gdp's Comments

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : Nick Hoile: Beware of an unintended consequence of mastering Covid - a winter flu crisis later this

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 11:34:54 +0000

It is worrying how so many meekly accept "the number of people suffering from flu fell by more than 95 per cent compared to the previous year" while offering "social distancing, mask wearing, hand washing, lockdowns, and an enhanced influenza vaccination programme" were the factors for such "reduced transmission". That isn't a reduction. It is an elimination. If those factors eliminated flu they would have done the same with Covid. They didn't. Instead of believing those less than credible and certainly inadequate reasons, the health authorities need to invest heavily in research to know how we were spared flu this winter and the consequent welcome failure of the health service to be overwhelmed from Covid. My non-expert opinion tells me Covid drove out the flu virus, got in front of it, or combined with it. The 50,000 excess deaths we get in a bad flu winter became/will become instead 150,000 Covid/flu deaths from March 2020 to March 2021.

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : Gimson, Gimson, Gimson...and Gimson. My Coronavirus experience, fifty calls from test and trace. And

Sun, 7 Feb 2021 13:53:22 +0000

Didn't say no lockdown same level of excess deaths. Rather we are having a level twice as bad as a bad flu year. But no flu deaths.

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : Gimson, Gimson, Gimson...and Gimson. My Coronavirus experience, fifty calls from test and trace. And

Sat, 6 Feb 2021 10:34:59 +0000

With zero cases of flu in recent weeks, attributed oddly to lockdown - yet Covid proliferates - we were able to avoid the hospitals being overwhelmed, just. This needs unbiased investigation as to why. Are people who are dying, suffering from both or is Covid driving out flu? We had 50,000 excess deaths in 2018, the last bad flu winter. We are now heading for 125,000 excess deaths, in the 12 months from March 2020. So this pandemic is over twice as bad as a bad flu year in terms of mortality. Do you remember 2018?

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : As the Treasury digs in on Eat Out to Help Out, its critics are fighting an uphill battle

Sat, 30 Jan 2021 14:59:15 +0000

I don't doubt the 12 month Covid toll in excess deaths will end up around 125,000, over twice the bad year numbers of 2018, although with a novel economic collapse of 10%. Lockdowns can suppress the rate of infection, and protect our hospitals from being overwhelmed, thus spreading out the ultimate casualties. The vaccines however can break the virus cycle perhaps by the summer. The Blitz analogy is daft. The 100,000 civilian deaths were all violent, affected all age groups and went from zero in 1939. The Blitz also wrought colossal physical destruction on the UK which took decades to mend.

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : As the Treasury digs in on Eat Out to Help Out, its critics are fighting an uphill battle

Sat, 30 Jan 2021 12:57:47 +0000

Without Covid we had 50,000 excess deaths in 2018. Did we lockdown that year?

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : As the Treasury digs in on Eat Out to Help Out, its critics are fighting an uphill battle

Sat, 30 Jan 2021 12:56:07 +0000

I agree. It brought life back to the Kingdom if only for a season. The later, high, Covid spread came mostly from family gatherings and parties and our density. It was inevitable as the virus will come back once restrictions are lifted, as happened in all EU countries. We could have gone for Zero Covid but without a vaccine at that point we would have been doomed to a permanent lockdown - appreciated by the non-economically active 55% (75% in Scotland) and thus electorally popular. Now with the vaccines we can all expect a normal summer.

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : 100,000 dead

Wed, 27 Jan 2021 10:42:56 +0000

Flu does seem to be absent this year and little is being made of it not least by the BBC. Because of its absence hospitals are just able to cope this month. Without its absence, the NHS would have been overwhelmed. Perhaps many who died from Covid these months would have been taken out by flu or had both viruses. Who knows? In a bad flu year like 2018 there were 50,000 excess deaths in England. I don't remember any great concerns expressed then. Do you? Now excess deaths are around 100,000 so we are experiencing a flu year twice as bad as 2018 and it will be higher by March. But nothing like 1918 especially as young people were then the worst hit. Comparing the numbers to the 100,000 civilian casualties from German bombing in the war is silly given there were none in the 1930s. However the destruction in our cities can be likened to the economic impact of the pandemic and the likely 10% loss in jobs and wealth.

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : Neil O'Brien: Five lessons from the pandemic

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 10:01:05 +0000

Sweden has a light lockdown and its death numbers are lower than Ireland with the tightest of lockdowns. Maybe population density matters but increasingly - vaccine aside - it looks like Covid will just resurface when lockdown is lifted.

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : Richard Ekins: How to reform our Supreme Court

Sun, 24 Jan 2021 16:46:49 +0000

Check out the names on the DOJ's Human Rights Act review panel and despair. Two aren't even nationals. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-lau...

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : May - beached not only by frustration and defeat, but by the sheer pace and scale of change

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 10:09:17 +0000

She is now the nasty one.

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : Andrew Lewer: It's time to turn off the taxpayer funding of left-wing student union campaigning

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 10:04:16 +0000

It is all Thatcher's fault. Bringing student unions into the proposed trade union reforms on membership control and balloting was seriously considered in the 1980s and then was dropped for fear of opening up a new front. What is now unclear is the method of current student union funding of the £165 m. which needs explained. In the past, the money came from the individual students' grants, as I recall, but was deducted before payment and funneled through the universities to the unions. The first cry that will go up is we haven't the time or energy to do anything but even researching and considering change are worth progressing. That alone might induce a little caution from the identitarian left.

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : Jonathan Caine: My experience of Biden and his team suggests that we shouldn't fear his presidency -

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 18:47:17 +0000

For Unionists to engage there has to be somebody willing to engage with you. Opponents know full well that if they engage they have given way so there is NO engagement in Northern Ireland in the contentious end of politics especially in relation to the sectarian terrorist campaign known as the Troubles and its legacy. None of the academics and lawyers so favoured by officialdom would give you the time of day or even mention or reference your work. It is total war in academia. The BBC cannot look at the subject except in shockjock terms. You might expect some willingness to engage from non-Republicans like the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee with its predominance of Tory MPs, or Lambeth Palace and the Archbishop of Canterbury, or our embassies in Dublin and elsewhere, or the civil service in London. No, no and no again. So try to have a discussion with a key American? You can't, because you don't know them and you never will even if they were willing. Unionists who want to engage simply end up mutating.

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : Brandon Lewis: I am not neutral on Northern Ireland. I am unapologetically pro-Union.

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 11:19:04 +0000

All borders throughout the world are created to maintain at least a majority of those people in the area within the state so created favourable to it. The Republic of Ireland, as it is now, did exactly the same in reverse when it carved out from the UK a tenable section of the island of Ireland, one that it could control. The discrimination experienced by Catholics in Ulster is 1968 was largely the result of two communities operating in isolation and a failure by Stormont to modernise, for example on the local government franchise, as had been done in England 20 years earlier. For that you are justifying the IRA murdering 1,000 soldiers and police officers. The 'peace process' happened because the IRA chose to end its war. It will start again if they so decide.

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : Lockdown is popular, and sceptics' parliamentary tactics must account for it

Sat, 16 Jan 2021 14:02:39 +0000

Lockdowns are popular with the over 50% of people who don't have to work or are working from home. Politicians who try to avoid economic collapse with policies that often fail can only be unpopular. Nicola Sturgeon would become Queen of the UK in a people's vote. Excess death figures tell us that a Covid year is, or will be, twice as bad as a bad flu year. Remember the bad flu year of 2017/18 with its 50,000 excess deaths? Yes I don't as well.

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : Happy centenary, Northern Ireland. Let's plan for a second one.

Wed, 6 Jan 2021 14:20:56 +0000

"The upshot of this is the vicious cycle of devolutionary unionism at its most advanced, perhaps morbid stage, which amounts to substantial cash transfers between parts of the country with increasingly little institutional or social integration to justify it." Good phrases but not much can change when the NIO is so linked to 'our Irish partners'. A big test will be the promised NI equivalence for veterans of Operation Banner as provided in the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill currently stuck in the Lords. That and legislating the Supreme Court's jurisprudence that the Human Rights Act has no effect before 2000 when it was commenced. Recommended by the NI Attorney General, this would curb the mission creep of the ECHR's court at Strasbourg on NI legacy cases.

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : Farewell, Sweden

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 14:40:07 +0000

Not sure about "hammering a last nail into the coffin" of the Swedish strategy. That a dozen European countries have a worse death rate than Sweden puts their lockdown-averse strategy into perspective. And the 2.5% fall in Swedish GDP seems a burden the UK on a 10% drop would willingly bear (both figures to September with only half a Covid year to date). The death numbers for the week ending 21 December tell an interesting story of failure but more here than there: UK 3,330, Sweden 126, Denmark 134. Sweden has one sixth the population of the UK so has the equivalent of 20% of our deaths.

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : Geoffrey Cox is knighted

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 11:07:24 +0000

Without Sir Geoffrey Cox and Dominic Cummings, or both, a panel to review the Human Rights Act as promised in the manifesto was set up earlier this month by the Lord Chancellor under Sir Peter Gross. It has seven members: Simon Davis, Baroness O’Loan, Sir Stephen Laws, Lisa Giovannetti, Professor Maria Cahill, Professor Tom Mullen and Alan Bates. One certainly and two probably do not carry British passports, one being an Irish national working in Cork, while a third is a Scottish devolutionist who has argued for yet more 'competencies' to be passed to Edinburgh and for EU citizens to maintain their privileges in Scotland. Baroness O'Loan has majored on resisting any abortion law reform in Northern Ireland while also seeking more and deeper inquiries into historic security force actions during the Troubles. Only one of the eight has been publicly critical of the Act and the Strasbourg court. The civil servants who advised Robert Buckland on the panel membership were either naive or willing to see the resulting recommendations being so minimal as to be meaningless - that is unless there is a split and the minority writes a dissenting report.

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : If the Lords is to be representative of the Commons, LibDem peers should be culled

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 11:24:02 +0000

Patronage is the glue for party, and with the creation of quangos selected on 'competences', is ever reduced in scale. So the Lords is about all that is left alongside a scattering of names on the Honours lists. Without peerages, party loses its point especially at local level. Lord Fowler may splutter about numbers but a dozen Lords die every year and more hang up their robes.

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : Emergency proxies and postal votes: how the Government intends to ensure the local elections go ahea

Sun, 20 Dec 2020 10:12:14 +0000

The amount of proxy voting in Northern Ireland has rocketed in the last two elections overtaking postal voting. With proxy voting you only need to call on an elector (often a non-voter) once to get them to agree and sign away their ballot paper to someone else.

http://www.conservativehome.com/ : Down with equality, up with opportunity

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 13:00:15 +0000

Sadly David Cameron had the opportunity to effectively delete any part of the Equality Act when he took office in 2010 as it had not been commenced. In the event, only a fragment of the clauses remain uncommenced. Most of the grotesquely complex ones necessitating the employment of countless Equality Tsars in every public sector body and beyond filling in lengthy forms and annual audits were allowed through. Harriet Harman must have thought Cameron equals Christmas.