Compulsory house arrest for the 70+group risks causing secondary physical and mental health problems for otherwise healthy individuals

Compulsory house arrest for the 70+group risks causing secondary physical and mental health problems for otherwise healthy individuals

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community links. You can’t just issue a 4-month quarantine order to them without explaining how they’re supposed to spend their time/get fresh air/physical and mental exercise. This risks secondary physical and mental health issues from an otherwise healthy population. Am not — Jane Merrick (@janemerrick23) March 15, 2020 becoming inadvertent spreaders? We – political class, media, society – largely don’t pay attention to social care because it’s been in the “too difficult box” for decades. Now the fragile system is…

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Betfair voids its London Mayoral 2020 market following the election’s deferral until next year

Betfair voids its London Mayoral 2020 market following the election’s deferral until next year

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If you have placed any Betfair bets on its London mayoral election market then I suggest you log into your account and check your account balance. For it appears that the betting exchange has voided the 2020 London election market following the decision to defer the vote until May 2021. Sometimes when a market is voided it can be unfortunate for punters who have had the foresight to back someone early on and then to see their choice rise and…

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A British Gift – the ECHR

A British Gift – the ECHR

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What is it about the European Convention on Human Rights which so riles some on the right (and, if reports are to be believed, the PM’s closest advisor)? It cannot surely be its name. Can it? A belief that it is a Brussels creation imposed on a reluctant Britain? Some may think this but politicians should know better. Even the PM said – (in 2016 so he may now have changed his mind) – “Keep the European Convention, it’s a…

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Swing for the moment. How the country shifted at GE2019

Swing for the moment. How the country shifted at GE2019

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The Conservatives won the 2019 election decisively.  Received wisdom has it that it was won by demolishing a red wall in the north of England.  Let’s take a look at how each constituency swung, seat by seat. Before the election, I posed some questions.  One of them was whether seats would continue to sort by Leave/Remain or whether they would now swing more uniformly.  It turns out that the answer is a bit more complicated than either of those answers….

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Trump’s inadequate response to Covid-19 will doom his presidency

Trump’s inadequate response to Covid-19 will doom his presidency

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All the options are bad and Trump is running scared of them In some ways the world is very fortunate. It may not feel like it at the moment, never mind in a few months or – if we’re lucky – weeks, but pandemics are an inevitable if rare occurrence of nature and the best we can do is ride out the storm with good judgement and timely action. There is probably no other country on Earth that was as…

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This year’s local elections, including Sadiq Khan’s defence of London mayoralty, put back for a year

This year’s local elections, including Sadiq Khan’s defence of London mayoralty, put back for a year

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In a move that was probably inevitable Number 10 has announced this afternoon that the English local elections won’t be taking place in May and have been put back till next year. The last time that elections had to be deferred was in 2001 when there was the Foot and Mouth outbreak. Then the deferral was for a month and included the 2001 general election that saw Tony Blair’s win with a second landslide and a turnout of less than…

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Trump’s Republicans move drop below a 50% betting chance for WH2020

Trump’s Republicans move drop below a 50% betting chance for WH2020

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This looks as though it was driven Trump’s initial reaction to the coronavirus There’s little doubt that Donald Trump is not having a good coronavirus crisis. His initial dismissal of this this being not much more than a commons cold hardly said a lot for his judgement in the early days. He wasn’t helped by several of his right-wing backers declaring that that this had been got up by the Democrats to wound Trump ahead of November’s election. After a…

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The UK’s big Coronavirus gamble – not taking measures now that other nations have in place

The UK’s big Coronavirus gamble – not taking measures now that other nations have in place

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Chart from my live on #Newsnight just now. Right or wrong, there’s no doubt the UK is increasingly an outlier in our Covid response. pic.twitter.com/ZczXx8M48c — Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) March 12, 2020 Unlike many other similar countries there is little doubt that the measures that that have not been put in place here make the UK very much of an outlier. The objective, as is repeated time and time again, is to change the virus timetable so that the peak…

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