Being stuck in our homes for most of the day the Thursday evening clapping in the streets for the NHS comes as something of a relief. It is just nice to get out of the house and also to exchange a few words with neighbours. Where I live this has become even more of an occasion because at one of the houses someone sets of the series of fireworks timed at exactly 8pm. Mike Smithson
Nancy Pelosi has made public a letter she’s sent to her Congress colleagues in which she charged Trump with missteps in handling the coronavirus pandemic that “caused unnecessary death and economic disaster” in the US. That’s a big accusation given how close we are to WH2020. In detail the Pelosi letter said: The truth is that in January Donald Trump was warned about this pandemic, ignored those warnings, took insufficient action and caused unnecessary death and economic disaster. The truth…
The death toll continues to mount. To date, at least, the government is having a spectacularly good pandemic, in political terms. Its popularity has hit heights only seen in the heyday of the first Labour government under Tony Blair. The Prime Minister has emerged from his harrowing illness to widespread genuine public affection. This government is having its honeymoon in a plague pit. In one sense, this is very normal. Governments from Ireland to Italy have seen their poll ratings improve sharply as their…
One of the great things to come out of the lock down has been that many are becoming accomplished at using the excellent and easy to use video conferencing platform Zoom. It is so nice being able to have conversations with groups of friends who you can’t meet face to face at the moment. I’m doing at least one a day and it just adds to the feeling that you are not cut off. Anyway – have a good night…
A lot of questions have been raised about the daily death toll data that has been issued. A problem has been that it only included those who died in hospital. The above table, based on day of death data, certainly points to the peak being reached a week ago. If that is the case then just perhaps we might have an indication that the corner has been turned which would be a major milestone. This is one that we should…
The cost of fighting the coronavirus It has always been the case since the the scale of the crisis became clear that making saving lives the priority was going to come at a huge economic cost. The OBR report yesterday with all its projections starts to quantify the challenge ahead and in the meantime the new Chancellor has to find a way of balancing what appears to be the irreconcilable. Sunak starts with a lot of goodwill on his side…
So the lockdown conitnues and looks set to be with us in the UK for at least another three weeks. What is quite remarkable is how well the public, that is all of us, are putting up with it. In fact the polling shows that people in the UK give more backing to the lockdown than in similar countries where the same measure has been put in place. The other big development is the sheer scale of what has been…
Unlike in the UK where for less importance is attached to leader ratings the approval numbers for an incumbent US president are generally seen as a good indicator of how the next election is going to shape out. YouGov, which is now very well established in the US, just put out its latest chart showing the trend since just after Trump became president in early 2017 till the present day. What can be seen is that he has had much…