Emlyn, are you Kier Starmer in disguise? We can only be thankful a Steve Baker lead Conservative Party would indeed give Labour a 500 seat majority, as otherwise as PM he might declare war on the EU and China, while stopping all NHS treatment in order to reduce the national debt.

Steve Baker never stops banging on about WW2. Would he have argued blackout regulations were an infringement on everybody's personal freedom, and we should just have jollied off and partied, and accepted a few tens of thousand people would have been blown to bits by German bombs? What a clown.

This CRG are an embarrassment to the Conservative Party, and membership of it should be grounds for considering de-selection. If the choice had been between indefinite lockdown, and let the virus take its course, they would have had a point. But there was originally the option of putting in place an effective track trace isolate system, and now there are the various vaccines that may resolve the situation. Either they are too stupid to understand the maths and science of the situation, or they are self publicists and/or crude populists.

Call me Virgil is bang on the money with this comment. The CRG should hang their heads in shame, it is their stupidity that has led to us having amongst the worst death tolls in the world

The slowdown in economic growth and stagnation in productivity in this country coincides with expansion of university education. This is the exact opposite of what was supposed to happen. Correlation does not prove causality, of course. But it is al least plausible that taking people who might otherwise have learned skills directly related to employment, such as building and construction trades, book keeping and accountancy skills etc. and instead cause them to study subjects that do not directly provide any skills or knowledge that is useful in the jobs market could indeed reduce productivity. Similarly, it is difficult to understand why it was ever thought vastly increasing the number of people studying history, English, social studies etc would increase economic output.

agreed

Although I broadly agree with you, I'm not sure why you think maths courses should escape the axe. Surely there are not many employment opportunities where what is learned on a university maths course is of any value?

Does anyone remember a TV program from the 1960's 'Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo'? It was about a kid in the outback of Australia who was home schooled over a two way radio, rather than a lap top. The kid did not seem to suffer any mental health problems in any episodes, and as well as successfully completing his lessons, he and his pet kangaroo were also able to catch criminals, put out bush fires, rescue people who had fallen down wells etc. Maybe in reality there were mental health professional visiting all the outback farms, and the program maker 'skipped' that bit out.

As the parent of a 16 year old, I think Robert Halfon, like many others, ridiculously exaggerates the impact of children not being in school, and being home schooled instead.
1. If its so terrible for children's mental health to not be in school, how have we managed to have at least 6 weeks of summer holidays for as long as any us can remember in theUK, 8 weeks in France, 11 weeks in the USA with seemingly no ill effects?
2. He does not recognise that past the age of about 13, at least 95% of what he and his colleagues in education have caused to be taught in schools is irrelevant to most pupils. They will never use it again. If this year children do not learn to manipulate cosines and quadratic equations quite as well as previous years' students, or do not learn french irregular verbs quite as thoroughly, it will make absolutely no difference to anything as they will never use that knowledge, it is mostly useless to them. The small proportion of pupils who go on to study science, medicine and engineering will anyway keep up.
3. I have quite easily home schooled my daughter remotely (before the school got its act together) using a mobile phone, and as far as I can see that is how the vast majority of her friends get their lessons communicated from the school. The teacher simply photographs the work and sends it out. All this stuff about laptops and broadband being essential is tosh from the out of touch.

Should we not try to agree that the decisions need to be made on some sort of objective basis? The problem with Hannan and indeed the rest of us, is that he has already reached his conclusion, then is trying to justify it.
Objectively, the costs of what has been spent so far should be regarded as 'sunk' costs, we should only look forward.
If we take one extreme scenario, of taking minimal measures to contain the virus and resigning ourselves to it mostly working through the population, a fair estimate is maybe 300,000 premature deaths, with an average loss of about 5 years of life. Using the figure of £30,000 per year of quality life as being the valuation we make in other healthcare calculations, this would 'cost' £45 billion.
Lockdown cost 20% of GDP in the first quarter, with GDP of £2200, billion I calculate that means full lockdown costs £37 billion a month in lost output.
The August level of lockdown resulted in GDP being down 9% , that equates to £16.5 billion a month.
Thus many months of these restrictions would exceed the £45 billion value we place on this 'lost life' in other healthcare scenarios. However, if the restrictions are only in place a couple of months, then a testing/track/trace regime plus vaccination means they can be lifted then going forward they are worth it, using the criteria we use in other health care scenarios.
I think we can debate whether £30,000 is the right number, or if there are also other factors, but surely some numbers based objectivity is needed? Its not just a question of simply money v lives, because we could spend the money on 'saving lives' in other ways, which might ( or might not) give us a better outcome than spending it on 'lockdowns'.