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Edwin Hayward 🦄 🗡 Profile picture
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8 Feb, 6 tweets, 2 min read
"Hancock has also announced today that the government has secured 20m lateral flow tests from a contract with the Derby-based manufacturer SureScreen Diagnostics."

Is there a Tory connection? Would be weird if there wasn't, right? 🧐 theguardian.com/world/live/202…
Here's something interesting: the check is supposedly cheap and accurate, and the company offered it to the Government in March 2020, only to be ignored. So they sold it overseas instead.
thelondoneconomic.com/news/science/c…
Meanwhile, the Tories have forked out over £1 billion on dodgy lateral flow tests with poor reliability, with the money going to foreign firms...
huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/lateral-…
And here's an article that references Surescreen's test being used in Australia in May 2020...
spectator.co.uk/article/my-pos…
And here's Matt Hancock earlier today, celebrating coming nearly a year late to the procurement process.

(He doesn't put it that way, of course!)
To sum up...

Here's a firm that has a product that's cheaper, better and produced locally, but because they didn't suck up to the right Tories they got sidelined for 11 months while others had cash firehosed at them.

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Edwin Hayward 🦄 🗡 Profile picture
9 Feb
Matt Hancock has said...

"People who need hotel quarantine will need to pay £1,750 per individual for the hotel, transport and testing."

Talk about platinum-plating. There's platinum layered on gold layered on silver on that pricing!
theguardian.com/politics/live/…
Normally, when you bulk-buy, you'd expect a discount.

Yet the Tories have managed to block book thousands of hotel rooms in hotels that would otherwise have been empty, and yet still managed to end up paying over the top rates for them.
To put the price into context, 10 nights at the Novotel (one of the closest hotels to Heathrow) starting tonight would cost you £632. The Ibis would be £440, or the Radisson £639.

You'd have to add lunches and dinners, but you would die of caviar overload before hitting £1,750.
Read 4 tweets
Edwin Hayward 🦄 🗡 Profile picture
9 Feb
The dirty secret of Brexit? It hurts less the bigger you are.

If you're a large firm, you can amortise the cost of engaging extra staff to do paperwork.

You also face the same red tape as a small company - but instead of writing "20 widgets" on forms you write "2000 widgets".
Beyond a certain size, you can afford to engage dedicated hauliers, and that means your shipments will not get held up by problems with consignments carried on behalf of other firms.

If you need to register chemicals, again you're amortising a fixed cost across higher volumes.
And so on, and so forth.

Beyond a certain size, and assuming your products don't fall foul of Rules of Origin issues, Brexit really is just a rounding error...

until it's not.

Why? Tragedy of the commons. Everyone shares ports. If they get totally blocked, you're stuck too.
Read 5 tweets
Edwin Hayward 🦄 🗡 Profile picture
9 Feb
Every time one or other industry encounters Brexit barriers, representatives call for their elimination.

But there's still little or no recognition of why the barriers exist: because we chose to leave the Single Market & Customs Union.

We did that to ourselves. Not the EU. Us.
It's like being in a car careering down a steep hill and screaming "stop!" without acknowledging that it's only in motion because we deliberately took the footbrake and handbrake off.

We could have left the brakes on. We didn't. So we don't get to blame the hill, or gravity.
We can't fix the Brexit deal without modifying it. Not merely interpretation.

We can't modify the Brexit deal without winding our stiff necks in and accepting things we rejected so far. Our red lines must change.

(And all changes must be negotiated with the EU and signed off.)
Read 5 tweets
Edwin Hayward 🦄 🗡 Profile picture
5 Feb
What a ridiculously irresponsible article!

Yes, a single dose of vaccine undeniably provides *some* protection.

But there's no way that single dose represents "mission accomplished" when it comes to the vaccination programme - people *need* their second dose too.
Problem is, the more that high-profile articles such as this one take the Government propaganda position that "one jab = vaccinated", the less pressure there will be to deliver the second dose on schedule.

To repeat: one dose IS better than nothing. Definitely. But not the end.
And the snag is, a lot of the good work of the vaccine could be undone if people relax too far too fast - which is always the danger when they're faced with articles like this.

We need realism rather than optimism at this point. We've had far too many instances of the latter.
Read 4 tweets
Edwin Hayward 🦄 🗡 Profile picture
4 Feb
Has anyone come across this weird situation?

Our road has two names. But only one appears on Google Maps.

All houses on one side officially have one address. All houses on the other officially have a different address.

Delivery firms keep getting confused, Deliveroo too.
Net effect: anyone relying on GM/Android for directions can't find the houses on Road A side of our road.

(It's a silly situation brought about by a bad decision made by the original developers. But it's too well established and affects too many addresses to change naming now.)
Two questions, really...

1. Has anyone seen examples of Google Maps labelling a road with two different names, or is that impossible?

2. Any suggestions as to how to get a HUMAN inside Google to look at this? Their "suggest changes" function on Google Maps is very limited.
Read 4 tweets
Edwin Hayward 🦄 🗡 Profile picture
2 Feb
Occasionally, the Express has something useful to say about Brexit (even if it puts massive spin on it)...

Here's a key story that hasn't gained attention anywhere else: the UK Government have made over 100,000 changes to imported EU laws.

express.co.uk/news/politics/…
That will presumably have been done, in most cases, without Parliament's knowledge or consent, because the "transcription" mechanism only requires oversight if the changes are deemed significant.

But that's how-long-is-a-piece-of-string territory.
As well as burying all sorts of nasty changes waiting to trip people up (a few examples in the article) this opaque and secretive process makes it harder to unpick the effects of Brexit, because nobody in the world will have any idea of what all those 100,000 changes are.
Read 5 tweets

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