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Tag: lockdown

Britain Coronavirus 

Lockdown libertarians take road to tyranny

Melanie, , ,

Lord Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court, has said lockdown should be voluntary and the damage it has done to the economy isn’t justified by its “not very impressive” results. Lockdown, he said, should be a matter of free choice. Even potential virus carriers should feel no obligation to restrict their activities; instead, those who were frightened of the virus should stay at home. For him, freedom seems to mean his right to behave as he wishes regardless of the harm he may cause others. Of course there’s…

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Boris Coronavirus 

The terrible cost of ignoring common sense

Melanie, , ,

Common sense is a much underrated value. It is sneered at by the intellectual priesthood, which venerates abstract theorising divorced from reality and how people actually behave. Responses to this pandemic have illuminated the destructive irrelevance of this snobbery. People are fighting over abstractions while victims of Covid-19 are dying around them. Those trying to prove that across the world economies have been wilfully trashed by power-mad politicians and that lockdowns have all been a terrible mistake are seizing as weapons statistical claims about the course of this disease. This…

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Coronavirus Britain Coronavirus 

Bromides punctuated by gibberish. Bravo no more, Boris

Melanie, ,

Oh dear. Boris Johnson’s much trailed address to the nation this evening has merely deepened the impression that this is a prime minister who is not in control of events at all. In summary, he was saying there will be no substantive change to the lockdown, other than the tweak of permitting more outside activity, at least until June when perhaps some schools may open and July when perhaps some of the hospitality industry and other public places may open too. As I have previously observed, such caution is at…

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Britain Coronavirus 

Ignore these siren calls to end the lockdown

Melanie, , ,

Bravo Boris! Urged days ago to announce a speedy exit from lockdown, he has refused to be pushed. He’ll set out his plan next week amid signs that restrictions will be lifted only slowly. Although the virus now seems under control, the prime minister’s caution is understandable. The rate of decline is still too small to permit a speedy lifting of restrictions without risking a fresh spiral in the infection rate. Yet among people for whom damage to the economy outweighs all other considerations, there’s no acknowledgment of Johnson’s complex…

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Boris Britain Coronavirus 

Prevention paradox and dilemma denialism

Melanie, ,

Bravo, Boris. His statement this morning, on return from convalescing from his near-fatal encounter with Covid-19, took real courage. Under enormous pressure to lift the lockdown, he refused. His priority, he said, was to avoid a second surge in cases. He asked the public to be patient and not to undo the progress that had been made by social isolation. No-one can doubt the pressure he was under from his own party, including a number of big donors, who have been warning of the ever-more terrible damage to the economy…

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Boris Britain Coronavirus Europe Israel 

The ghastly mirror-image of lethal group-think

Melanie, , ,

In Britain, there are now insistent calls for the government to lay out its strategy for exiting the Covid-19 lockdown. Treat the public as adults, goes the cry; tell us the truth. Well, the truth which ministers are not telling is pretty unpalatable. For as in other countries, the government faces two brutal and appalling alternatives: destroying the economy or ending people’s lives. Yes, the lockdown is doing terrible damage to the economy and if it goes on for much longer some of that damage at least may well be…

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