Categories
Opinion

The lockdown left is no friend of the working class – Spiked

It is now the left that wants working people to be decommissioned, put out to pasture, languishing on state-paid wages or Universal Credit and uncertain of whether their job will even exist once the lockdown is finally lifted. And it’s the Tories saying: ‘Erm, don’t you think it would be better if working people worked?’

Of course, the left’s justification for its new policy of preventing the working classes from working is that they might catch Covid-19 and die. They’re ramping up the culture of fear in a desperate effort to present their bizarre, historically unprecedented anti-work outlook as a good, noble thing. Actual facts – like the fact that under-40s have made up just 0.75 per cent of deaths from Covid – don’t get so much as a look-in. No, keep all workers at home, even the fit, healthy young ones.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/13/the-lockdown-left-is-no-friend-of-the-working-class/

Categories
News Opinion

The Grand Delusion: Bail-out billions shield us from the reality – our economy is in tatters – Dr. John Lee, Daily Mail

  • Just 11 people under the age of 20 have succumbed to Covid-19.
  • Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College has a dismal record as a forecaster.
  • There’s the possibility that the lockdown has actually made the virus more deadly.
  • Bank of England warned that if the lockdown is extended until June the economy could shrink by 14 per cent this year.
  • More than one-in-five adults now furloughed on 80per cent of their wages.
  • A fifth of the working-age population could be jobless and the quality of people’s mental and physical health would plummet.
  • Every day, about 1,700 people die in Britain. Only five years ago, in the winter of 2014/15, more than 28,000 people died from seasonal flu, not far off the current coronavirus death toll of just over 30,000.
  • Direct evidence to support the two-metre rule is weak, and based almost entirely on modelling rather than real life.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8302055/Bail-billions-anaesthetise-reality-economy-tatters.html

Categories
News

Coronavirus: 2million have now claimed benefits in UK since outbreak took hold – The Mirror

An astonishing 1.8million have claimed Universal Credit, 250,000 claimed jobseekers’ allowance and 20,000 claimed Employment and Support Allowance between March 16 and the end of April.

Even now UC claims are still running at around 25,000 a day – double the usual rate, MPs heard.

The new figures suggest around 5million people may now be on Universal Credit in the UK – many of them in work on low incomes.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/breaking-coronavirus-2million-now-claimed-21972159

Categories
News Videos

Businessman Luke Johnson: Coronavirus lockdown is “Project Fear Mark 2… Enough is enough” – talkRADIO

Categories
News Opinion

The importance of courage – Spiked

Science is not a good guide for society. Of course science is essential to our understanding of the world and to the creation of the new insights, technologies and treatments our societies need. But it cannot tell us what is best for our societies in political, moral or economic terms…

If it is true that Boris put the country into lockdown partly in response to media pressure, then the media themselves may have a lot of questions to answer about the damage currently being done by this unprecedented freeze on working life and the economy.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/04/24/the-importance-of-courage/

Categories
News

Unprecedented collapse of Eurozone economy amid virus lockdown – IHS Markit

The eurozone economy suffered the steepest falls in business activity and employment ever recorded during April as a result of measures taken to contain the COVID-19 outbreak, according to provisional PMI® survey data. The month as saw unprecedented damage to the eurozone economy from lockdown measures coupled with slumping global demand and shortages of both staff and inputs.

https://ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/unprecedented-collapse-of-eurozone-economy-amid-virus-lockdown-apr20.html

Categories
News

Lockdowns Don’t Work – The Witherspoon Institute

Many policies provide public-health benefits in pandemics, such as making facemasks mandatory, cancelling school, and banning large assemblies and long-distance travel. But ordering people to cower in their homes, harassing people for having playdates in the park, and ordering small businesses to close regardless of their hygienic procedures has no demonstrated effectiveness.

Categories
News Opinion

Coronavirus Lockdown and What You Are Not Being Told Part 2 – Off-Guardian