade deal with the EU is moving closer by the day – although Johnson may regret imposing such barriers.  Last Monday, about 100 officials from both London and Brussels took part in a fourth round of negotiations on a UK-EU trade deal. Although it might seem like a sideshow, given the coronavirus crisis, the session matters. Progress since the UK left the EU in January is virtually non-existent. “We are on different planets,” one EU official admits. A UK source agrees: “We are talking past each other.”

The need to video-conference hasn’t helped; no informal chats by the water-cooler to break the metaphorical ice. David Frost, Boris Johnson’s negotiator, has not had a “Zoom drink” with his EU counterpart Michel Barnier, though Frost would be well-qualified as a former chief executive of the Scotch Whisky Association. Instead, they exchange frosty letters designed to make the other side look unreasonable to their domestic audience.

Left to their own devices, officials suspect they could strike a trade deal by the December deadline, when the transitional period ends and the UK will leave the single market and customs union. But they are staring at three big roadblocks, which only politicians can clear.

The German Constitutional Court ruled in early May, which challenged the actions and remit of the European Central Bank (ECB). This decision could have severe repercussions if it were upheld, but the reactions to it are arguably even more consequential and telling of the ECB and the EU’s stance on national sovereignty, on respecting member states’ own laws, and on their own expansive powers. 

https://mises.org/wire/german-courts-unexpected-blow-ecb?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=ea7dac162c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-ea7dac162c-228270721

 

To be continued next week.

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Author: Austrian Peter

Peter J. Underwood is a retired international accountant and qualified humanistic counsellor living in Bruton, UK, with his wife, Yvonne. He pursued a career as an entrepreneur and business consultant, having founded several successful businesses in the UK and South Africa His latest Substack blog describes the African concept of Ubuntu - a system of localised community support using a gift economy model.

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rhs jr

Here in the USA, the Blue states are Useful Idiot asylums run by the inmates. I’d like to see a graph of Blue Cities rioting destruction costs vs Red Cities; again, Red areas should not have to pay for Blue area’s stupidity. To the morons, George Floyd is a hero like ML King Jr and Rosa Parks; and Robert E Lee is a villain who’s statues must finally all be torn down. Only the morons can’t see that the protests & riots are part of the coordinated NWO Revolution to destroy Conservative America, and Trump. I have no doubt that it will continue and if Trump is reelected, in spite of massive Blue State Vote Fraud, we will see a repeat of The Spanish Civil War in the USA.

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