RandoEFC

It's obviously great that we've got a deal. I don't know the detail but any deal is better than no deal. Hopefully things won't be too bad after all. Whilst watching Ursula von der Leyen's professional and dignified speech on Sky News I then opened Twitter and the first thing I see is this cringeworthy photo op on the PM's official account. Some contrast...

Okay, well I've not seen any of that although I need no convincing that there's fresh hysteria in the air over today's news. Personally, I was only reporting what had just come out.

Come on guys. Nothing the government have said about either of these new strains contradicts SAGE and their own findings. Yes this was always likely to happen, and it's surprising that it's taken this long then happened twice in a week, but that doesn't mean it's been exaggerated or it's some sort of conspiracy. Yes it's convenient for them to bin the unsuccessful tiered system, that doesn't change the fact that the England new strain is 70% more infectious than what we've been dealing with before. And the South African one is supposed to be more infectious based on early research. If anyone can find any evidence that a) there have been other more potent strains over the past year that have been kept quiet by the UK government or b) that the potency of these two new strains is being exaggerated for political reasons then we can have a conversation. Until then it's perfectly reasonable to be concerned. There is a middle ground between playing down the changing risk posed by these new strains and running around waving your arms in the air shouting doomsday prophecies.

We're already hitting 750 deaths a day now and rising. The public already harbour overwhelming support for tighter restrictions, I don't see what further excuse they need. Nobody wants lockdown but nobody wants this many deaths to carry on. You can't have both and most people understand that. If there was majority public agitation about increased restrictions, then I could see a theory along the lines of "there have already been more infectious strains discovered before these last two but they're making a big deal about these ones for political reasons" but there's no need for them to do so here.

Yeah but the one identified in the UK last week was of major concern being 70% more transmissible than the other strains, and apparently this one is even worse, so yeah it's a bit surprising a year in to find another even worse strain just days after finding the first mutation that caused a really significant problem. They have done the right thing here, and at the right time by the looks of it, but it's still concerning. We can only do so much to control this thing.

Sake

As much as I hate the blitz spirit thing and the shit attitude to personal health in the UK, there are huge cultural differences that you can't ignore. The measures taken by some of the Eastern countries to contain the virus simply aren't viable in Western countries. Some of them would laugh at what we call a "lockdown" compared to, say, the original Wuhan lockdown and there's no way you can get a South Korean style test and trace system running in a country like the UK where people think that their personal liberty and privacy come above a public health crisis - and to be fair, we don't have massive trust in governance in the West, often with good reason, so can you blame people for having this attitude? What I will say is that the UK has become a country that feeds off of conflict and "otherism". Whether it be Muslims, immigrants, the EU, the public sector, the media in the UK has made it an art form turning the public against each other. Readers of the Mail and the Sun always have something to be angry at, someone to blame their lives on, and its never rich white men who inherited their wealth, have never genuinely worked for their position in life, pay their taxes overseas and get elected to run the country because of their posh accents and because they more or less look and sound like the ones that came before them and because of their upbringing, genuinely don't see why they should use their massive advantages to make other peoples' lives better at little or no cost to themselves. But I'm going to stop there before I go off on one properly.

Russia, China, US, all as bad as each other. Britain would still be as bad if you were looking from the outside as well if we were still a major world power.

Pretty conclusive .

@Happy Blue

Well it was the public who gave these dickheads an 80 seat majority so yeah fair enough.

Can't blame you lot for trying to leg it to be honest.

Okay.

Starmer's got this one wrong (by a long shot) for me. I get he's trying to stop Johnson from having the opportunity to paint him as a traitorous unpatriotic Remainer but you have to show the country that the national interest comes above politics because that's one of the ways he needs to distinguish himself from Johnson. Starmer has called the second lockdown right and now the shambles of Christmas week while Johnson laughed him off like the class clown he is only to be proven to be a complete witless moron within a matter of days. Labour need to do a better job of rubbing this in and making sure this cuts through so that the wider public see it. I know they're scared of being accused of politicising the pandemic but at some point you have to stop being scared and oppose the government. It's in the national interest to expose Johnson's utter stupidity and incompetence to the public at times like this. It might even cause him to think twice before promising the world to the public only to be proven stupid again. (Or we might see pigs fly). It's not just the right thing for the country but it's also politically wise to call for an extension to the transition period now. If Johnson disagrees which he probably will, then it's another example of Starmer having better foresight and general intelligence than Johnson when we have utter chaos in 11 days time.

France closing the border to all of our freight from Dover to Calais. Is it because of the new strain of the virus, or do they just look at England and want to close the border to get ahead of all the English migrants in the back of those lorries seeking asylum from our government?

Standings after Round 3 of Last Man Standing 2020-21 A solid round 3 for @Viva la FCB sees him extend his lead at the top to 4 points. @DeadLinesman moves up to 2nd place. In reality, though, it remains anyone's game in what has been a low-scoring season so far.

One of my favourite arguments from those who call themselves Covid-sceptics or lockdown-sceptics or I'musingthewordscepticbecauseitsoundsmoreclevererthanconspiracytheorist-sceptics is that we should "get over" Covid and get on with life because people aren't being treated for cancer or other illnesses because the hospitals are so obsessed with this disease that only has a 0.5% mortality rate or whatever. Have they ever asked themselves what would happen to hospitals, and what would therefore happen to A&E, cancer screenings and other urgent treatments and surgeries, if we just let Covid run wild through the population? The bodies would be piling up and the hospital corridors would be full within weeks. You can ask "when does it end", but we all know the answer to that, as frustrating and depressing as it might be. This ends, as much as it's ever going to, with people getting vaccinated. The end is in sight now, there are multiple vaccines that have been approved. If there was no end in sight, then I'd have more sympathy for these arguments. What we need to know is how long it's going to take to get the vulnerable people in the population and the majority of front-line workers vaccinated, because then we can go back to normal life. If the government can make a prediction and tell us this is achievable by Easter or by June, then they can tell us what life is going to be like until then, and we can be prepared for it. The whack-a-mole changing of restrictions every week or two since the start of the second wave has been an absolute disaster and is why people are struggling to keep complying. Boris Johnson is a huge problem. He's the worst person you can have in charge at a time like this. He said we'd send the virus packing in weeks at the start, so what do people do? Mentally prepare themselves for weeks in isolation, then get told halfway through, oh yeah it's going to be months now. He's done it again and again and it's brutal for peoples' mental health. Some of them have responded by breaking the rules because they can't hack it anymore, a small number have ended up taking their own lives because they can't handle it. He's done it again with Christmas. Months ago, he said, life will be normal again at Christmas, when there was no evidence to suggest it would. This whole thing started because one or two people came into the country infected and it spread to thousands. This was always the elephant in the room during the first lockdown. Yes, we can drive infection rates down but if one person still has it when we all go outside again, then it's just back to square one. In November, he said we needed the lockdown to have a normal Christmas. Then a bit of reality arrived at the table and he said we can have a normal Christmas for 5 days. Now, we've got too close to the day itself that reality is right in our faces and it's only one day we can have a normal Christmas, some people not even that. And for those people, it's so much worse now than if he had said in November that I'm sorry I don't have better news, but there's no guarantee we'll be able to have a normal Christmas even after this lockdown. But he can't help himself from trying to be Mr. Good News. If he was a PE teacher, he would tell you, come on, this is the last lap, you'd push yourself to the end of the lap, fuelled by the knowledge that rest is on its way, then when you cross the line, he says, alright, keep going, 5 more laps to go, when you've actually still got 20 to do.

So going back to this, surprise surprise, everything that the teaching community said has now come true. Teachers that live and work in London but have families in the North or elsewhere have now been condemned to spending Christmas in lonely flats, because less than a week ago it was so safe to mix with several sets of kids from 30 different households a day for the essential business of colouring in and watching movies, that Gavin Williamson threatened legal action against a local council for advising their schools to close 4 days early. Today, the same part of the country along with many others are back in full lockdown because it's not safe for people to travel and see a household of 4 relatives instead of spending the festive season on their own. Scrolling through Twitter this morning, I've seen colleagues paying tribute to a teaching assistant who has just died of Covid in hospital having (presumably) caught it in school while another one of their teaching assistants remains in intensive care with Covid. I've seen headteachers receiving news of positive tests over the weekend having to continue carrying out their own in-house test and trace having found out from the media, not by receiving the appropriate guidance from the Department for Education on Thursday that mass testing will take place in schools alongside a staggered return after the Christmas holidays. I've seen news that civil servants from the Department will receive a £1000 bonus for working on mass testing in schools over the next two weeks (when it's not holiday for them anyway) while school leaders are expected to contribute to putting the provision in place during their own time off, for which they aren't paid. I've seen teachers in Tier 4 areas (this isn't exclusive to our profession) admitting that they cried during last night's announcement because the only thing that's got them through the last 15 weeks has been the Christmas light at the end of the tunnel which has now been taken away from them, and I've seen a teacher from outside a Tier 4 area that still won't be able to meet anyone on Christmas Day because a student in his class tested positive during the last, pointless week of term, and he has to now self-isolate until after the 25th. It's absolutely abhorrent. If this was a normal country, where people who dedicated their careers to educating other peoples' children weren't vilified as leftie unionist anarchists who "wouldn't survive 5 minutes in the real world", whatever the "real world" is, by the Murdochian press and ignorant, angry members of the public with an undefined chip on their shoulder towards everyone else, this would be the sort of thing that brings a government down. It speaks volumes that when @The Palace Fan joked about a week off on full pay earlier, I couldn't help but bite, because you encounter so many people every day with that weapons-grade level of genuine ignorance and lack of empathy towards our profession that it becomes totally believable that it's an opinion that could be held by a normal person. And some of you will be reading this thinking "it's not just your sector, everyone's having a bad year". You're right, and that makes it even worse. What I've described above is the tip of the iceberg of the mismanagement of this pandemic in the UK. "But everyone's had it bad this year, there's nothing we can really do about it" "Every other country has struggled just as much as we have" "Boris is trying his best" No. This is a government who threatened legal action to ensure that kids stay in school to spend an extra four days colouring in, knowing that it would increase infections, lead to more people locked down for Christmas, and even lead to further hospital admissions and deaths, and then DAYS LATER, told us that it was far too dangerous to mix with other households. And it isn't anywhere near the top of the news agenda. Let's focus more closely on Gavin Williamson, the Secretary of State for Education and the ultimate boss of every teacher in the country at the end of the day. Under Theresa May's government, where he was the Secretary for Defence, he was found to have been responsible for leaking sensitive information from the cabinet and was sacked for breaking the ministerial code by Theresa May shortly before her time as Prime Minister ended. The Secretary for Defence, leaking government information to where it shouldn't be going. Months later, he was appointed to Boris Johnson's cabinet as Education Secretary because he supported Brexit. A few months into the pandemic, when infections started to fall, Johnson and Williamson tried to force through the return of primary school children of all ages before the summer holidays while restrictions remained in place meaning that class sizes were restricted to half of their normal size. The pair of them had a stand-off with teaching unions and primary school headteachers while the newspapers blamed the leftie unionist anarchists for being obstructive and refusing to be "heroes". After a few weeks, Johnson, Williamson and The Daily Mail eventually remembered how to count, and realised that it was impossible to return all children to primary schools while restrictions on class sizes remained in place, without magically doubling the number of teachers and classrooms available. Roll on the summer holidays and the exam results fiasco that Williamson presided over. First we had the algorithm, which skewed the greatest inequality in GCSE and A Level results in years and saw students from working-class backgrounds across the country docked several grades because of how kids in previous years had done at their schools, while Eton and other schools saw their grades boosted. On results day, Williamson defended and praised the algorithm as being rigorous and reliable, you can't just give everyone an A, he said. Two days later, in a small victory for the teaching profession, the government backed down after realising they'd completely shit the bed again. Williamson kept his job. Sorry, we're only up to September now. Universities are unfortunate enough to fall under Williamson's umbrella of responsibility as well. Learning from home was a pretty big challenge for primary and secondary school children and nobody argues that we should have kept them learning at home after the summer holidays. Universities, though? Not many university students go to study without their own laptop, and are old enough to be expected to be independent and not need face to face contact with a teacher in order to learn, so home learning was perfectly viable for university education. Some universities told their students to stay at home until at least Christmas and that lectures would be provided online. Others didn't. Less than two weeks into term-time, we had students imprisoned in apartment blocks, others forced to pay rent for accommodation that they might not see this year. Perhaps this doesn't all fall at Williamson's feet individually but did they really think it was going to be okay to just throw 200-300 students in a lecture theatre together like normal years when the pandemic was still very much alive? It seems like an easy win to keep a bunch of 18-21 year olds not all packed into university halls and lecture theatres like sardines rolling in Covid when in a normal year, half of them would have been catching up on lectures through online resources anyway having been too hungover or lazy to actually turn up. I won't type it all out again but threatening his own staff with legal action in order to force them to stay open instead of prioritising health and safety of children and school staff for an extra 4 days to make himself look like a big hard man is peak Williamson and in hindsight, I don't know why I've allowed it to piss me off enough to write out this massive essay because if I'd thought about it a month ago, I probably would have expected worse. Without a doubt, one of the most stupid and incompetent men I've ever seen in my life. Not just in government but anywhere, ever. The lack of respect and empathy for teachers in the UK really has been exposed over the past few months as one scandal after another just washes over the public. Point any of this out to most people and the only response you get is "what about nurses?" like it's some sort of competition. I know it's a bit self-obsessed to expect the rest of you to care about all of this even 1% as much as I do, because everyone's got their own shite to deal with as a result of this pandemic and as a result of shite governance be it in England, Wales, America or elsewhere. But if ten people skim read this and it gets you to remember just what an avoidable mess teachers and students in England have had to put up with since March then I suppose I can tell myself I've made a small difference.

Everyone has said so far that there's no evidence that it's any more lethal in terms of symptoms or mortality. I haven't seen anything about it being less dangerous, just more transmissible. So yeah, in the sense that if 20,000 people catch it instead of 10,000, you're going to have twice as many people hospitalised, it is a problem in that sense. The rate of hospitalisations at this point doesn't appear to be higher or lower.

How do you think flu is spread? And does it make sense that there would be more or less spread of flu when people meeting each other in person has been restricted? You big nutty troll.

I really, really don't blame these people for what they're doing, but we know that this is how this new, more infectious strand of the virus makes it's way to every corner of the country.

My understanding was that Patel was the first time since the 70s or something that didn't get sacked for it.

Christ, if you look at the UK government and think "there's a country where they get held to account" then you must have literally no media in Wales. Johnson gets asked questions but he's allowed to just burble through some irrelevant nonsense and it doesn't get followed up. What people need to do is play back to him and everyone watching the press conference the clip from 3 days ago where he referred to Starmer as seeming to want to cancel Christmas and have endless lockdowns and then ask him whether he was wrong 3 days ago or wrong today. Embarrassing him and other politicians like that is the only way to stop this current brand of being able to say whatever you want to get you through the next 5 minutes because you know you'll face next to no consequences for it later. I know very little of what's gone in in Wales. Earlier in the year, the things you were complaining about I honestly thought were pretty trivial compared to the horror show going on in Westminster. Ever since Wales went into the first 'firebreak' though and there was that shite about aisles being closed in supermarkets for non-essential goods, a lot of things I've seen and heard from that point onwards tend to suggest that Drakeford and co have basically lost their collective heads as well. I'm incredibly lucky to be on the Isle of Man where things are still fine, I have huge sympathy for what you're all still going through. I think the media have been exposed for simply not knowing how to play their vital role of keeping politicians on their toes in a crisis like this. The questions that get asked by 80%+ of media come through the scope of political bias one way or another and even the ones who make an attempt to hold politicians properly to account think they've done their job by asking a single question and not following up on it when that question doesn't get answered properly at all.

He should have just said that he didn't realise he was leaking to the press when he was leaking to the press, and because he only broke the ministerial code by accident, then it doesn't count. Hasn't he been paying attention?