THIS PRIME MINISTER LED US INTO THE WORLD OF HERD IMMUNITY - WE ARE NEARING 100,000 DEATHS

 The responsibility for our carnage lies primarily with the prime minister and his special advisor - Johnson and Cummings - who made the wrong decisions back in February last year. Their actions and inactions then are part of the sequence of neoliberal Tory misgovernment that followed. 

I have spent my lockdown charting this tragedy in Dying to Know and am now back on the familiar path of finding a literary agent/ publisher. My book is well worth reading. I am the historian by academic training and I have become a fledgling scientist and economist for the purposes of my pandemic tale. This will be my third publication.  

I hope you find this BLOGPOST worthwhile. It would help my path to publication for my book 'Dying to Know' if you would press the Follow button at the top of the blog post (on a full screen) - 29 followers to date. Thank you. 

 

Here is the latest twist in this sordid story, courtesy of SKWAWKBOX today:

'Former Tory MP Matthew Parris appears on Sky to exonerate catastrophic PM - while MP Lucy Allan quietly deletes 'like' of tweet calling for abolition of NHS

'Operation Absolve Boris' has begun. The Conservative party, which can never quite disguise its contempt for the Labour-founded NHS, has sloughed off even more of the facade to start its campaign to water the idea in the public consciousness that the blame for Boris Johnson's appalling and frankly murderous handling of the pandemic crisis rests with the NHS, not the Bullingdon boy.

Johnson's 'battle' with the pandemic - with grateful acknowledgements to Martin Rowson, cartoonist at the Guardian

Former Tory MP Matthew Parris was on Sky News this morning (thanks, reader and Labour activist Val Colvin for the pointer) - and Parris not only suggested that the latest scandal of slow vaccine roll-out was the NHS's fault, he 'jumped the shark' and suggested that he couldn't think of anything that Johnson could have done differently to reduce the scale of the UK's pandemic disaster, which has left this country with one of the world's worst death rates and worst economic collapses:

https://skwawkbox.org/parris-nhs-blame1-mp4/

Parris is not alone, with various Tory voices being given media time - or making comments on social media - to attack the NHS and shift the blame onto our underfunded and austerity-withered Health Service. Tory MP

NO IFS OR BUTS - SCHOOLS SHOULD BE SHUT

More SKWAWKBOX material - this is a nightmare - living in a land where misgovernment has become so blatant it hardly raises an eyebrow within the mainstream media.

And not a mention on Marr of mass school union action

(SKWAWKBOX - Sunday 3 January 2021)

Johnson - image from a virtual Downing Street press conference 

Boris Johnson appeared on the BBC's Marr this morning and was asked by Marr whether parents should send their primary-school children to school tomorrow. Johnson launched into a performance in which he claimed that:

·         'the evidence is not clear' whether keeping schools open is driving the pandemic

·         he has closed schools in the south-east because of the virus is 'surging' there

·         schools are safe, even though his own SAGE scientific committee says the pandemic can't be controlled without closing them

·         there is 'absolutely no doubt' that schools are safe

·         there is no doubt 'in my mind' that schools are safe

Johnson looked like he was parodying comedian Matt Lucas's parody of him:

https://videos.files.wordpress.com/hxH1b3ND/johnson-marr-lucas_hd.mp4

Shamefully, in a discussion of the topic of whether schools are safe and parents should send their children in, Marr completely failed to mention that the National Education Union (NEU) and Unison have told their members in primary schools not to go to work tomorrow because schools are emphatically unsafe, while the National Association of Head

WHAT BETTER WAY TO START THE NEW YEAR

SKWAWKBOX provided the material for me to close 2020 - and they are coming up trumps again with this gem of a post:

Huge popularity of former leader's move will stick in craw of his attackers

(SKWAWKBOX - 1 January 2021)

Jeremy Corbyn's new Project for Peace and Justice has met with a huge welcome, with widespread support on the left - and local Labour parties already planning to affiliate. It has also met with bile and vitriol from his enemies, who remain eager to rewrite history and bury the memory of the movement he led and galvanised - and its popularity.

Jeremy Corbyn - the tie and badge are tokens of remembrance for Grenfell

So the news today will come as bitterest gall to his enemies that tens of thousands of people have already signed up for the project's live launch event, with almost three weeks still to go before it happens. The announcement was made on the PJP's Facebook page:

Sunday17 January 2021 - 3 - 4.30 pm - PLEASE JOIN US.

 As well as Corbyn himself, the event will feature Zarah Sultana, one of the stars of Labour's 2019 intake of MPs, Unite head Len McCluskey, leading Jewish ANC member Ronnie Kasrils, former NUT head Christine

CAN THEY BE THIS STUPID?

 As this madcap year draws to a close, one last blogpost from me - and once again, my thanks to Steve Walker's team at SKWAWKBOX for shining the light on all that is going wrong in this nation of ours. It is our nation, remember, even if we are being misgoverned. It's just that we have very rarely had any semblance of control or power within it. We being the masses, the many. Not the few. 

  

Prof Kailash Chand takes apart Matt Hancock's new desperation-driven 'plan' that will destroy vaccine roll-out's effectiveness

(SKWAWKBOX - 31 December 2020)

Professor Kailash Chand

Kailash Chand on a recent BBC programme:

The Government's joint committee on vaccination and immunisation (JCVI) today recommended a single dose of either vaccine should be given to as many vulnerable people as possible, rather than sticking to the original two-dose strategy.

This in no way is a scientific decision - it is political expediency.

Pfizer said in a statement:

Data from the phase three study demonstrated that, although partial protection from the vaccine appears to begin as early as 12 days after the first dose, two doses of the vaccine are required to provide the maximum protection against the disease, a vaccine efficacy of 95 per cent.

There are no data to demonstrate that protection after the first dose is sustained after 21 days.'  

Further, the trial data said that after a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine coverage was 52%. But six days after the second dose that rose to nearly 91%.

Outrageous. What use is 52% to someone over 80 or 90 who is extremely vulnerable? Delaying the second

THE PRICE OF NOT HAVING A SOCIALIST GOVERNMENT - COVID-19 DEATHS

 Last Monday (21.12.2020), the Morning Star published an article by Stewart McGill headlined 'Covid-19 and the socialist states' in which he explored the reasons why China, Vietnam, Cuba and the Communist-led Indian state of Kerala, with a combined population of 1.5 billion people [world population:7.8 billion], have lost 7,000 people to COVID-19 but Britain has had over 62,000 deaths, officially. The actual number of virus deaths in Britain will be closer to 80,000 by now (see a number of my previous blog-posts for an explanation - for instance, here). What follows is a precis of Stewart's thought-provoking piece:

China - the state with the largest population in the world - now the rival to US world hegemony

Britain has a population 21 times smaller than China, yet it has seen at least 20 times as many cases of COVID-19 and around 13 times as many deaths. The WHO has described China's efforts as 'perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment in history'. The Wuhan epicentre of the virus

THE BLAME GAME: ANYONE BUT ME: 'LOOK, I'M YOUR LEADER - IT'S NOT ME - IT'S THAT MUTANT VIRUS.' 'OH NO IT ISN'T!!!'

 

No evidence that 'new' UK variant transmits any more easily or spreads any faster - and it's not 'new', WHO has been studying it for a while

Skwawkbox (Saturday, 19 December 2020) has confirmed my suspicions. The man leading the misgovernment of this country is attempting to shift the blame for getting his Christmas messaging so disastrously wrong on to the coronavirus itself. Shame on Whitty and Vallance for standing alongside him and misrepresenting the scientific community. 

Whitty, PM, Vallance

'Boris Johnson has blamed his Christmas U-turn on a 'new' 'mutant strain' of the coronavirus, claiming that it spreads more rapidly than the previous variants present in the UK.

But according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) this week, there is nothing to suggest it actually does spread faster - and it isn't new either:

Not only is there no indication, as far as the WHO is concerned, that the new variant of the coronavirus can

FROM 'DYING TO KNOW' - AN INTRODUCTION TO MMT - MODERN MONETARY THEORY

 Do have a read of my blogpost earlier this month - press this link here - for an update on my latest book. I have now completed chapter 10 in which, as referenced in the blogpost, I present the case for MMT as a means for transforming our economy and society. But it's going to take political will. 

Professor Stephanie Kelton, advocate for MMT

Here is a shortened version of my account of the power of MMT, taken from my draft of chapter 10 in 'Dying to Know'. I hope you are as excited as I am by what I discovered. This is your taster. I have also included a couple of YouTube videos for those of you curious to find out more. 

'Stephanie Kelton and other MMT advocates are pointing out the simple truth that any government that issues its own currency can never run out of money. The US government issues its own currency – the dollar. The UK government issues its own currency – the pound sterling. Economists and politicians and