The state of the UK

[pErvinalia]

Scot Dutchy would hate Kangaroo Island! He hates kangaroos, and islands.

[Hermit]

I bow to your superior knowledge. Mine comes from reading Hornblower and Jack Aubrey novels...

Heh. Good ole C.S. Forester. I have not read any of his Hornblower novels, but I've watched the TV series based on the first three books. You can watch and/or download all eight episodes here.

[Brian Peacock]

The upper middle class do love a golf course don't they(?)

[Scot Dutchy]

Plenty must live in Edinburgh then.

[Brian Peacock]

As Shakespeare once said, golf is the perfect way to ruin a good walk.

[Scot Dutchy]

Plenty of good walks being ruined in Edinburgh? There was at one time in the '70's 22 golf courses within the city's boundaries (all 18 holes).

[Brian Peacock]

Have another go. The last two posts have fallen well short.

[Scot Dutchy]

Have another go. The last two posts have fallen well short.

Short of what? I did not come out with a pure insult like some do about the Netherlands is that it?

[Brian Peacock]

Sorry, I'm not going to have a dig at where someone lives. I'll leave that to others.

[Scot Dutchy]

More corruption but never mind.

Boris Johnson ‘acted illegally’ over jobs for top anti-Covid staff

Legal action targets appointments of Dido Harding, Kate Bingham and Mike Coupe

Boris Johnson and his health secretary, Matt Hancock, acted “unlawfully” when appointing three key figures – including the head of NHS Test and Trace, Dido Harding – to posts in the fight against Covid-19, according to a legal challenge submitted by campaigners to the high court.

The Observer has seen details of documents from those pursuing the case – and initial responses from government lawyers – relating to the call for a judicial review into the appointment of Baroness Harding, who is a Tory peer, and into those of Kate Bingham to the post of head of the UK’s vaccine taskforce and Mike Coupe to the role of director of testing at NHS Test and Trace.

The case has been lodged jointly by the not-for-profit Good Law Project headed by Jolyon Maugham QC, and the UK’s leading race equality thinktank, the Runnymede Trust. If it is successful, it would represent a further serious blow to the credibility of the government’s handling of the pandemic and support claims that ministers have been running a “chumocracy”.

The claimants say the appointments were made without advertising the positions, and without the open competition normally insisted on for important public sector roles. Instead they suggest those identified and then appointed were installed in part because of their Tory connections. Harding and Bingham are both married to Conservative MPs while Coupe is a former chief executive of Sainsbury’s, and was a colleague of Harding’s at the supermarket.

[Scot Dutchy]

More chumocracy:

Trump sank lower, but that doesn't mean Johnson isn't knee-deep in sleaze

A damning report makes clear how complacent we’ve been: under cover of Covid, taxpayers’ money has been abused

The gradual, reluctant departure of Donald Trump removes a man who performed a vital function for the UK government. He served as a lightning rod and handy distraction, diverting attention away from our own rulers by reliably being more appalling, more outrageous and more incompetent than they could ever manage. However low they sank, they could always point across the Atlantic to someone who had sunk lower. Trump absorbed a lot of emotional energy that way, soaking up fury that might otherwise have been directed closer to home. But now that his slow retreat from the centre of global consciousness is under way, his utility as a decoy is diminishing. Once Trump is no longer gobbling up all the attention, our gaze can settle more steadily on our own masters. And it is not a pretty sight.

For even though Boris Johnson never told anyone to inject bleach, his government’s handling of the pandemic has been disastrously bad by any measure except direct comparison with Trump’s. Whether it’s the late decision-making, including a delay to the first lockdown that is estimated to have cost 25,000 lives, and a second one imposed five weeks after the experts had warned a circuit break was urgently required; sending infected people back into care homes without testing; the baffling decision to allow mass gatherings to go ahead and to allow air travellers to keep arriving without even the most basic checks once they had landed; or the serial failures to set up a functional test-and-trace system, the record is abysmal – borne out by the fact that Britain has the highest death toll in Europe.

Alongside the uselessness has come callousness. Again, it’s never voiced as baldly as it was by Trump, but the choices speak for themselves. This is a government that has had to be dragged – twice – into extending free school meals to hungry, poor children when they need them, acting only after moral instruction had been supplied by a professional footballer. Now we learn that the price of Britain’s public-finances problem – which is real – is to be paid by public-sector workers in the form of a wage freeze. Admittedly, NHS staff are to be exempt, but still it is the teachers and key council workers, whose indispensability has been confirmed anew during this crisis, who are once again to bear the brunt of austerity. And all the while, the government is leading us into another economic hurricane, one that will inflict far more damage than Covid, in the form of the Brexit that is waiting for us once the clock strikes midnight to usher in the new year.

Just wear your mask and you will be fine.

[Brian Peacock]

More corruption but never mind.

Boris Johnson ‘acted illegally’ over jobs for top anti-Covid staff

Legal action targets appointments of Dido Harding, Kate Bingham and Mike Coupe

Boris Johnson and his health secretary, Matt Hancock, acted “unlawfully” when appointing three key figures – including the head of NHS Test and Trace, Dido Harding – to posts in the fight against Covid-19, according to a legal challenge submitted by campaigners to the high court.

The Observer has seen details of documents from those pursuing the case – and initial responses from government lawyers – relating to the call for a judicial review into the appointment of Baroness Harding, who is a Tory peer, and into those of Kate Bingham to the post of head of the UK’s vaccine taskforce and Mike Coupe to the role of director of testing at NHS Test and Trace.

The case has been lodged jointly by the not-for-profit Good Law Project headed by Jolyon Maugham QC, and the UK’s leading race equality thinktank, the Runnymede Trust. If it is successful, it would represent a further serious blow to the credibility of the government’s handling of the pandemic and support claims that ministers have been running a “chumocracy”.

The claimants say the appointments were made without advertising the positions, and without the open competition normally insisted on for important public sector roles. Instead they suggest those identified and then appointed were installed in part because of their Tory connections. Harding and Bingham are both married to Conservative MPs while Coupe is a former chief executive of Sainsbury’s, and was a colleague of Harding’s at the supermarket.

Someone should take that to the corruption commissioner.

Oh hang on. Dido Harding's husband is the corruption commissioner, so everything must be above board and tickety-boo.

[Brian Peacock]

More chumocracy:

Trump sank lower, but that doesn't mean Johnson isn't knee-deep in sleaze

A damning report makes clear how complacent we’ve been: under cover of Covid, taxpayers’ money has been abused

The gradual, reluctant departure of Donald Trump removes a man who performed a vital function for the UK government. He served as a lightning rod and handy distraction, diverting attention away from our own rulers by reliably being more appalling, more outrageous and more incompetent than they could ever manage. However low they sank, they could always point across the Atlantic to someone who had sunk lower. Trump absorbed a lot of emotional energy that way, soaking up fury that might otherwise have been directed closer to home. But now that his slow retreat from the centre of global consciousness is under way, his utility as a decoy is diminishing. Once Trump is no longer gobbling up all the attention, our gaze can settle more steadily on our own masters. And it is not a pretty sight.

For even though Boris Johnson never told anyone to inject bleach, his government’s handling of the pandemic has been disastrously bad by any measure except direct comparison with Trump’s. Whether it’s the late decision-making, including a delay to the first lockdown that is estimated to have cost 25,000 lives, and a second one imposed five weeks after the experts had warned a circuit break was urgently required; sending infected people back into care homes without testing; the baffling decision to allow mass gatherings to go ahead and to allow air travellers to keep arriving without even the most basic checks once they had landed; or the serial failures to set up a functional test-and-trace system, the record is abysmal – borne out by the fact that Britain has the highest death toll in Europe.

Alongside the uselessness has come callousness. Again, it’s never voiced as baldly as it was by Trump, but the choices speak for themselves. This is a government that has had to be dragged – twice – into extending free school meals to hungry, poor children when they need them, acting only after moral instruction had been supplied by a professional footballer. Now we learn that the price of Britain’s public-finances problem – which is real – is to be paid by public-sector workers in the form of a wage freeze. Admittedly, NHS staff are to be exempt, but still it is the teachers and key council workers, whose indispensability has been confirmed anew during this crisis, who are once again to bear the brunt of austerity. And all the while, the government is leading us into another economic hurricane, one that will inflict far more damage than Covid, in the form of the Brexit that is waiting for us once the clock strikes midnight to usher in the new year.

Just wear your mask and you will be fine.

Oh come on Scot. Toby Young told us this week that out of 5 million cases of Covid only 54,000 people had died, and that's no worse than the flu.

[pErvinalia]

More people are killed by falling off a ladder than that.

[rainbow]

Have another go. The last two posts have fallen well short.

Short of what? I did not come out with a pure insult like some do about the Netherlands is that it?

Ja, Nederland is saai kak