Bournbrook Live
Our commentary on the news as it comes in.
If you would like to contribute to Live, please email us at live@bournbrookmag.com
Test and Trace has been a shameful waste of money
Posted at 5.50 pm.
Posted at 5.50 pm UK time
New data from the Office for National Statistics shows that the Test and Trace app – which has cost the taxpayer at least £35 million – is contacting fewer than half of its users who need to self-isolate. What a waste of money.
I report on this for Lockdown Sceptics here.
Six feet apart or 60? It might not make a difference
Posted at 8.10 am.
Posted at 8.10 am UK time
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that ‘one is no safer from airborne pathogens at 60 ft than 6 ft’.
Find this – and more – on my Daily News Digest for The Conservative Woman here.
Americans get cold feet on second doses of Covid vaccines
Posted at 4.34 pm.
Posted at 4.35 pm UK time
Almost eight per cent of Americans who have received their first doses of Covid vaccines are refusing to take a second.
I report on this for Lockdown Sceptics here.
Communist tendencies at the heart of Sage
Posted at 2 pm.
Posted at 2 pm UK time
It has been revealed that Sage scientist Professor Susan Michie is a member of the Communist Party of Britain.
Some will say that the political opinions of a Government scientist does not matter. I disagree.
In fact, when someone so close to Government policy has *political* sympathy with Chinese Communist Party-inspired lockdowns, I actually find that quite distressing.
Whodunnit – a Downing Street special
Posted at 10.10 am.
Posted at 10.10 am UK time
The idiocy of Downing Street’s gratuitous attack on Dominic Cummings is becoming clearer by the second.
Instead of letting sleeping dogs lie, and taking their lumps when Cummings next gave evidence to a Parliamentary Committee, they could not resist engaging in puerile and heedless palace intrigue.
And so the Sunday papers are packed with the sort of who-done-it speculation one might expect to find in an Agatha Christie novel. Was it Harry Newman, the Cabinet Office SPAD and best friend of the Prime Minister’s fiancé? Was it in fact Cummings, the deposed eminence grise with a grudge? Or was it a sleeper cell of Labour-supporting civil servants?
Can I therefore suggest the Murder on the Orient Express solution is the most likely: it was probably all of them.
Read more by Collingwood on ‘The Cummings Storm’ here.
Weekend News Review
Posted at 7.50 am.
Posted at 7.50 am UK time
My Weekend News Review for The Conservative Woman can be read here.
Cummings drops a tactical nuke on Number 10
Posted at 6.30 pm.
Posted at 6.30 pm UK time
Number 10, terrified following Dominic Cummings’s statement to a Parliamentary Select Committee that the Department of Health was a ‘smoking ruin’ after just two months of pandemic, was bound to try to clip his wings. Who knows what Cummings might reveal next time?
Sadly for them, but happily for us, the Government is run by mentally indolent, panicky nincompoops who are pathologically incapable of fast forwarding the tape to see what might happen when they press play. Thus, they attacked Cummings in a way guaranteed to backfire. And boy has it backfired!
Cummings has not only denied he was the ‘Chatty Rat’ leaker, but has made two damaging allegations. First, that the Prime Minster tried to quash his own leak inquiry because it had fingered one of his fiancé’s best friends. Second, that his ‘plans to have donors secretly pay for the renovation [of the Number 10 flat] were unethical, foolish, possibly illegal’.
And just as a final flourish, Cummings demanded an under-oath, full-access parliamentary inquiry into the Government’s handling of the pandemic.
Cummings responded to an ill-considered shot across his bows by dropping a tactical nuke on the Government’s position. Another jolly wheeze gone well for the PM, then.
‘Unite for Freedom’
Posted at 5.15 pm.
Posted at 5.15 pm UK time
More by myself on the ongoing protest against lockdown and vaccine passports in London today can be read here.
Large crowds gather against lockdown in London
Posted at 2.30 pm.
Posted at 2.30 pm UK time
There are some encouraging scenes taking place in London today, as thousands of people have gathered to protest against Government-imposed lockdowns.
How many will the BBC say turned up this time…
Lockdown proponents must stop deflecting the blame
Posted at 12.10 pm.
Published at 12.10 pm UK time
Two of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration have written a great piece in The Daily Telegraph telling lockdown proponents to stop deflecting the blame on the greatest public health fiasco in history.
I report on this – and quote from the article – for Lockdown Sceptics here.
Further threats to holidays abroad this summer
Posted at 10.40 am.
Posted at 10.40 am UK time
There are now 40 countries on the Government’s travel ‘red list’. Only a handful are likely to feature on the ‘green list’ when (if) overseas travel returns on May 17th. Even travellers to these countries will have to fork out for hefty testing costs.
But new reports suggest that none of this could matter anyway, since the Foreign Office could refuse to sanction travel to ‘green’ and ‘amber’ countries given that its advice is provided independently of the Government’s ‘traffic light’ system.
Since disregarding Foreign Office advice invalidates most travel insurance policies, travel operators would most likely not run holidays to these countries.
Just as people started to believe we were returning to a state of normality…
I report on this for Lockdown Sceptics here.
Britain’s regulator missed early blood clot cases linked to AstraZeneca vaccine
Posted at 11 am.
Posted at 11 am UK time
By the time cases of blood clotting in patients who had received the AstraZeneca vaccine had begun to emerge on the Continent (in March), Britain had already administered 11 million doses of the vaccine (the first having been given in January). No such occurrences had been reported publically in Britain, but not for a lack of cases, according to the findings of a new investigation. Clotting cases were recorded in the UK’s Yellow Card database (a website for reporting adverse drug reactions) in January but were missed at first by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) – possibly due to the algorithms it used to interrogate UK data.
Read my report on this for Lockdown Sceptics here.
Pregnant women to be offered Covid vaccine
Posted at 10.40 am.
Posted at 10.40 am UK time
My Weekend News Review for The Conservative Woman can be read here.
Johnson fails the morality test, miserably
Posted at 9.45 am.
Posted at 9.45 am UK time
An excerpt from my article in The Conservative Woman today, titled ‘Johnson fails the morality test, miserably’:
Following the most recent gossip about Johnson’s ‘love’ life, a number of Right-wing columnists have written that the PM’s philandering ‘doesn’t really make a difference’ (Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times), that virtue doesn’t matter in such a position, and that Johnson ‘looks positively saintly’ compared with some of our past PMs anyway (Dominic Sandbrook, UnHerd).
Even if other commentators took the opposite view, I doubt if the papers would have published them.
Read the full piece here.
Nearly a quarter of registered Covid deaths are not caused by the virus, new statistics show
Posted at 8.10 am.
Posted at 8.10 am UK time
My Daily News Digest for The Conservative Woman can be read here.
4.6 million people missed out on hospital treatment in England in 2020
Posted at 7.40 am.
Posted at 7.40 am UK time
My Daily News Digest for The Conservative Woman can be read here.
Even Big Tech thinks the Government is going too far!
Posted at 4 pm.
Posted at 4pm UK time
A software update to the NHS Test and Trace app – which was scheduled to coincide with the partial reopening of pubs and restaurants – has been blocked by Apple and Google because it breaks rules about the collection of location data.
I have reported on this for Lockdown Sceptics here.
Positive signs from Texas
Posted at 3.45 pm.
Posted at 3.45 pm UK time
The stats on lockdowns from Texas are looking positive.
This is amazing.
It's almost as if lockdowns have had little to no effect on a seasonal, respiratory coronavirus.
But pointing this out with data and evidence makes you a ‘denier’ or ‘Covidiot’, or something like that.
BLM studying their foes?
Posted at 4.05 pm.
Posted at 4.05 pm UK time
It seems that the call of affluence truly is irresistible, even for the most militant among us.
I am, of course referring to the rather comical news that a co-founder of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement has purchased a $1.4 million home in a neighbourhood characterised by the old, the white, and the male.
It's wonderful how far the oppressed and marginalised can go in this day and age. Perhaps she is simply studying her foe.
It just gets worse and worse for the pubs
Posted at 11.40 am.
Posted at 11.40 am UK time
In a sign of just how ‘partial’ the next easing lockdown really is, a large proportion of hospitality businesses will not be able to open tomorrow due to the requirement for customers to remain outdoors. So many venues just don’t have the space for this.
And even those venues which are able to reopen will achieve nothing like their ‘normal revenue’. Pubs are dying – the blood is on the Government’s hands.
I report on this for Lockdown Sceptics here.