Johnson starts on a foolish note, promising an ‘irreversible’ route out of lockdown. It’s something he simply cannot know.
All the evidence shows schools are safe’. All the evidence does not show this. If it did, scientists would be in unanimous agreement. Why not, for once, just be honest and admit it’s a risk and some experts disagree with it?
Unnecessary cheap shot there, saying some people would like to ‘stay in the slow lane’. Some people just want to stay safe.
Sobering and jarring to talk about imminent unlocking and then be reminded we’re still at the hospitalisation rate of the April peak
It just all feels like vintage Johnson. I hope this time is different. But they called last 4 July Super Saturday and Independence Day
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How many people are prepared to admit that New Year’s Eve is their worst night of the year and that they are genuinely excited to be spending it at home alone
NYE is terrible. One year I had a standup row on the stroke of midnight. Another year (30) I had to supervise a party my flatmate (22) had thrown without telling me. Then there was the year I woke up at 5.30am in someone’s flat, having passed out at 11.50 in a different flat.
Mostly it’s just a terrible anticlimax punctuated by too much alcohol and a rendition of Auld Lang Syne where no-one knows the words.
Von der Leyen starts speaking French and the British political establishment grinds to a standstill
Ooh, she’s returned to English and delivered this particular zinger: ‘we need to consider what sovereignty actually means in the 21st century: pulling each other up’. Fucking touché, as I think they say in French
You just know she’s speaking for us better than our own prime minister ever could
He just couldn’t resist a nationalist flourish boasting about how the UK is best placed in the world to identify new viruses. He simply can’t abandon the jingoism for a moment
Does anyone know the lyrics to ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’
The Christmas row highlights a key problem that we have never really discussed: what should be firm guidance and what should be law.
The government relaxed the rules around Christmas because it knew people would break them and it didn’t want to criminalise vast swathes of the population - partly because (you presume) it would embolden people to break more rules, more often, afterwards.
But this is exactly what it’s been doing since the start of the pandemic: criminalising people for gathering in gardens, criminalising them for having sex, criminalising them for chatting to another group in a park.
Very few people in Britain know about Western Sahara but its refugee camps are the second-longest operating in the world (after the Palestinian ones) and the frozen conflict is always at risk of unfreezing. This is a major provocation and completely unacceptable.
No country in the world has formally accepted Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara. The UN lists it as a non-self-governing territory and has been waiting to implement a referendum there since 1988. This decision cannot, must not, stand.