They do have bats! I am confident they're not the menu, even though one did find my daughters head when we went.

Around here you have to take your one or two children to school in a 4x4 because the streets are too dangerous due to being full of 4x4s, each taking a child to school.....:rolleyes:

From 15 June, face coverings (not clinical masks) will be mandatory on all public transport in England. Passengers who refuse to comply will be refused travel or fined, which will be enforced by staff and British Transport Police

Network Rail chairman Sir Peter Hendy says he does not foresee workers having to police the new rules, saying: "This is about people being sensible - people do what they're asked as long as what they're asked to do is sensible."

So it's going to be chaos then.

He doesn't get out much I take it?

Which is based on scientific advice....

Nothing to do with trying to make people think they are safe on public transport once we all have to be crushed in together again.

It’s like theatre security at airports.

He doesn’t know Cummings.

Either way it should be doable without incurring unacceptable levels of risk of spreading the infection. It's especially important for the schools to open because the continuing negative effects especially with regards to the most disadvantaged children and communities.

In that regard it comes off as utterly selfish and inconsiderate when some teachers demand that schools stay closed until they face little to no risk of being infected.

“.... The NHS coronavirus test-and-trace system designed to prevent a second deadly wave is not expected to work at full speed until September or October, the Guardian has learned.

Tony Prestedge, the chief operating officer of the NHS scheme, admitted in a webinar to staff that the programme would be “imperfect” at launch, adding that he hoped it would be operational at a world-class level within three to four months....”


Oh dear.....


https://www.theguardian.com/society/...e_iOSApp_Other

Covid-19: how a virus is turning the world upside down

If you catch it, it's your fault for not washing your hands (of the situation) enough:rolleyes:

If they're admitting to 4 months, it could easily be a year if my experience of large government projects are anything to go by.

Or 'forever' if my experience of Boris is anything to go by.

I am beginning to suspect that "world-class" means something different in British English than it does in American English.

Is this an ironic usage that everyone there understands as satire?

Serco admits track & trace not likely to work for months but chief exec says he wanted to 'cement the position of the private sector' in the NHS supply chain. Rage-inducing story

https://theguardian.com/society/2020...er-coronavirus

It's depressing to see a global pandemic being used as a catalyst to achieve the key objectives of Brexit:

• Privatising as much of the NHS as possible - ideally to US corporations
• Lowering food standards to allow the US to flood the UK market with the likes of hormone-fed beef and chlorinated chicken
• Abandoning worker and environmental protections
• Lowering taxes and hollowing out the welfare state to further facilitate the transfer of wealth from the poorest to the most wealthy

That over 50,000 had to die to achieve it is just deplorable. :mad:

I watched the Channel 4 documentary on the government's (mis)handling of the Coronavirus crisis. If I hadn't already been out for a run with Mrs Don and done a spin class, the effect that programme had on my pulse and blood pressure would have counted as that day's 30 minutes of cardio.

I am surprised it has taken so long for Silver Swan to leak. This was an exercise that the Scottish Government (the current one) did, modelling a coronavirus pandemic. It identified issues with lack of PPE, testing and contact tracing. No action taken on lessons learned.

(FWIW lessons learned were shared with NERVTAG UK based scientific advisory body, not sure whether shared with Westminster government.)

https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson_MP/...893489664?s=20

https://twitter.com/SpanishDan1/stat...539534336?s=20

It's interesting how the Swedish and UK eugenists suddenly have bleeding hearts towards 'disadvantaged children and communities' (for Sweden: read Somalis in Stockholm, for the UK: read people on benefits and low-paid BAME). Who cares if 'these people', as they are invariably referred to, go down with Covid19.

There's a link to https://bylinetimes.com/2020/05/13/s...of-journalism/ "strangling-democracy-millions-paid-to-corporate-press-at-the-expense-of-journalism"
******* hell. What's the best way to support independent journailsm?

Utterly petrifying.

Lol yeah only Somalis are disadvantaged in Stockholm. You are clueless.

It's stunning how many people don't understand that Boris Johnson is leader of the same Conservative Party that they think they are protesting against by voting for Boris Johnson.

Although you're allowed not to wear one if you have, for example, asthma. No chance of any problems with that...


Also, there's supposedly some volunteer force being set up to remind people, but no-one thought to mention this to the rail unions, whose members are also expected to enforce the new regulation. The unions are threatening to strike.

Wait, so now Boris wants people to look like bank robbers and letter boxes? :confused:

R number above 1 in some parts of England...no health or science experts at the presser...

Fishy as ****.

Are the government providing face masks or is it again going to be the lower paid who bear more of the financial burden?

This pandemic is really not playing fair, doesn’t it know that you just issue a press release and that solves the problem?

Tory MP attended lockdown barbecue with journalists - Spectator deputy editor, Freddy Gray, and Isabel Oakeshott - as well as Richard Tice, Brexit party chairman

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...th-journalists

More details here. The value is between .89 and 1.01 in different areas.

Calls for regional lockdowns, and claims, unsurprisingly, that restrictions were lifted too early.

Grant Shapps, "We only came to Government in December"

So the past 10 years of Tory Govt just gets airbrushed from history.

I assume that’s rhetorical.

They are disproportionately affected by Covid19, so where is the sense in 'disadvantaged children really really need to be back at school because suddenly we care so much about them'?

Can't see the logic of that as asthmatics are considered relatively high-risk (10% of those who die of Covid19 have this as an 'underlying cause').

Advice given to asthmatics is pretty poor IMV as they are not told that inhalers will not help them if they have difficulty breathing due to Covid19 infection. This could lead to unnecessary fatalities due to people overdosing on their Ventolin.

With cctv cameras everywhere you go in London you can be sure they HATE the idea of people having their faces covered.

They will be giving out disposable face masks.

Could be those dud masks that came all the way from Turkey a couple of months back. Wouldn't surprise me as they say you can make your own.

It's OK, he was speaking as his alter-personna, Kenneth Green.

Do you have a link for that. Articles I've seen suggest asthmatics aren't at higher risk. For example:

https://www.medpagetoday.com/infecti.../covid19/86323

Why not? It worked last December. Johnson's platform was 'Vote for me to fix the things my party (including Governments I was part of) have broken over the last decade'. I've spoken to people IRL who have literally claimed to have voted Tory as a protest against the last government! (Not smart people admittedly, but there's enough people that fall outside that category to swing an election).

Just wait, when Murdoch and the Barclays decide the time is right Johnson will be ousted and their papers will be assuring people that they should vote for the new Tory leader who has absolutely nothing to with any decision made in 15 years of Tory rule. But that the Labour leader is Micheal Foot in a rubber mask.

The Tories literally got elected on a campaign of "we're the party that's fighting against the party who have been in power for the last 10 years". I mean, you've got to hand it to them, really.

If Boris Johnson murdered his parents he'd claim clemency on the grounds of being an orphan.

Will they?

I have no idea what you are trying to say, but given the level of social exclusion and disadvantage that many immigrant communities experience it's obviously highly detrimental to their long-term welfare if Swedish schools had been closed.

It's not Swedish middle class people who would experience a disproportionate impact of the closure of schools.

It’s much older than that. :)
The Joys of Yiddish was published in 1968.

Volunteers for Transport for London will apparently be doing it from next week. I don’t know if anyone will be doing it for other rail or bus services; it’s only been mentioned that the volunteers there will be reminding people to wear masks.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...ing-volunteers

It looks as if it might go back a little bit further than that: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/359...d-then-pleaded


Although I haven’t found a quotation of that published earlier than the Rosten one.

Ah, I think the Paranoia manual was quoting that (now you mention it I think it may even have been attributed to Mr Rosen, I read it a long time ago!) but I'm pretty sure that is the exact description they gave, word for word. Chutzpah is a character sheet attribute in Paranoia.

Has anyone told these volunteers?

They don't know they're volunteering yet.

So there'll be a group of people standing around trains all day? I hope they'll be regularly tested it sounds like a recipe for "super spreaders" as well as mindless idiocy.