COVID-19: Note To Boris - LOCKDOWNS. DON'T. WORK.

 It looks like Boris is going to announce a new lockdown tonight. 

Guess what Boris? It will be as effective as the last lockdown (Tier4) and the Lockdown before that (the November "Save Christmas" lockdown) and the lockdown before those two lockdowns (The "Save the NHS" three month lockdown).

None of which have stopped the spread of the virus.

Now Boris, if you are going to have a fourth lockdown, please can we have a "proper" lockdown? 

By that I mean closing the borders, closing the airports and making people entering the country to isolate in hotels for two weeks at their expense, like they do in New Zealand and Australia.

Without proper control of people entering into the country, how the hell can we control the virus? 

Lets have a proper closure of shops, or at the very least control of the numbers entering shops, like the original lockdown.

And I hope the government give up with this stupid notion of keeping schools open as well. Those little snot-breathing bacteria-farms called children will spread the virus as surely as eggs are eggs. And if not them then their parents meeting up at the school gates are a vector for infection spread.

Otherwise, without proper lockdown, what's the point? It will be a failure, just like the ones before.

Or alternatively, now we know that lockdowns (at least the UK version) don't work, lets not fucking bother and let all the people that have a 99.999999% chance of surviving infection just go about their daily business.

Let's stop fucking the country up for no apparent gain. Because Boris, you are quickly losing the support of the country. We can't keep going into lockdown after lockdown and still be where we were before.

You will lose the support of the people, the government will lose the support of the people. The Police and the NHS will lose support also.

I can quickly see the day when we lose all respect for authority in this country and the ensuing chaos will not be pretty. The Police have already lost the respect of the working class, it's quickly losing the support of the middle class too. When the majority of the population have no respect for the law, or the rules the government put forward (illegally, without consent of Parliament) then you have a BIG problem.

You have been warned. 

Jeremy Corbyn: Crisis of Confidence and Leadership.

It seems with every day that Jeremy Corbyn and those at the top of the Labour Party fail to get a grip of the Anti-Semetism issue, is another day that the Tories are let off scott free regarding Brexit.

Just like Brexit is consuming the Tory party to the exclusion of poverty, homelessness, crime and all the other important facets of government, the Anti-Semetism crisis on the opposition benches is preventing Labour from calling the government to task on those failures.

The fissures, fractures and failures in the Tory party right now should a mountain of material to kick into the open goal available, but at each PMQs we get bumbling Mr Bean presenting failure after failure to deliver a coup-de-grace, kicking wide of the very open goal week after week.

And that's it: we see him most Wednesdays failing the non-Tories of the country and then he disappears like a hermit, never to be seen or heard unil the next Wednesday. Not the sign of a leader. He should be up there, in the public eye on a daily basis thumping lecterns and desks and speaking about the injustices regarding the poor. Instead it seems he's more likely to stay at home and drink free trade cocoa with his plaid slippers on.

When he does rise from his cocoa-induced slumbers, it seems he's intent on giving his enemies ammunition by aligning with terrorist organisations, attending far-left rallies and not denouncing anti-semitic outbursts..

Jeremy Corbyn is doing the poor and needy of this country a disservice by staying in office if he can't put this to bed. Or to put is another way, if he can't put it to bed quickly, he is not the person to lead the Labour Party.

By bumbling along and letting things continue, by pushing it out to committees and endless investigations, he is allowing others outside Labout to disrepute the party.

Investigations need to be thorough, swift and decisive.  Failure on either count looks like dithering, prevarocation and right now looks like tacit approval of the anti-semitic sentiment in Labour.

The Labour party needs a leader that can lead. Maybe Corbyn has been on the back benches for too long and is used to just leaving it to everyone else to run the shop. But that can't happen... he's the bloody leader of the party!

It's gone on for so long, the party are calling themselves into disrepute.

Their failure to crack on and fight on behalf of the poor and the impoverished and the dispossessed shows thay have taken the wrong route in politics.

STOP IT NOW!

Benefit Busters

I've made a couple of replies on Subrosa's blog about benefit busters. You might want to nip over and have a look. I'm going to flesh out my comments here.

Time and time again, you see government envisage a problem, spout rhetoric, deploy plans and then declare the problem is fixed, when the reality is far from the truth. I provided an example on Subrosa's blog: The government announced they were getting tougher on the unemployed and their policies (like the minimum wage) were going to create lots of lovely well-paid jobs for them to do. The benefit rules were changed so you lost jobseekers after 6 months, the minimum wage was introduced to make sure people didn't work for less than benefits, working tax credits were introduced to help those on benefits, private companies were brought in to manage the unemployed into work, in fact a whole raft of changes to the welfare and benefits system have been enacted over the past 12 years.

But has it worked? Well we don't know, because the feedback from the system is either non-existant, skewed so much by government departments as to be useless, or of more concern, totally ignored or suppressed.

Anyone in the system will tell you it doesn't work. The system hasn't been changed where it counts to reflect modern working practices, which requires people flexible enough to do extremely short term temporary work. Also, some of the changes have been counter-productive, providing a disincentive to leave benefits, rather than an incentive.

So why don't the government see this and sort out the system? Because thanks to the lack of reliable feedback, the government believes its done the job and thats the end of it. Instead it takes a FOI request like this one to show that in fact in real terms, the number of unemployed hasn't dropped, despite the government's best efforts. So feedback shows the inputs they made to the system haven't had the required effect.

Another example is the governments avowed policy to reduce child poverty. Many schemes have had much money spent on them, but only now has the feedback been produced to show that child poverty has increased under Labour than decreased.

Another is climate change. The government has raised billions in extra "green taxes" and intends to spend billions in order to reduce CO2 emissions. But nowhere is there any mention of measurement. How do we measure our success? If we monitor the megawatts of electricity used, does a reduction indicate people becoming more energy efficient, or is it an indictor of recession? Are we going to monitor every chimney for emissions and note any reduction in CO2?
I took Ed Milliband to task on Labourlist about this back in July, asking him before he comitted billions of pounds of our money to climate change, how was he going to monitor success? Because without feedback, he was just chucking money away. I never got a reply.

A crucial point about all this is once you have feedback from the system, if your expected output doesn't match your objectives, you modify the input by either going back to how the system was before you messed with it, or by identifying where the anomalies lie. That, one instantly recognises is the logical progression.

In the case of unemployment as the FOI request mentioned above reveals, its pretty obvious that uncontrolled immigration has had a quite significant impact. Its also had an impact on education and the health service too, but hey, immigration is too hot to handle for the government. Although you'd think a dispassionate analysis of reliable feedback data would be welcomed, as it should remove most criticisms or cries of racism.

Governments will continue to add layer upon layer of new legislation and process changes heaped on top of those already in place. With no feedback, how can they ever hope to ensure such a complex system is changed for the better?

Well the answer is they won't. The REAL problem with reliable feedback is that its an indicator of failure as well as success. Governments don't like to be labelled failures because it invites criticism and rectifying it may go against whatever dogma they are peddling at the time. But they should embrace failure, because as long as they do something to correct it, failure is all part of the process.

Just remember when governments of any persuasion tell you they are going to do something, ask yourself and them, wheres measurement, the feedback that will confirm success or failure?

Ask yourself some questions: what if Churchill, during the second world war, kept sending ships across the Atlantic without measuring how many of those sent actually arrived here safe? How would he have known that the U-boat threat was increasing? How would he have known that his current plans were failing and that something needed to be done about it? How would he have known that the things he implemented worked or not? He had to have reliable feedback and he had to aknowledge failure, be brave enough to embrace it, and strong enough to do something about it.