Time to get real. The royals have avoided inheritance tax for far too long and there is no reason this good earth for the monarch and her heir to still behave as the last vestiges of feudalism in Europe. The sea bed and the south west of England need to be returned to their rightful owners - the people.
No one doubts what a backward country the UK is but with levels of inequality and tax on low wages that are indefensible it is about time that time was called on this abuse of grotesque privilege.
Having the three stooges of Johnson, Rees-Mogg and Gove as P.G. Woodhouse 1930s effete and inept characters is bad enough but feudalism in the 21st century makes the UK a laughing stock - a mixture of Disneyland and Ruritania.

First, the effects of the Covid “second wave” in Sweden itself (where a commission has now criticised the government’s record on protecting care homes).

That is NOT a condemnation of the overall policy of shielding the vulnerable whilst not tanking the economy. Indeed the UK government has hardly earned plaudits for its policy of dumping old people out of hospital and into unshielded care homes,
Secondly, and I do realise that the UK is world class at fake news (Brexit black propaganda being a case in point), the data from the ECDC shows that Sweden's second wave of deaths was 50% of its first wave and fell as sharply as it rose. Unlike Norway, 70% of first wave, which rose fell and then rose again and certainly not like the UK that rose fell a bit and now is rising sharply.
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/d...

God what a shocking little country. Innumerate and economically illiterate to boot.

Yet more nonsense about British 'democracy' - akin to Jeffrey Epstein being a mentor to young women. Yet more power for the elected dictator in No 10 and no one does dictatorial power better than Boris Mussolini Johnson. If elected MPs pose a barrier to his madcap schemes packaged in lies he sacks them if he can and suspends them otherwise.
The reason why Brexit wil fail and the UK's decline accelerate after being on hold since the early 1980s is because most Brits can vote but their votes are simply ignored as those they vote for can be dismissed with ease and the last vestiges of a faux democracy thrown into the garbage can. As that becomes more evident so will the tattered faith in the septic isle and his dysfunctional form of governance.

It seems to have become common-place to compare Brexit with the Reformation. I guess that it is only natural for a post-imperial power in decline for the best part (if not the whole) of a century to cling on to its history. And it does make a change from the fantasy of 1940 and Churchill. Someone who only got one thing right in his whole career (albeit a massive one) and was only in power thanks to Labour and the Liberals – the Conservatives wanting Halifax and to do a a Vichy-type deal with Hitler.
However, two things are (deliberately?) overlooked. It was a power grab by Henry VIII in order to maintain the Tudor dynasty – and it ultimately failed.
Secondly, those most in favour of the break with Rome, Protestant radicals, would eventually cause a king to be beheaded. The Reformation and Protestant ethic being totally opposed to being ‘educated’ by an elite that read Latin.
So, if the comparison with the Reformation is at all accurate, the desire for a power grab will succeed in the short-term but ultimately fail. And the radicalism it unleashes will see the UK transformed in ways unimaginable in 2020.
It’s worth bearing in mind that the demographic Johnson has relied on is old and a market that diminishes at a steady pace. The young that have been denied opportunities in the single market and in UK society as a whole is a growing one with memories not diminished by age.

The first mistake being made here, and Jung is not alone in this by any means - the faux economists on the Guardian do it all the time, is that Keynes has two parts to it.
Part 1, the government as consumer of last resort (i.e spending when others can’t or won’t)
Part 2 a domestic economy with spare productive capacity. And the UK has not had the latter component for decades. In fact going back to the 1960s when Reginald Maudling tried that stimulus only to have to rein it back due to imports being sucked in when UK industry failed to step up to the plate.
Similarly a decade later when Tony Barber tried the same.
The multiplier effect of Keynes being 1 / (1 – c +m) where c is the propensity to consume and m the propensity to import. And as the UK trade and current account balance has shown since 1980 , m is very significant. So the effect of Keynes is to stimulate the economies that export to the UK.
Of course Covid is almost certainly a dry-run for a post-Brexit UK. Whether a deal or no the ability of the UK to address its perennial and large balance of payments problem that arises from its current account deficit one by means of attracting investment due to having unfettered access to the single by virtue of being a member of the EU has now been trashed.
That means the spending of UK consumers and since 2007 the spending of UK government will have to be scaled back. Otherwise sterling will fall due to a lack of demand for it by the rest of the world and so inflation rise due to imports being more expensive.
Of course this could be the cunning plan – use inflation (taxes are inflation linked and public sector pay/government spending in general doesn’t have to be) to pay off debt by means of financial repression
But then since this government comprises those who advocated leaving the EU and claimed access to the single market as a member state would largely continue clearly have a combined IQ that can be counted on the fingers of two hands
So I doubt there is even a plan much less a cunning one

When the UK has such a dysfunctional and worthless system of governance with the first past the post, winner takes all system with no checks and balances of any worth that Lord Hailsham described as an 'elected dictatorship' the FTPA is simply a piece of rag to polish what is a huge and stinking turd.
In 2019 the Brits were faced with a terrible choice between Corbyn and his bunch of nutters and Johnson and his bunch of nutters. The Johnson crew being marginally less bad than the Corbyn mob - but that's like comparing syphillis with gonnorrhea. And all due to that woeful worthless system of governance.

The Lancet back in March reported back in April

For many viral diseases (SARS-CoV, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, influenza virus, Ebola virus, and Zika virus) it is well known that viral RNA can be detected long after the disappearance of infectious virus.2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
With measles virus, viral RNA can still be detected 6–8 weeks after the clearance of infectious virus.8
The immune system can neutralise viruses by lysing their envelope or aggregating virus particles; these processes prevent subsequent infection but do not eliminate nucleic acid, which degrades slowly over time.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article...

So the following is not necessarily true.

We know the specificity of our test must be very close to 100% as the low number of positive tests in our study means that specificity would be very high even if all positives were false.

We do know that young people in general, the one currently identified as being those most infected in this ‘second wave’ were the ones most likely to recover from infection. So, they are the one most likely to have residue RNA.
A Canadian study, albeit a small one, identified the limitations of the RT-PCR test
https://www.cebm.net/study/predicting-infectious-...

It has astounded me that no one seems to have tried to reproduce this study bearing in mind the religious fervour now attached to simplistic epidemiological models and the very dodgy data they rely on.
The testing rate has increased so the ability to identify young people with non-infective virus residue must also increase.

Data from the European Centre for Disease Control is only available up to 6 Sept due to UK data only being available up to 7 Sept but shows a declining rate of hospital admissions with an increasingly downward trend in early September.
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/d...
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/healthcare

What this indicates is that the RT-PCR test is very unreliable and is reporting young people who were infected but no longer are with a virus that is probably no longer of great concern.
Alternatively, if the virus is still problematic then clearly the 3 months lockdown did not resolve the matter. There is no practical way of imposing a lockdown that might. And the virus is now endemic and needs dealing with as Sweden has – isolate the elderly and the vulnerable and everyone else goes about their business pretty much as normal.
It is also worth bearing in mind that RNA viruses mutate very easily and so producing vaccines is very difficult if not impossible – there being no evidence of a vaccine for Sars-Cov –1, Covid being Sars-Cov-2, .

The United Kingdom is on the edge of Europe. - this is true
We have fewer neighbours - again true
and wider choices. - oops, not a hat trick. The UK has few if any choices, at least in terms of the economy.
For 40 years the UK has run a permanent and generally worsening current account deficit. In business terms that's a continuing negative cashflow. .So, as with any business that suffers permanent negative cashflow, the UK requires constant inflows of foreign investment to address the consequent ever-present balance of payments problem. That investment, both capital and financial, has been over-whelmingly predicated on unfettered access to the single market. That attraction has now gone.
The morons that constitute chief-moron Johnson's Cabinet appear to believe Johnny Foreigner is quite stupid (almost as stupid as they) and would grant the UK the same access (more or less) post-Brexit so that regulation could be trashed and continue to attract those investment inflows.
The second part of the title of the title of Kampfner's book is - Notes From a Grown Up Country. We all know how painful those growing pains were and, thankfully, the UK has been spared them,But now the growing up starts, less dramatic so therefore more prolonged.
At some point that will lhave to be the rejection of the quite dysfunctional system of governance that always cedes power to a minority interest in favour of something more pluralistic as in Germany The Brits had their chance in 2011to change that but all concerned (including the LibDems) failed miserably in grabbing the oppotunity with both hands.
The 2019 General Election reaching a new nadir with the choice between the vacuous, self-serving, habitual lying moron that is Boris Johnson and the crazies of the Corbynite Labour Party. Cummings is quite right - a hard rain is going to fall.

Certainly under Ken Clarke (the best leader the Conservative party never had) the problems caused by the Lawson boom and bust were handled. The Thatcher government built on the Falklands feel-good factor and had no intention of going back to sound monetary policy. But it is worth noting that the cad as a proportion of GDP broached the IMF danger threshold of 5% with Osborne, breaking Lawson's record.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/curre...

And Gordon Brown, for all his faults, did keep it under control and even ,managed to be in balance for aperiod of time, With Johnson's populist and cretinous outlook I doubt Osborne's record will stand for long

It would seem that we live in a world of ‘for a person with a hammer everything is a nail’. Epidemiologists with equations that have little resemblance to the micro-biological behaviour of viruses and a total reliance on dodgy data have had their 15 minutes of fame (or, as I suspect, infamy) and now a ‘strategy consultant’ that probably gives good foil and is certainly adept at promoting fantasy seeks to rely on fantasy and ignore evidence. Clearly a follower of the Great Dictator Boris ‘Mussolini’ Johnson..
And I call it fantasy due to one huge key important economic statistic that rarely is spoken of – the current account. Or, more precisely, a current account deficit that the UK has run for 40 years and one of generally increasing size. If anything demonstrates the inability of the Brits (and the Anglosphere in general) to create wealth it is that.
In fact, it goes back further than 40 years to the early 1960s. Reginald Maudling (hands up those who can remember him) in the early 1960s as Chancellor of the Exchequer tried to stimulate UK industry. It failed to step up to the plate, imports rose and a sterling crisis resulted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Maudling#C...

Tony Barber (another name from the past) tried the same thing in the early 1070s with the same result.
Both had to reverse direction due to the demands of Bretton Woods (no current account deficits of any size under that regime). With the demise of capital controls in 1979 the flood-gates opened.
So for 60 years UK industry (and there was some 60 years ago) has constantly failed to take those opportunities. Not least the biggest one now gone – unfettered access to the world’s largest market a mere 40km away through a tunnel.
I know that Liz Truss, Dominic ‘I left my heart in Dover’ Raab and others have pushed the fantasy that is ‘Brittania Unchained’ but that is as likely a recipe for success as Johnson’s ‘world beating app’.
Governments not only in the UK but elsewhere have singularly failed to create supply. They are great at short-lived demand creation, e.g. job creation schemes and industrial policies that support decaying industries but not dealing with the future.
Out there, there are individuals who can make something of the future but there’s not many of them and they’re not going to save a decaying, post-imperial power.