https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/01/exclusive-bbc-bans-black-lives-matters-badges-air/

Even the BBC have issues with it.

It’s disappointing to see British BLM organisation starting to alienate people.

Pundits on Sky refusing to wear the BLM badge after anti capitalist, anti police, anti Israel tweets they have put out.

They would do well to concentrate on their core message than muddy the waters with some of this far left politics nonsense.

They have been going since 2013, and I don't think their core message has changed much.  I don't see how they get equality without some politics that may be considered left wing.  You can believe in spreading the wealth a bit more wildly without been anti-capitalist.

I don't think defund the police is anti-police, it is about spending some of the money that goes on prisons etc. on things that benefit those at the bottom.   This is particularly relevant in the US where the prison population is huge and blacks are over-represented and BLM is mainly a US bases based organisation after all.  You can say this without been anti the principle of having a police force.

I think there is an issue with how Israel is criticised and how anti-Zionism is used.  Zionism itself isn't the real issue, and I cringe at the use of the word Zionists in a lot of contexts.  If you are an anti-racism organisation you should be a bit more careful with your language.

Israel treats a large chunk of their population terribly and is planning on extending its territory.  Both these things are in breach of International law.  Both seem legitimate grounds for criticism from an organisation that believes that black lives matter; but the way the UK arm is doing it seems pretty clumsy at best.

It is possible to believe in equality, improving the position of minorities and not be aggressively left wing.

We are moving back to the moral high ground nonsense which so many on the left bang on about.

The concept of treating everyone with respect should cross all political parties and the campaign should reflect that.

I can support the rights of minorities but I can’t support the BLM movement/organisation when they want to take this path. Neither can big chunks of decent, honest people that will support the concept but not an overtly far left organisation.

It’s disappointing to see British BLM organisation starting to alienate people.

Pundits on Sky refusing to wear the BLM badge after anti capitalist, anti police, anti Israel tweets they have put out.

They would do well to concentrate on their core message than muddy the waters with some of this far left politics nonsense.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e5TVLEaqqdI

His latest video is bang on.

https://youtu.be/5Hrn6vnOjRs

Not sure he’s to everyone’s taste but I enjoy his rants.

Labour sack Rebecca Long Bailey for sharing stuff with anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

I bet the Momentum crowd on twitter will be in meltdown.   

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OflGwyWcft8

You may have seen this before but it’s truly shocking and no action was taken against the police officer. Beggars belief.

...
On the wtfside, another "oh look, that stable door is open where is my horse?" moment with the compulsory order to wear masks on public transport from 15th June, the prospect of which was something dismissed by the government/SAGE in April as an irrelevance

When public transport use was down by 80 to 90% how much difference do you think the 10-20% still using it wearing a mask would make?

The answer would still be a net positive effect, albeit a tiny one.

However, if they had introduced compulsory wearing a mask on public transport earlier, it could have lead to only a 50 or 60% reduction on public transport use because of people feeling safer going out.

Those 40-50% then using public transport might not bothered so much with social distancing, because everyone was wearing a mask so why would they need to.

The net effect could be a higher rate of transmission as a result of making mask use compulsory.

- is the "kind" of logic they had in mind.

As with other details in the epidemic response, just because something isn't appropriate at one point in time - it doesn't mean that it will never be appropriate at another point in time.

----

All that with the proviso though that the government response does seem to be getting more and more political and less and less 'science-y'

I’d not thought it through but that actually has some logic. Don’t think the Mayor of London has considered that either given his comments today.

Get well soon Camel

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52890515

ONS numbers reported this morning, includes excess death numbers

So now vulnerable people being told to get out and about.

This is mad isn't it? Have the government just decided fuck it and double down on ending lockdown and see how it goes?

It’ll be a tough gig for whoever has to explain the scientific rationale behind this today. Most likely option will be to send out a scientist who doesn’t have a specific public health brief I guess.

Hope they don't all drop dead when they walk outside in the atmosphere within a couple of meters of someone - really is chicken licken stuff this.

It would be interesting to know how much additional immunity is conferred by reading The Telegraph 😊.  

The governments own guidance still says this action won’t be safe until Alert Level 1, we’re still at 4. It looks as though they can’t bring themselves to admit how badly this is going (relative to the rest of Europe bar Sweden) so they’re just gonna say we’re now at Level 1, they don’t appear to have anything other than a faint hope that they get lucky 🤞.

Haha, definitely helps so far, I'm notionally vulnerable but I've probably been out something like 5 days out of 7 since lockdown. This isn't about recklessness - it's understanding the science and that being 'out', per se, is not at all threatening to anyone. It is some kind of hysteria that makes people want to lock people inside or indeed, for the locked in to want to stay locked in rather than move about safely

Good morning

It’s possibly something that’s been misunderstood throughout (in terms of the lockdown), the obligation on most of us is not to avoid catching it (I’d quite like to catch it, before the pubs/restaurants/Lords/spectators at racing/football are allowed, provided that having it gave me immunity*) but to avoid spreading it. Coronavirus is just not a good spot for the ‘I’m alright jack’ mentality, which has always been a defining boundary in the political divide.

* On balance of what we know, it’s likely that you are immune after you’ve had it.

Apologies to the people who don’t think it’s a political issue, we disagree.

Completely agree with what our primary obligation is. Pretty confident the hardest people to make this message stick with are sub 25 year olds - virtually no risk to them personally, mostly left wing supporting  and will be trying to spread it to kill off older Tories imo

On a slightly more serious note, aren’t we worried about the lack of social distancing (especially from younger people) ?

I know Kush may say the Government will want to pass the buck if there is a second wave but there really does seem to be a disregard for it.

Looking at scenes from parks, beaches, beauty spots etc, it looks a serious issue to me.

It’s a collective responsibility isn’t it? So let’s all (especially the young, who might for various reasons be higher volume spreaders) be responsible for our own actions. Collective responsibility still needs coherent and unambiguous leadership though, so basically anything other than use “common sense” would have been a better message. I think there’s a powerful argument that some of the messaging has been deliberately ambiguous, you don’t have to be a genius imo, to work out what ‘Stay Alert’ means but it’s still failing some important tests for what constitutes good comms at a critical time in a national crisis.

It would be fascinating to know how old everyone who regularly contributes to the thread is. I think we generally know from stuff we’ve picked up over the years but I wonder I  there’d be any surprises.

Whilst you may be right about some of the communication, I think the social distancing 2 metre rules is clear and well known by all.

People just ignore it and the level of blantant disregard has increased massively.

Try walking down a main road and see how many people move to distance. My observation of group gatherings in parks etc is its widely ignored. On Friday I witnessed 2 games of football and a group playing cricket. Distancing genuinely wasn’t a consideration for any of them.

I genuinely don’t get it.

So now vulnerable people being told to get out and about.

This is mad isn't it? Have the government just decided fuck it and double down on ending lockdown and see how it goes?

It’ll be a tough gig for whoever has to explain the scientific rationale behind this today. Most likely option will be to send out a scientist who doesn’t have a specific public health brief I guess.

Hope they don't all drop dead when they walk outside in the atmosphere within a couple of meters of someone - really is chicken licken stuff this.

It would be interesting to know how much additional immunity is conferred by reading The Telegraph 😊. 

The governments own guidance still says this action won’t be safe until Alert Level 1, we’re still at 4. It looks as though they can’t bring themselves to admit how badly this is going (relative to the rest of Europe bar Sweden) so they’re just gonna say we’re now at Level 1, they don’t appear to have anything other than a faint hope that they get lucky 🤞.

Haha, definitely helps so far, I'm notionally vulnerable but I've probably been out something like 5 days out of 7 since lockdown. This isn't about recklessness - it's understanding the science and that being 'out', per se, is not at all threatening to anyone. It is some kind of hysteria that makes people want to lock people inside or indeed, for the locked in to want to stay locked in rather than move about safely

Good morning

It’s possibly something that’s been misunderstood throughout (in terms of the lockdown), the obligation on most of us is not to avoid catching it (I’d quite like to catch it, before the pubs/restaurants/Lords/spectators at racing/football are allowed, provided that having it gave me immunity*) but to avoid spreading it. Coronavirus is just not a good spot for the ‘I’m alright jack’ mentality, which has always been a defining boundary in the political divide.

* On balance of what we know, it’s likely that you are immune after you’ve had it.

Apologies to the people who don’t think it’s a political issue, we disagree.

Completely agree with what our primary obligation is. Pretty confident the hardest people to make this message stick with are sub 25 year olds - virtually no risk to them personally, mostly left wing supporting  and will be trying to spread it to kill off older Tories imo

On a slightly more serious note, aren’t we worried about the lack of social distancing (especially from younger people) ?

I know Kush may say the Government will want to pass the buck if there is a second wave but there really does seem to be a disregard for it.

Looking at scenes from parks, beaches, beauty spots etc, it looks a serious issue to me.

Have they revised the estimate of R down.  Last I heard was officially 0.7 to 1 and the modellers plucked an addition of 0.3 for the modest school reopening.  I know others have said 0.6 to 0.8 for outside London, but this was before the recent loosening and all the shop reopening.  Feels like they are going too far, but hope it works out well.   Shame if they have done all this so we forget about Cummings.  Given his actions seem to have single handidly changed the child care rules and led to a fair few people planning to get their revenge on Cummings by going out and getting Covid, how much do we think his trip is indirectly adding to R?

I guess it is just a local thing, but on our town facebook we are getting warnings from the local hospital/council that our local cases are on a plateau so we need "stay alert" (they really said that).  Also on my facebook am getting the BBQ party messages from the locals.

Guess we want to get out and about now while we can, because I don't think this ends well round here.

The relaxing of lockdown looks too early from my experience today.

Went to the park for 2 hours this afternoon. Large groups of young people where social distancing just doesn’t exist.

Driven past the same park tonight and it’s rammed with groups.

If people observed the 2 metre rule it might work but that is just being widely ignored.

We should have waited longer.

Lewis Goodall on NN cut through all the bullshit.

If his wife had COVID symptoms they should not have travelled.

If she did not have COVID symptoms there were no exceptional circumstances.

I think it easy to get very tribal about stuff like this especially as this is Cummings.

I can see the logical of protecting the welfare of a 4 year old child. Given the guidance does give everyone the leeway to deal with that situation, I think the isolation in Durham is actually reasonable. Everyone does have the option to do what Cummings did - it just happens we dont tend to have an empty property on our parents estate to use (but that’s just his good fortune).

It’s the trip to Barnard Castle which is the bit that looks irresponsible. That’s the killer for him along with the negative PR for his Government and the damage to the lockdown.

The combination of those last points is why he should resign for me.  

Who is getting tribal? Polling shows the view that what he did was wrong is held by the majority of the population, inc Tory and leave voters. Even right wing newspapers are running headlines criticising and ridiculing the whole thing.

Instead of giving leeway the guidance explicitly stated to not isolate in second homes. I don't know how that could be clearer. Having a child is not an exceptional circumstance. Millions of families have children. Were they all exempt from the rules too? Will they be going forward? Of course not. Hence the government have avoided saying so whilst still contorting to try and somehow say what he did was ok.

As for it being logic and within the spirit of the rules this is clearly not the case. He took his infected family from an area with a high infection rate to an area with a low infection rate. They then ended up in a hospital there and helped (or at the very least risked) spread the virus to an area with a low infection rate. One of the entire points, if not the main point, of the lockdown is to prevent this. If the millions of families with children did the same as may as well have not had a lockdown at all.

It wasn’t his second home.

We all have/had the same option to protect the interests of a young child. So on the isolation point, there were no special rules for Cummings.

Lewis Goodall on NN cut through all the bullshit.

If his wife had COVID symptoms they should not have travelled.

If she did not have COVID symptoms there were no exceptional circumstances.

I think it easy to get very tribal about stuff like this especially as this is Cummings.

I can see the logical of protecting the welfare of a 4 year old child. Given the guidance does give everyone the leeway to deal with that situation, I think the isolation in Durham is actually reasonable. Everyone does have the option to do what Cummings did - it just happens we dont tend to have an empty property on our parents estate to use (but that’s just his good fortune).

It’s the trip to Barnard Castle which is the bit that looks irresponsible. That’s the killer for him along with the negative PR for his Government and the damage to the lockdown.

The combination of those last points is why he should resign for me.