Amid the COVID-19 panic, it has hardly been noticed that Carphone Warehouse went bust, with 2,900 people losing their jobs. Its co-founder, David Ross, is of course the billionaire that Boris Johnson claimed paid for his luxury holiday to Mustique, whereas Ross claimed he only organised it. Who actually paid is one of those Johnson peccadilloes, like the promotion of Jennifer Arcuri, the Garden Bridge fiasco, the Guppy conversation over beating up Stuart Collier, the Russian Influence report, the question of how many children he really has – I could go on rather a long while here – which will be discreetly downplayed by the state and media nexus.
Ross, like Branson and so many others of the “entrepreneurs” that we are taught to worship, came from a very wealthy background and had the great advantages of capital and connections to boost him up the ladder. To be fair to Ross, unlike for example Philip Green, there is no suggestion that he made his fortune from Carphone Warehouse by systematic asset-stripping. What he did do, which is typical of capitalism today, is with the other directors systematically and legally remove capital as it accumulated from the company into their own personal bank accounts. In the long term this left Carphone Warehouse unable to restructure and adapt to changed market conditions, which it needed to do, as its High Street model failed for reasons unrelated to the current health crisis. Ross also had illegally used his shares as collateral for £162 million of personal loans, for which this major Tory party donor has inexplicably never been prosecuted.
Ross had inherited a very large chunk of shares in, and the chairmanship of, Cosalt Ltd, a maritime supplies company. It went bust with £70 million debt and a £50 million pensions deficit, which ruined the lives of many employees and ex-employees. Inexplicably, after it went bankrupt its best assets were sold by the administrators Price Waterhouse at a knockdown price to… major Tory Party donor David Ross. Who thus made money from his own family company going bust and its pensioners being shafted.
Inexplicably, major Tory Party donor David Ross was not disqualified as a director of other companies by the Insolvency Service when Cosalt, of which he was a chairman, went bankrupt.
About 7% of Ross’s wealth would pay the entire Carphone Warehouse staff being made redundant for a year. That of course will never happen because it is absolutely contrary to the model of capitalism currently operating, in which the ultra wealthy view companies as sources of short term wealth extraction and feel zero connection to the workforce.
There is room to be congratulatory of Rishi Sunak’s active interventionism in the face of the economic crisis caused by the reaction to coronavirus. Many of his interventionist measures are very good, in particular in subsidising wages. It has been rightly and widely noted that to date there is not enough to support those self-employed in the gig economy, while to rely on universal credit to support anybody in crisis is plainly insufficient. But I am here more concerned with the larger macroeconomic measures. Quantitative easing as ever will merely push more money into the financial institutions for them to looad into financial instruments of zero real economic benefit.
The vast bulk of the £330 billion business bailout will find its way in huge tranches into mega-companies. The airline industry has already requested £7.5 billion, to give just one example. That is a series of simple large cheques for an overstretched civil service to write. I strongly suspect that the loans to small businesses, started today, will be slow and bureaucratic and difficult to access. They will be subject to bank interest – the bankers always win – which for a period will be paid by the taxpayer. Many of these measures when you analyse them are in the long term more transfers of money from the taxpayers to the banks.
It has been widely noted that money is suddenly magically available which was denied to industrial strategy and to the NHS for decades. But do not be fooled; this is not a conversion to Keynes by the Tories. In bailing out the airlines, Branson is not going to be asked to put back one penny of his personal wealth, and nor is David Ross nor any of the other billionaires. Those who have made vast fortunes in our ever-expanding wealth gap are not going to be asked to put anything back into the companies or system which they exploited. Massive state subsidies will predominantly go to the biggest companies and benefit the paid agency of the bankers. You and I will pay. The taxpayer will ultimately pick up the tab through what may prove to be another decade of austerity imposed as a result of another transfer of wealth from us to banks, financial institutions and big companies. The small and medium companies which will go to the wall – and a great many will – are going to provide rich pickings in a few months time for the vultures of the hedge funds and other disaster capitalists.
It is fashionable to write articles at the moment stating the Government has discovered the value of socialist intervention. I suspect history will show that nothing could be further from the truth.
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Yes, at last. I’ve been saying this.
Its always about the money. The privately owned central banks have no policy left to deal with anything. Everything they have tried has failed. We are near NIRP (Negative Interest Rate Policy) a measure they have been trying to implement for a decade. Never let a crisis go to waste. Time to stuff the turkey whether it wants it or not. The banks are essentially banktrupt. Did tou really believe low interest rate were about the ordinary people or the economy? It was about saving the banks and encouraging people to splurge the savings on things they frankly did no need.
There is nothing governmental about central banks. A privately run cartel. The money will go to the main international finance players and as you point out any measure for mr ordinary will probably be tiresome and designed to deter claimants.
As for Carphone Warehouse. CPW were originally approached by Dixons regarding a merger, Charles Dunstone (CD) rejected this proposal as at that time CPW were doing reasonably well. It was later when CD seen the sales decline he approached Dixons regarding a merger. The rest is history. Once acquired Dixons went on a fat reducing exercise. Cutting perks, and finding new ways to reduce the incentives (commission/Share Options etc) paid to staff. While telling staff this was good for them. Somewhere in Dixons I think someone realised they had bought a lemon and sought ways to reduce the toxic exposure. The reasons given are not inaccurate but reflect a saturated market with too many players selling homogenous products from a variety of sellers. The customer demanded better features, camera, battery, storage. All of this increased the price. Hence the contractual offering became more expensive resulting in consumer delay in upgrading or moving to lower cost sim only plans to stretch out the old handset for longer. However, CPW was a place where people had a real interest in technology and providing the best service. Dixons has such a bad name that it is unlikely the same people will want to visit a CPW store within a store. It is truly a worrying time for CPW staff. There is a rumour that Charles Dunstone is interested in around 300 of the shops and will go in with Talk Talk, name them Talk Talk and take it from there.
The airlines have also been buying their stock for many years. If you can’t survive you die. Another will rise. Endless bailouts show that they will always have your back. The firms know this. I mean the private aviation industry is also looking for a bailout in the US. While society looks at overweight people with toxicity, it does not view the damage done by overweight firms like BA with the same disdain. The damage is good people losing their standard of living. Think about that, one time it might be you. Let the debt dogs die and instead helicopter the money to the infrastructure and the least well off in society.
Are people that thick they cannot see its always about the money? Society does not want to address the issues. That thousands of children need to go to college after leaving school as they did not obtain the necessary qualifications to progress in life. The state school system in many parts of the country should be closed down. There is no financial benefit sending people to school for years for them to be only qualified to stock supermarket shelf’s. They do not need to go to school for that. So do it right or don’t bother. If someone is poor at say math and English, teach them a trade. Don’t teach them religious tolerance or sex education. They already know the second one when they mature and there is no evidence that teaching kids pornography deters them from having kids at an early age. If you look at the prison population demographics you will see that if the areas they originated from had more money spent on them, not paying peanuts to people in benefits and reform the state school labour camps then they just might be able to get a reasonable job without feeling bitter and angry and turning to crime. However, you could say the biggest most successful criminals are the umbrella “grunting toff” term. Which covers the international banks, politico, big business etc. Then there is the “security” industry that need these people to be dysfunctional and angry otherwise there would be less crime and the grunting toff would be out of a job. Can’t have that. The people on the council estates are oppressed by the state. Someone might say that if attacked by 4 people you should focus on 1 and do as much damage as possible. Hence when in hospital the police will have someone to question. I always see people trying to fight multiples rather than direct their energy at 1 thing. The distracted can never win.
Bill Wallberstien.
You need maths and english to learn a trade and to stack supermarket shelves. For instance, if your trade is electrical you will have to read and understand the wirring regulations. If you are a brickie you need to understand the drawings for a buiding. Shelf fillers have stock control paperwork to keep on top of.
Bill,
“There is nothing governmental about central banks. A privately run cartel”
Some banks – e.g. the Bank of England are actually directly owned by the government. Others are indeed privately run e.g. the Federal Reserve Bank in the US; I would argue it’s a monopoly rather than a cartel but that’s just nitpicking.
It doesn’t actually matter which is which though, either way these institutions are intrinsically extensions of government. They are in the final analysis simply vehicles for corruption – a way for people in power to steal from the rest of us. They work in the same way foreign aid works.
Foreign aid allows a government to tax its own people, and give or lend the money to a foreign power. In order to get the loan the foreign potentate has to bribe the poilticians in charge of dispensing it. Usually about 10% I understand. Depending on the circumstances prevailing in his own jurisdiction, the foreign potentate then either keeps most of the money if he can get away with it, or spends it on a project to “help the poor” which involves large contracts with companies owned by his cronies and/or cronies of the politicans dispensing the cash. If the aid was in the form of a loan then the taxpayers of the receiving country are on the hook to pay for it.
Central banks work by allowing commercial banks to print money out of thin air. This is used in three ways. Firstly to make outsize profits through crazy leverage whilst creating a bubble. Secondly to prevent non-banks from competing by ensuring that they cannot access leverage on the same terms. Thirdaly to ensure that when the bubble collapses the tax payer pick up the bill. In return for this privilege the bankers who get to print the money bribe the politicians to allow them to keep doing it. And if central banks (or foreign aid) didn’t exist, governments would create them immediately – or run a different scam.
The problem isn’t even really banking per se. It’s power. When anyone wields enormous power then corruption and tyranny follow as night follows day.
“If you look at the prison population demographics you will see that if the areas they originated from had more money spent on them”
I disagree. They would be fine if they just had less money stolen from them. The concept of welfare is a disaster, because it intrinsically accepts a powerful government which redistributes wealth. And that government never does redistribute from the wealthy to the poor. It always flows the other way and there are systemic reasons for this. The math just works that way. A wealthy crook has a huge incentive to bribe a politician to steal a little bit of money from millions and enrich them both. And the millions cannot spend the time to track and fight every crooked scheme, and they get poorer $1 at a time.
And until this is widely understood we are condemned to bounce backward and forward from Tory to Labour. It makes no real difference to most of us which gang is in control – although it makes a big difference to the politicians themselves and their cronies. Why do you think billionaires donate to both parties as so many of them do? It’s so they can keep playing the game no matter who is in power.
David
Anyway here is the agenda of ratcheting down on the population and the divide and impoverish policy continuing:
‘The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, said the delay in announcing help for the self-employed was down to it being “incredibly complicated” finding a way of designing a scheme that would help those in need, while not giving money to people who did not need it.’
Lol. These ‘middleclass’ waged workers with pensions and savings and stuff and the execs and bankers obviosly NEED it and the hand to mouth self employed – yes even these who only work for cash – supposedly don’t need it.
Meanwhile the Government experts have reduced the status of the Virus – ‘As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious diseases (HCID) in the UK.’
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid#status-of-covid-19
And did we all get the same text today?
‘GOV.UK ALERT
CORONAVIRUS
New rules in force now: you must stay at home. More info and exemptions at gov.uk/coronavirus
Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save lives’
Talk of moving goal posts and mixed messages.
‘I’ll also remind us all that today is World Tuberculosis Day.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosis
Now this one really is a pandemic.’ – Posted by a commentator at Off-G.
The tories have no intention of letting this crises achieve anything approaching fairness, quite the opposite it seems to me the rush to pass draconian legislation under cover of this ‘medical emergency’ is leaving us with martial laws being imposed and taken for granted.
1) As well as the elderly, another group who are being hit especially hard by the coronavirus and the response to it are the HOMELESS. There are three reasons for this.
a) Fewer supermarket customers are donating to foodbanks, partly or mainly because of supermarket rationing.
b) City centres are practically deserted, making it hard for those among the homeless who beg, or who sell the Big Issue, to make the income they need to buy nights in hostels, cups of tea, and food.
c) Cafes have shut, and so have many takeaways.
I spoke to a homeless man today who said he had hardly received any money at all all day, because there were so few people about, and that there weren’t any chip shops open where he could buy hot chips.
If you can afford to part with some coins or banknotes, please bear the above in mind if you pass a homeless person who is collecting money. GIVE THEM SOME MONEY.
2) The government is in effect saying “Think you might have the coronavirus? Well don’t call us.”
3) Many bank branches have been shut until future notice. Imagine the FTSE falls another 30%, on top of the 30% it has fallen in the past month. Is everybody satisfied they’ll be able to withdraw their money whenever they want? It’s no good whingeing about the banks. Let’s have a run on them and bring them down.
4) Government propagandists are doing a very effective job turning the population against the population. I have overheard many conversations where people are talking about “idiots” who have been “panic buying”. Those with the foresight to hoard dried food, long-life milk, and, yes, even toilet rolls, are put in the same category as those who according to some are hoarding perishables that they surely don’t have big enough freezers to contain. Meanwhile those who went to pubs (basically machines for spreading bacteria and viruses) having been advised not to but before the pubs shut are being classed with those who “panic buy”, which is equated with a vicious disregard for the needs of nurses. Media consumers are not exactly proving able to ORGANISE THEIR THOUGHTS very well. At the same time as repeating whatever the latest government slogans are, like absolute morons, they also seem to think that most of the REST of the population are, well, morons. A lorry driver who had some interesting information about the buying up of potatoes told me that the virus first appeared close to a Chinese biological research centre (he didn’t say weapons or warfare), but he expressed disbelief that “the Chinese” would “kill their own”. I felt like banging my head against the table. Not only would the Chinese government do that, mate, but so would the British government. That is in Government 101. “Cynicism” about government is paper-thin if it shows no recognition of this. The truth is that they’ll kill you as soon as look at you. “Democracy” is garbage talk. You’re sh*t on their shoes.
5) Note carefully that “panic” and “hysteria” are terms that are antinomic to the “scientific” incense that the government is polluting the atmosphere with.
@N conspiracy theories, as per lorry driver, are un useful, but hardly less so than just about every action taken by any government
One can see why the Chinese gvmt thought they must contain it, and why every other then thought they must follow, the benefits to wargaming martial law were too obvious to pass up, let alone another chance at a juicy capital transfer
But – as this virus is hardly unique, in that it appears neither exceptionally lethal nor unrelated to those which have come before, and so will spring up again in some variant or other with possibly increasingly regularity
And – as it looks unlikely that they can afford another wargame on this scale next year or the year after or anytime soon, nor that any initiatives will be taken to improve health, or control the vectors of transmission
What will they do next time round? Compulsory termination for the over 70’s? Segregation sci fi style? Mass sacrifices? or maybe First strike against the Chinese having built select bunker reserves with vaccine for the élite?
Gerrard, I like your selective gradings of conspiracies. N-‘s conspiracy about the release of the virus from a biological facility was a bridge too far for you, but not the conspiracies that all governments are ready to cull or control the population. Wargaming-eh?
I also like the disinformation
“But – as this virus is hardly unique, in that it appears neither exceptionally lethal nor unrelated to those which have come before, and so will spring up again in some variant or other with possibly increasingly regularity.”
I take it that you have thoroughly studied the genome of this virus and concluded that it was not unique, and have epidemiological data about its lethality and hopefully also the morbidity it causes.
That governments are always and permanently engaged in wargaming the or their public is hardly a conspiracy theory, although it does allow many to find only those for any explanation, more like common knowledge
If you think that anyone knows the definitive truth about this virus I suppose you are mistaken, just as next time one emerges it too will be ‘unknown’ and create, very probably, a corresponding panic and conspiracy theories
Nor do I think that there is or will be a way of preventing such
But what’s your point?
‘We have it under control’? or ‘Let’s take the time to analyse this thoroughly and we will come up with a solution’?
Or……
My point are:
It is unique. It has been sequenced and found not to be the same as other corona viruses but is distinct. It’s closest relatives are bat coronaviruses. It is novel in the sense that it is the first that this virus is known to infect man and there is now human to human transmission.
It is highly infectious. Whereas the flu virus infect ivory rate is about 1:1.3, meaning that one person will infect 1.3 other individuals, but the infectivity of SARS Cov-2 is 2-3 at least twice as infectious. This leads to very fast dissemination of the disease. Although how many people are infected at any one time is not known, it is known that there may be a large number of asymptomatic carriers or some with mild disease as there is as yet no extensive testing. However we do know that there is an exponential rise in cases after lag period and this has been shown in many countries. This sudden number of cases can overwhelm the healthcare system as seen in Italy and Spain unless the transmission is suppressed by various methods as seen in South Korea and China. But to do nothing is not an option.
I have no idea whether it came from a Chinese BW lab. It certainly seems that China is much more capable of BW defence than the US. We also know that people are dropping dead in the street in Iran.
For all the “Imperial College vs Oxford” business, It would be easy to find out what proportion of the population are currently infected. All you have to do is take a random sample. Governments such as the British one, as well as Big Insurance, have almost certainly already done this.
Similarly I imagine they have good figures on what proportion of infectees never develop symptoms and fight it off successfully. Let’s not assume they divulge everything they know from behind Dominic Cummings’s shiny “We love the proles and we love the NHS” lecterns in Number 10.
CULL is the word.
I agree with cull, even if it seems a very expensive way of going about it, they jumped on the half a chance thrown their way
But I do think that inefficiency is built in and that they find it useful to operate within and as cover
More of the same seems inevitable next time around sooner rather than later, do you not think?
What can be done by way to resist or to plan resistance?
Nonsense. There are no figures for asymptomatic or mild cases. Doing selective studies can be misleading. For example 75% of cases in Italy until recently came from Lombardy. London by far has many more cases and even then there are clusters within several areas.
Anyway I know Dominic Cummings has his tentacles in many places but I don’t think he is personally conducting or directing public health epidemiological research.
But just a little back of the envelope calculation: if only 25% of the population get the disease, not the mild form, that is 17 million people. If 20% need hospital admission (Italian and Chinese figures) that is 3.4 million hospital admissions (NHS has 160000 acute beds I think). 5% require treatment in ITU that is 850000 cases. But of course this depends on the time scale but still a huge number
Closing the parks is a disgrace. Exercise and fresh air are both requirements for good health, and socialisation outdoors where you keep 2 metres from other people, which is a small enough distance for you to be able to have a conversation, even a group conversation, is not a problem in respect of the coronavirus.
https://themanc.com/news/full-uk-lockdown-seems-imminent-after-crowds-flocked-to-popular-destinations-this-weekend/
Pretty simple really.
Means test the rich and well off.
They do it with ordinary people if they find themselves having to approach the State for assistance.- why not do it in reverse?
And while we’re at it raise some taxes on the Rich – particularly those companies with their hands out for assistance.
No dividends paid and personal fortunes should be taxed properly.
Small comment on Ross and Carphone Warehouse. If he actually, personally, owned shares in the company, I believe is was legal for him to give them as security for his personal borrowing. The wisdom of the bank accepting them as such i
s a different matter.
The ‚Entnazifizierung Deutschlands’ After World War 2 West Germany had to be ‘entnazifiziert’ – i.e. decontaminated from Nazi indoctrination. This task was taken on by the allied occupation forces. After the Nurnberg trials, a Spruchskammer, a committee was organized to identify who had taken part in establishing the dictatorship. Jurors were selected from commoners who had been removed from office because they had not run with the flow of the party line of the National Socialists.
The problem the committee faced was that more or less the whole of the citizenry had were implicated.
Some could be confirmed as ‚Mitlaufer‘ – opportunists who looked away from the reality before their eyes and instead of acting morally, played safe or actually went further and used the situation to improve their material circumstances or advance their careers. The rest, being the whole population, had to be left.
The question has always arisen since then in numerous books – How in the world did the greater part of the Volk somehow close its eyes to wrongdoing – and in fact join in? Surely, all they were doing was supporting their own families and lifestyles?
After it was all over, why did they not want to understand, or why could they not understand that they had been drawn into evil doing? That they had been cogs in the wheel of a mass murder machine? Could such a question ever be asked of them?
A disturbing fact is that when a person’s survival or livelihood is threatened, as at present, there is a harsh confrontation with reality. Because we have dodged all vital issues, and stayed well camouflaged – especially from our own self-circling reality, when life shows its uglier face we are ill-equipped and can but downward spiral into madness.
Having never bothered to establish a society which scrutinizes facts thoroughly before introducing them into commonly held belief systems which are acted upon, we in our sloth, allow everything concerning the well-being of this planet as a whole entity, to be decided and done for us by those we authorize to govern it and us. And thus we have lost our rights and are ruled over by predators.
We are too lazy to collectively carry the burden of weighing things up, of being always watchful, of insisting on being informed truthfully, of keeping an eye on those we have delegated. We in turn delegate this burden to a profit-based press – instead of insisting on a public-based open information system, safe-guarded by many public watchdogs and guardians and jurors from diverse points of experience worldwide from the common people.
The internet could take on this task.
As it is, in our mass sloth and cowardice, instead of policing the rulers, all we are capable of is policing our neighbours for minor infringements.
In Italy drone surveillance is on the cards. To control people out illegally moving – walking talking to each other. Those who don’t assess the virus as a danger. Apparently they are known of because of cell-phone tracking. Word goes around that harsher measures should be implemented to make sure no one breaks what is in actual fact house arrest, at present voluntary.
In the same way in which the wartime Germans didn’t care to notice that friends and families in their streets disappeared overnight, because they were Making Germany Great Again – Italians (and everybody else) don’t seem overduly bothered about the fact that the first casualty of the ‘state of emergency’ were the courts.
At the very beginning of the scare the tribunals of law were suspended until the 1st of June.
Peope are to this day denied rights of political Assembly.
Should such a thing happen – under any circumstances?
That was the most beautiful and truthful writing I have read explaining the madness we have descended into
Truth, honesty, fairness, honourable mindness? Where?
The Tory-Malthusian “coronavirus advance” needs to be understood. It is not going to be attacked by the Labour party, at least not right now, which is when an attack on it most required. Politicians of major established political parties rarely if ever accuse each other of being totally untrustworthy types who always speak with forked tongues. There’s a key in the word “established”.
The Tories cannot be trusted on the NHS. I repeat : the Tories cannot be trusted on the NHS. This is especially important to grasp, because you only have to see a still photo of one of Boris Johnson’s daily press conferences to know that the Tories are singing their love of the NHS to the whole country. Well, they are LYING. I even read a piece by a guy who is usually quite well-informed who asserted that the Tories supported the creation of the NHS. He is wrong about that. The Tory party in Parliament voted AGAINST the creation of the NHS multiple times. The medics’ union known as the British Medical Association also opposed the creation of the NHS – until, that is, Nye Bevan famously “stuffed their mouths with gold” by letting specialist medics have one foot in the NHS and one foot in the state sector. And THAT is precisely the reason why there are such things as NHS “waiting lists” – because many medics, e.g.surgeons, keep TWO lists: one of patients who are given appointments in a diary in the obvious way, and one of patients who are kept waiting so that a) they don’t get in the way of the servicing of patients on the first list, and b) because they may be prepared to hand over their money, if they have got any to spare, to join the first list. (It used to surprise me that so FEW people in Britain know this, when it should be obvious.)
The whole “we love the NHS” spiel is a complete lot of crap coming from Tory scum, and we should also note that the semi-dictator Dominic Cummings is having an absolute field day with this whole “NHS” shtick. He knows most people in Britain like the NHS, so he praises it and he tells people that if they vote for Brexit or for the Tories they will get the NHS for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day until they feel so sated that they will feel like fainting. His and the Tories’ REAL views are very VERY different from this, and they have a long history that goes back to Thomas Malthus and Francis Dalton. Every time they think of a member of the lower orders getting “free” health treatment who is past retirement age or who for some other reason isn’t really needed as an employee, smoke comes out of their Tory ears. Tory “support” for the NHS must make the Tories piss themselves with laughter when the cameras are switched off.
We see Cummings’s marks on much of the propaganda that is coming out, e.g.
* Clap for medics, clap for nurses, clap for the government which loves those medics and loves those nurses
* Buying four of the same item in your local supermarket is a slap in the face for nurses (Tories used to like to say that coalminers and their families shouldn’t have baths in their homes, because they’d only keep coal in them. At the moment they are probably wondering what the “great unwashed” working class needs so much toilet paper for. “Give them toilet rolls and they’ll only throw them at rugby matches”, maybe? Let them use their hands. Let them eat cake.)
* Sitting around with your friends in the park is probably undermining “our NHS” too? How could you do such a thing, acting as if you’re on “holiday” from work, when those poor nurses are working so hard? Etc.
Then there’s data science. Ah yes, “we’re all data scientists now”, right? I admit I have been following various statistics to do with the coronavirus epidemic. But “data” is being used to befuddle minds and to shield important areas of social facts from your attention, including biological warfare. Whether or not you want to have this or that “conspiracy theory” is not especially the point. That several great powers have sizeable offensive biological warfare capabilities is. That bioweapons were always going to be a major feature of WW3 is too. That they can be said to have an even greater psychological effect than conventional and indeed even nuclear weapons, and for that matter chemical weapons, is as well.
The rulers have far better information about this epidemic than they are letting on. What proportions of people have the antibodies or are currently infected are unlikely to be great mysteries to them.
What the Tory prole-cullers are saying is this:
“either you are with the government and its experts, or you are with the killer virus”.
Do you know what that reminds me of? It reminds me of the way the Italian state played the TERRORISM card during the “years of lead”: “either you are with the state or you are with the terrorists”. When, of course, the state was AT ONE with the terrorists who carried out the most bloody crimes.
The likelihood is that they the authorities will deny people the right to buy food if they haven’t had the “vaccine”.
Perhaps ration cards will have to have “CORONA – 6” printed on them in order to be valid?
Add up the letter values for “CORONA” to work that one out.
Isn’t that the currency of the Czech Republic?
Popped over to have a look at Wings.
1. Craig as I have said previously please do not go getting yourself prosecuted just because some people are egging you on.
2. Terence Callachan just why do you keep getting so many things wrong.
Passing up the offer to buy ventilators immediately through the EU, and then placing an order with the billionaire Dyson (a sleazy Brexiter who moved his company out of Britain after realising what would happen to it in Brexit Britain) which won’t be fulfilled until 1000s more have died in a massively underfunded NHS care system, shows once again what Tory priorities are.
What I find really amazing is the way in which a crisis can be used to manipulate public opinion so easily, and to dupe people into blindly following a government that just couldn’t care less about them. It happens over and again.
If you want to be a real patriot, instead of the world’s biggest donkey, you will criticise a government that behaves so immorally, not get behind it simply because you have some fuzzy feeling that this is what you need to do ‘at this time’. And there are other ways of being a patriot – community organising and aid relief, for instance – than becoming a softy on the criminal negligence that the Tories embody so well.
Now that Boris has tested positive, if indeed that is even true, I suspect we will see the government’s crimes and criminal handling of this crisis held to account even less in the MSM.
My sympathies lie with all those who have suffered so badly in Britain, not with Number 10.
Meanwhile, Israel seems to be weaponising the impact of the virus in its quarters, which could lead to a genocide in Gaza, and the US is seeking to undermine the international efforts of a Cuban medical teams. Do the two most evil administrations in the world have nothing better to do while everything is going to hell?
Marmite
Succintly put
Aww poor boris…he’s got a cold
When i pointed out to two friends over their protect memes that it would have served the nhs better if they had such memes when the tories stole nearly 12500 beds in 10 1/2 years……i was told not to politicise the virus. That’s the level of disconnect here.
People who ask you not to politicise things either have their heads in the sand, or are being obfuscatory. Everything is already political. The request to not politicise something is essentially just a defense of establishment politics, which in Tory Britain result in some of the nastiest things since the dark ages, like children going without food, prioritising arms trade over health, migrants being stigmatised and scapegoated and abused. The list goes on and on.
To see WHERE money REALLY comes from – the 2min52 YouTube video ”Why Do Banks Make So Much Money?” and others by Positive Money [UK] Plus the 19.08 ”Banks Get $1.5 Trillion Bailout Over Coronavirus,” by The Jimmy Dore Show {now $4 Trillion)
Craig. I am just glad you are there my friend and I am sure your diligence will be rewarded.
Many people will be saddened to learn that our commanding officer – Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson – has tested positive for Covid-19 – and doubtless they will join together in prayer for his speedy recovery. I dare say there will be those who are secretly delighted the cunt has got it and are fervently hoping it does for him.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52060791