Matt Hancock Apologises for Tyranny? Hmmmm.....

 In the Covid enquiry the other day, Matt Hancock apologise for what he called an "error" in handling the Covid Pandemic. 

Hardly an error Matt, this was a magnitude more than that.

Prior to the Covid Pandemic the UK had pretty well thought out and pre-planned responses to a range of pandemic scenarios. 

The worst being an Ebola or Marburg outbreak within the UK. The best being another SARs-like outbreak. In between there are scenarios for human-transmissible Avian 'Flu, Swine Fever, Foot and Mouth, etc.

In terms of lethality, Covid comes closer to SARs. 

But...and it's a big but, the UK Government and Governments around the Western World looked at the Covid outbreak in Italy and panicked.

I posted back at the start of 2020 asking why if Covid as it became known as was rife in China and Europe, why weren't we closing borders? If there was something novel and from Italian statistics quite deadly, why weren't we pulling up the drawbridge and keeping the infected out?

I posted about Covid for the first time on the 11th of February 2020. I'd been watching reports inline for a month at least before I decided to post about it. I do remember postings online before Christmas of 2019 highlighting the outbreak in China and the bunch of military personnel that had attended the military games in China that had all become infected.

We even had a quite clear case of infection at a French ski chalet where the people renting the chalet came from Singapore and then went on to infect others at the chalet and showed quite clear symptoms BEFORE they returned to the UK but were still allowed to board a plane back into the country.

That chalet was ground zero for a huge number of subsequent outbreaks in Europe. 

Here in the UK I don't know what signals the Government were getting, but the best option after several Asian counties started reporting infections would be to have closed the borders and only let UK residents into the country and even then be subject to quarantine for a couple of weeks before being allowed into the population. The "close at hand" Ebola/Marburg response for and outbreak in Europe.

Instead, it was business as usual. borders open even to known Covid hotspots including China.

And then Italy happened. Hospitals full, doctors triaging patients, effectively deciding who should live and who should die. At the time the UK government didn't have the information that Covid had been in Italy since August 2019, the increase in patients with this new respiratory infection just exploded overnight.

Again, no borders closed.

Even when we'd had a few Asian plane passengers arrive with symptoms.

Then the ski chalet people arrived in the UK and it just went ballistic.

Brighton, Bognor, Southampton, and then the rest of the country as those plane passengers infected on the flight dispersed.

I posted on the 13th about the individual outbreaks, including an infected prisoner transferred to jail from Singapore.

Even on the 11th, I was calling for a limited lockdown of infected areas. The Ebola/Marburg "In country" response. 

On the 11th, I quite presciently noted this in an update:

UPDATE

Doing a mental exercise here: just think if the Government gave out advice to anyone in contact with an NCoV carrier to self-quarantine. Who would pay their wages while they were waiting the two weeks or a month to see if they had contracted the virus? How would the government stop or encourage people to stay indoors?

Given the severity of the virus and the infectious nature, surely another step for the government would be to underwrite any loss in pay and/or benefits for those that had to self-quarantine?

Otherwise people will just go to work as normal.

Back then the outbreak could have been limited if the government had acted to stop infected people from passing the virus on. 

Instead the government dithered until the only response was a complete country-wide lockdown.

We got the too-late sledgehammer response of a national lockdown, with all of the impact we now know it had on businesses and the economy in general. The government had several opportunities in January and February to try and limit the infection. Instead they failed to act in any visible or practical way.

I then posted on the 18th of February postulating the idea of a government support scheme for those (at that time) small numbers that were infected, paying them to isolate so they didn't lose money by self-isolating and thereby stopping the spread.

Another opportunity missed.

Then again at the beginning of March I asked questions about the nature of the virus and criticised the government "suck it and see" response.

Back then I said "Viruses have the ability to spontaneously mutate. They pick up attributes from other viruses in the hosts. The more people get infected with NCOVID-19 the more chance there is of a mutation picked up by the virus that makes it more deadly, harder to stop or impossible to vaccinate against."

Luckily, the Virus went the other way, wiping out several generations of South African mice to produce the Omicron strain which was thankfully a magnitude less deadly than the initial strain of Covid. It's only by luck that the scientists that engineered Covid gave it an ability to infect laboratory mice so they could watch it's progress in the lab. That was the weakness that allowed Covid to mutate into the less deadly strain through the mouse population.

I already assume that loophole will be fixed on the next engineered virus to make it more stable.

Anyway back to the matter in hand: No Matt Hancock, I will not accept your apology. As the minister responsible, you were well aware that there were pre-gamed scenarios in place and responses ready to cope with a pandemic like Covid. 

Instead you and all the other cabinet ministers shat themselves and started a train of events that would ruin the economy. 

Instead you acted too late in most cases. Too late to allow a limited response that wouldn't swamp the NHS, a limited response that tacked hotspots individually and limited damage to the economy, a limited response that would have prevented paying most of the population to stay at home, a limited response that would have kept the hospitality businesses viable.

Nope, no apology is worthy of the crippling of the country your government foisted upon us.

#FuckYouMattHancock.

Electric Vehicles: Pricing the Poor out of Personal Transport.

First, let me state where I'm coming from om this blog. I've driven cars since 1991. Since that time I've never paid more that £2500 for a car. I've always bought used and the prices have ranged from £175 for a Little Red Fiat Uno back in the early naughties to £2500 for my current Lexus RX300 4x4 luxo-barge.

The wife recently made noises about wanting a car of her own, and I started looking at cheap small cars for her. Given that tons and cities around the country are looking to ban diesel and eventually petrol carts, I started looking and elderly Hybrids like the 1st gen. Toyota Prius. It seems the Prius is holding it's value well, no doubt buoyed by scarcity and the demand in London for use within the ULEZ.

Elderly, high mileage Prius'are fetching well over a grand, even cars with worn out batteries, because even though it spends most of it's time on the petrol engine, it's still a hybrid right? So Hybrids were out. In the end with nothing environmentally acceptable, I went for a £300 quid Hyundai Getz. Not a bad little car as it turns out. Reminds me of the Uno, but even at 1.3L  a little more gutless that the 999cc Uno. I assume because of the safety gubbins installed in the car and the automatic gearbox sapping the power.

But the price of used Prius' got me thinking about the prices and availability of cheap electric cars when all the internal combustion cars die off.

As a start, lets look at my "Typical" shitbox car: over 100K miles, over 10 years old.

Now, transferring that to electric cars, first off the mileage isn't that much of an issue because I'm sure the powertrain will be capable of doing that sort of mileage.

The thing that would worry me is like the Prius, the battery. Unlike the Prius with it's petrol engine, an EV is totally reliant on the battery and batteries have a finite number of charge cycles and have a lifespan limited by previous usage.

There are plenty of Nissan leafs out there with knackered batteries already, because Nissan designed the battery without any temperature management. I'm not sure I want an EV with a sub-50 mile range.

So straight away there is a dillemma. I could buy an EV that no-one will touch with a sub-optimal battery, but that would cost more than a grand to replace. So straight away we're well over the grand or two that I'd pay for a IC-engined snotter.

I could go for a EV that has a lease battery. But then I'm paying endless payments to the manufacturer in order to guarantee range. Unlike a comparable ICE car.

It strikes me that anyone with my car buying power is going to struggle to get into EVs. Either buying a car that needs a 5 grand battery, or hopefully a recon battery for half that. Maybe the aftermarket will eventually cut in with cheap Chinese batteries :-)

Or I buy a car with a lease battery and pay endless payments and hope the manufacturer continues to support that model of EV 15, 20 or 25 years into the future. With their previous track record, I have the feeling that EVs are going to expire not due to the car wearing out, but the reluctance of manufacturers to keep supplying batteries.

I think the era of cheap personal transport is coming to an end. It's a shame that progress yet again excludes the poor.

Yes they can get buses and trains, but in the past 50 years we've had the option to use them or the car. In future I think car ownership for the poor won't be an option.

And that, to me is not progress.

Wage Depression Over the Decades

Many people of my age (mid-Fifties) can still remember a time when a single parent could earn enough to run a family and have the mother stay at home.

Then in the seventies thanks to inflation, if you wanted nice things the second partner had to go out and get a part-time job. The imability of wages to support a family had started.

In the eighties, if you wanted to run a car, have a VCR, etc the second partner needed to go out and get a job. The rise of non-parental childcare in the form of child minders boomed.

In the Nineties, the two parents started to struggle to support a family. When Labour came into power in the late Nineties, they decided that the family needed help and in 2003 introduced tax credits for working families.

All the while, in the background you had non-working families fully supported by the state in the form of very generous benefits.

Over the decades wage stagnation has caused wages to depress so much that now even two people working full time cannot support a family and the government has to chip in with in-work benefits like tax credits. But that's taking money from people without kids and give it to families just because employers won't or can't pay proper wages if they wish to stay competitive. i.e. we all suffer wage deflation, even if we don't have a family.

At the same time, benefits eventually became so generous, there was no incentive to work. The differential is still pretty big. Stay unemployed and you get everything paid for: rent, council tax, National Insurance, prescriptions.... The moment you step into work, the full reality of competing in a global market hits home.Thanks to globalism you are competeing with someone in Vietnam whos housing costs amount to a tin shack with no electricity, water or sewage system. They don't have to pay for any of the utilities that western workers have to pay for.

I've yet to formulate a plan as to how to equalise the playing field. Of course as that Vietnamese worker's life style improves, pressures will increase on his wages so that eventually he will be demanding similar wages to a wesstern worker.

In the meantime the disparity is being exploited by the global corporations. It's this disparity that is causing the rise of populism in the West. The global corporates and western governments have failed to effectively manage the issue and have largely ignored the poor working class in the west. There's a lot of people at the bottom of the pyramid and they are getting increasingly angry and connected by technology.

The poor working class see mass immigration as another attempt to further depress wages, not the advantage or benefit that the elites would have us believe immigrants are.

40 years of wage depression and the various attacks on the ability to raise a family in the West from all side has created an atmosphere in the West amongst the poor that enough is enough. We're already seeing workers on zero hours contracts, workers living in tents, trailers and shacks. The workers of the West can see a future where their families live in Shacks like the Vietnamese guy and the rich get even richer.

There is an overwhelming feeling amongst the poor working class that a red line has been crossed. Especially after the financial crisis where billions of pounds of taxpayer's money was used to bail out the banks rather than allow them to fail, in the process inflating the wallets of the richest 1% of the country. There's also a growing realisation that "climate change" taxes are not being used for the purpose of mitigating the effects, but instead again lining the pockets of the mega-rich.

The past decade has seen the biggest and fastest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in history. Quite rightly the poor are unimpressed, and angry.