And not a mention on Marr of mass school union action
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:
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 Teachers and NASUWT are taking legal action against the government because schools are unsafe. Such is the state of the BBC.
Meanwhile, approaching 200,000 education staff have signed the NEU’s petition to protect communities by making schools safe, in only around eighteen hours.
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Clive James once described Michael Foot as: ‘A man completely mastered by the English language.’
He had the wrong fellah . . .
I fucking hate people who talk in contrived witticisms like Clive James constantly did.
Dead now I believe.
There’s a woman called Kathy Lette I’ve occasionally seen on TV who’s even worse. She sounds Australian too.
Not that I’m saying all Australian intellectuals are a joke – those are the only two I’ve seen.
If Jordan Peterson was Australian I’d call it a pattern…
Quite like contrived witticisms myself.
He’s ‘aving a go at contrived witticisms now.
Get the state of the prick, with the tousled scruffy hair, as a sort of: ‘Please don’t pick on me, I’m just a jovial (he thinks so anyway) scruffy meff who doesn’t get time for personal grooming’ excuse cum plea.
Doesn’t fool me anyway. Nor do people convince me when they say: ‘Ah, but he has to be clever to play the idiot like he does’.
Errrmmm. No…He doesn’t. Not a bit of it.
He doesn’t ‘play the idiot’ , because he IS an actual, real, live idiot. Or at the very, VERY least a grossly incompetent, gormless slob who can’t even be arsed to comb his own hair.
…At least rees-smog gets nanny to make him look halfways respectable (If looking like a parody of a children’s comic strip character is respectable, but you get the drift)
From his buying the water cannon to today’s at least once daily balls-up, he’s bollocksed just about EVERYTHING he’s gone near, and ended up costing the nation more to put things right than if he’d done nothing at all.
Well once you’re dead things don’t get put right. And he’s seen off 70-odd thousand at least…AND COUNTING.
He is criminally incompetent and unforgiveably imbecilic. The eugenicist’s useful hypocrisy…
He did personally beat this dread, disease. He’s probably suffering from the new spike, virus or something. Have pity on Bunter.
I very much doubt he ever had it. He’s a compulsive, self-serving liar, remember.
No pity for him!
Johnson might have had it. Then again he might not. We will never know because as Timfrom says, he a compulsive self serving liar.
Regarding pity, save yours for those who unlike Johnson do not live in affluent circumstances, who haven’t had a decent meal today, who are facing homelessness in the future, who have lost their minimum wage jobs which just about kept the wolf from the door and who if they become sick with Covid are unlikely to survive because their bodies are already weakened by malnutrition, stress and overwork.
So much for BBC News….ITs always been a voice of the establishment,but now it’s very existence relys on neo liberal propoganda.I had a laugh today watching a report on threats to liberty and freedom in Asia especially SEast asia,were the covid virus was being used to suppress ordinary citizens.The hypocrisy of the establishment BBC lecturing to Asia when a insane tyrant like Johnson and collaborators to the jack boot Conservative and unionist party regime like the BBC is mindblowing…What a farce the non existent government is.! No country is perfect and we have problems here in Asia but freedom we have here as compared to the UK as made my return to Europe a difficult decision and one for now I don’t want to make even with my property rotting away empty and abandoned .
“Tyrant like Johnson” – what’s most depressing is that dictatorship by consent only requires a supine media.
Not informed consent obviously, but media propaganda has proven itself to be the perfect weapon.
It genuinely surprises and disappoints me that there’s no support, even on an activist site like Skwawkbox, for a proposal to enforce honesty on the mass media.
What makes you say that? I’d be extremely surprised if there wasn’t. It’s just that nobody’s actually asked.
The first party that puts it in their manifesto gets my vote!
I’ve proposed it here many times. On Twitter too. I’ve even submitted it to Labour’s website when I was a member.
Announcing Labour’s intention, when next in government, to legislate retroactively to jail in the future those proven in Court to have subverted and cheated democracy in the past – would definitely set the cat among those fat Tory pigeons.
How many more stories like this is there?
‘In her final moments, Maria took her oxygen mask off to say goodbye to Anabel and her sister Susana, who was allowed on the ward in PPE.
Maria, of Whitwick, Leics, was the last of her family to fall ill after Anabel’s 12-year-old son Isaac contracted Covid following the return to school in September.’
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/harrowing-final-photo-covid-stricken-23253257?utm_source=mirror_newsletter&utm_campaign=morning_newsletter2&utm_medium=email
Anne Longfield, Children’s Commissioner for England, said schools should be the last to close and first to open.
“I hope, for children and parents’ sake, that is measured in days not weeks and I would be particularly keen for primaries to stay open if at all possible,” she said.
Well said Darlene Edmonds…These are real lives and familys in despair.We could have saved thousands more ,but the public put their trust in a renowned liar and public schoolboys government,and the Labour party elected a knight to represent ordinary people.IT doesn’t take a genius to understand why the people are dying in fear and desperation does it.
Yep, the UK covid19 tragedy just keeps building – and to think that we had a clutch of (now strangely quiet on this topic) Covid19 deniers posting incessantly on here for many months too – helping out in their little ways to build the then still very widespread , toxic, belief amongst the UK public that the pandemic was either some sort of malign government hoax , or ‘much exaggerated’ . I think we all recall the regular claim by so many of our Skwawkbox denier trollers that Sweden had the right idea – with its ‘hands off , laisse faire approach to covid19 , An approach the Swedes are now bitterly regretting. This Guardian article explains the cynical ‘let em die while we make profit’ neoliberal capitalist propaganda/think tank forces behind the spreading of the ‘Sweden’ myth. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/03/swedish-model-failed-covid-19
And now we have a propaganda offensive by the Tory press to persuade us that, contrary to the manufacturer, Pfizer’s, research and clearly stated advice, its two stage vaccine can be effective as either a single dose, or widely time separated, Or, even paired with the, very different, ‘Oxford/Astra Zenica vaccine ! We have truly entered an era in the UK in which which all scientific analysis has been subordinated to the short-sighted gimmicks of a government run by incompetent spivs and conmen, and the BBC and Tory MSM simply serving as propaganda outlets for their madness.
Fully agree. And the new variant has ironically come to the rescue of an incompetent failed Tory government that had already lost the plot and control because of its incompetent populist (and always slow) decision making. For Johnson & co the new variant is a godsend, a definite silver lining to the pandemic cloud. It helps them to plough on with the tired old furrow that everything that’s happening is ‘unpredictable,’ when all the scientists, me, my fifteen year old, the dog and the budgie have all been predicting things pretty well so far. Then we get politician of the year Gavin Williamson appearing through the fog and mustard gas like a lost soldier on the Somme to say ‘nobody wants confusion and last minute decisions.’ Does that mean anything? It’s a bit like saying nobody wants to die in a car crash or slip on the ice and break their hip. (Whilst the BBC interviewer nods appreciatively, not to say sympathetically, not to say collusively . . .)
Fuck you Trot troll scum bad penney. The others had the good sense to fuck this site off, so you’re stuck with me, Doug & lundiel. Eat shit. Regards.
Union have been powerless for a long time, thanks to the neo-liberal of both the Tories and New Labour.
Bunter at one point said he was “fully reconciled” to the (future) need for stricter measures.
What would trigger stricter measures? A further rise in the number of deaths, presumably – what else?
The only possible conclusion is that he sees the present number of deaths as a small price to pay to hide his weakness in refusing to reverse a clearly stupid policy.
If he’d been PM a few years ago there’d be weekly shipwrecks on the half-built English Channel and Irish Sea bridges by now.
The far lesser degree of incompetence of a captain failing to avoid a bridge pier in a shipping lane in a storm would probably see him jailed.
There’s something seriously wrong with a democracy that doesn’t jail a mass-murdering government.
By now he knows he doesn’t really need a reason based in reality to introduce stricter measures. Being an autocrat, he can conjure up any old bullshit out of thin air and, being now in late-stage Stockholm Syndrome, the public will buy it.
The polls ain’t lying.
The evidence is available from the March 2020 lockdown. In March the schools were only open for key worker children. Lower pupil numbers meant measures could be put in place to keep everyone as safe as possible. The years of austerity before the pandemic left the schools short staffed and lacking in space to bring in such measures for all children. Labour should have been working with the teaching unions since the start of the pandemic to find possible solutions to enable safe tutoring of all children. The opposition should in turn be campaigning alongside the unions to get solutions implemented.
Johnson fails to understand any issues facing schools.
It was clear very early on that a mix of remote learning and face to face learning is required until the pandemic is brought under control. Until sufficient numbers are vaccinated the children need free access to broadband and their parents need affordable electricity. In addition teachers need the tools and resources to assist.
Bojo word salad.
The virus has evolved precisely BECAUSE the schools have been open whilst everyone else was locked down . The Government applied a selective evolutionary pressure which has actually CAUSED the variant Covid to spread by infecting school-aged children asymptomatically. It does not matter whether we agree or disagree – the virus has its own agenda & it appears to understand its business a lot better than the Government does.