What a funny old month July was. There was plenty of ‘potential’ opportunities to celebrate a wonderful month……but it all fell a little short and disappointed.
We came so close in the football……but those street wise Italians just teased us into thinking it was coming home. To be honest though, I’m just not sure we should be entering these footie tournaments ….it just doesn’t bring out the best in people.
More players than not are simply cheating to win. And when that fails, they have a bloody good spit and a decent swear at the ref. Supporters can’t have a pre-match beer without putting firecrackers up their……(you know where I mean……you’ve seen the pictures), breaking into the stadium and beating each other up. If we can’t watch a teenage kid miss one shot without turning to racist abuse, then clearly we need the FA to do the one thing that can stop this awful chain of events……simply don’t enter in the first place. Nobody says we have to. There’s no law that forces us to take part in these competitions. Nobody is complaining that the Vatican City football team doesn’t enter and they have won the Euros as many times as England.
And don’t get me start on Formular One (or F1 for the nerds). A tiny gust of wind at turn four can determine the outcome of a grand prix. We were told the other day that Mercedes had failed to win because there had been a light shower an hour or so before the race began. I’m sorry but it can hardly be classified as a sport if the winner is determined by a weather event that happened before everyone set off. Hamilton won but nobody seemed to celebrate given that he caused a brutal crash on lap 1, presumably because his car wasn’t set up for the correct weather. It’s difficult to celebrate that to be fair.
Then there was this year’s Tour de France. Hilarious. It’s impossible to work out what’s going on. You have a leader who’s hurtling towards the line, and then all of a sudden, he gives up and everyone swarms past in a jumble of sinew and socialism until eventually they all crash into one another and fall off. Behind the endless accidents you now have tactics that mean it’s no longer a sport in which a group of men pedal as fast as possible over a very great distance to see which one is the best. Instead, you have mathematicians in dark rooms deciding who should be in the lead at any given moment, how fast they should be going, what isotonic drink they should be drinking and in what order they should ride when the wind blows from the East. Anyway, the British mathematician wasn’t quite as good as the UAE mathematician, so Team UAE won. Terrific.
Andy Murray offered hope of celebration in Wimbledon as the BBC informed us every 10 minutes. What is it with people dressed in white, wiping their hands on a towel every 20 seconds and then sitting down. I just don’t get it. These guys and girls are at the peak of physical fitness, but after serving one ball in 13C they somehow develop such sweaty palms that they must stroll to the back of the court and stand there for a few moments to wipe away the rivers of perspiration. Then, after several minutes of doing this, they amble to a comfy chair at the side of the court where they chew idly on 4 grams of protein bar. Then it’s back to the hand-wiping, and so on, until one of them falls over and the other is declared the winner. My goodness it’s dreary, especially when Team Murray is knocked out early doors by a random we’ve never heard of.
At least Judy Murray had much to celebrate……winning the WTA Mother award for nurturing tennis players. Seriously! I’ve never heard of this award. Wouldn’t she just win it every year? Who the hell won it in 2016? I’m certainly not celebrating this.
The sport of politics had cause to celebrate though. When Rishi and BoJo were ‘pinged’ to self-isolate, the Government set about establishing a random pilot study that BoJo and Rishi were chosen randomly which allowed them to avoid self-isolation. Amazing……just how lucky was that! This had to be a personal best in setting up such an experimental study in such short time. World leading British science at its best.
Labour also achieved a personal best in getting Rishi and BoJo to U-turn in under 2 hours and isolate like the rest of the great unwashed. A quite remarkable performance by Labour.
Imagine living in a time when the leaders of this country have to be shamed into doing the right thing. Imagine that!
The Numbers
BoJo celebrated reaching 2 years as PM (whilst isolating in Chequers). Plenty of time to reflect on a tumultuous 2 years even by the standards of his rollercoaster life. A 2nd divorce, a 3rd marriage, the arrival of child 6 (with number 7 enroute), 3 national lockdowns and 57 coronavirus news conferences. That's after a Brexit war of attrition in his first year in which he shut down parliament illegally, kicked out 21 rebel Conservative MPs and won the Tories' biggest election victory since Thatcher with an "oven-ready" deal on Brexit that yielded an 80 seat majority. Even by BoJo’s standards, that is quite a set of numbers.
Elsewhere……
Furlough reached a new low with just 5% of workers on the scheme (1.3 million), considerably smaller than last summer’s peak of 33%.
The increase in the employment rate has increased consumer confidence, edging above pre-Covid levels for the first time. The GFK consumer confidence barometer (I know, I need to get out more) has delivered a main reading of -7 for July, up from -9 in June and a two-point improvement on the score in March 2020.
This has led to the UK’s economy growing at the fastest pace in 80 years and is expected to recover to pre-pandemic levels by the end of this year. The economy is now expected to grow by 7.6% this year (the fastest rate since 1941) and higher than the 6.8% predicted in April. It is the second consecutive upgrade to this year’s economic prospects and means that the UK is forecast to recover from the coronavirus crisis almost 3 years earlier than had been feared last summer.
The speed bump to be wary of is the number of people self-isolating and a rise in Covid-19 infection rates, which could create a slowdown in the UK’s economic recovery. As many as 1 million people a week were asked to self-isolate during July meaning that businesses are grappling with absent staff on top of raw material shortages and disruption to supply chains.
Nissan announced great news for the North East, with a major expansion of electric vehicle production at its car plant in Sunderland. A £1 billion investment will support 4,500 of jobs across the supply chain.
US recovery has also accelerated as the economy has grown by 6.4%. America’s recovery is accelerating at a rapid rate with Joe B saying that the world’s largest economy is “ready for take-off”, initiating what is widely forecast to be the US economy’s best year in almost 4 decades.
July also saw my biggest double-take moment in a long time. A reminder that we know even less about what’s going on than we thought. It came from the European Union settlement scheme, under which EU migrants can apply to remain in the UK permanently. During the Brexit negotiations, the plight of the 3 million EU citizens in the UK was front page news. When the deadline closed this month, 5.2 million of those 3 million had been granted the right to stay and another 500,000 were being processed.
That’s right. It turns out there are 2.7 million more non-Irish EU migrants in the UK than was thought during the referendum and 2.2 million more than the Office for National Statistics’ estimate last year. Measurement matters. Policy is guided by data. I’m still shaking my head at this one.
According to Greenpeace, 2 billion disposable plastic masks have ended up in our oceans since the pandemic began. 53 million masks are thrown away each day in the UK.
510 days of working from home……and counting.
Trump of the Month
I’m not messing about this month. Nobody came anywhere near close to BoJo’s level of lunacy and he is a very worthy winner of the Trump of the Month.
I didn’t think I would ever see a worse piece of political messaging than “Eat Out To Help Out”. But “Freedom Day” might have just topped it.
We have been advised by BoJo that “personal responsibility” is to be the maxim of the next phase of the coronavirus pandemic and that we must “exercise judgment”.
How, though? Take your guy in the supermarket with his mask on his chin. You know the one. Might have a medical exemption but probably doesn’t, on account of the way he looks like a weightlifter. At present he is definitely doing the wrong thing……BoJo confirms as much. But is he “exercising judgment” and based on what?
Is the Government trusting him, say, to have pondered the latest study published in The Lancet on airborne transmission (Greenhalgh, Jimenez, Prather et al), while bearing in mind the inconclusive nature of the 2020 Danish DANMASK-19 study into the efficacy of masks at protecting the wearer, while also weighing up the latest, promising, if not yet peer-reviewed paper from Public Health England (PHE), “Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against hospital admission with the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant”? Is this what he should have done, before leaving the house and breathing all over the royal galas?
This is not a flippant question……it is a deadly serious one. Nor, by the way, is it an argument for continuing controls. Personally I have never minded masks, not least because they allow me to covertly mouth obscenities at people who annoy me, but the logic behind many Covid rules does indeed seem to be ebbing away as vaccines keep deaths low. Although the government isn’t quite saying that either, is it? Rather, it is saying that it is all now up to us. Without quite saying what is.
When we speak of personal responsibility in the age of Covid, we are actually talking about two very different things. The first is responsibility for ourselves, and the second is for everybody else.
For me and I’m sure many others, the greatest anxieties of Covid have been all about being the link between whoever I’ve just seen and whoever I’m about to, whether it’s small children or elderly relatives.
If the last 18 months or so have taught us anything it's that sense is far from common. It is practically a super power. This is the country that panicked and phoned the police when KFC ran out of chicken……and panic bought loo roll for a pandemic that was not bowel related.
The amount of people not listening when the restrictions are there is crazy, yet we need to trust them to show common sense when restrictions are lifted. Now that is lunacy.
The Grand Reopening feels like an experiment. Freedom Day arrived and it was celebrated with a bonfire of Covid regulations. After 16 months, 130,000 deaths and several very long lockdowns…… BoJo’s great gamble begins.
BoJo’s announcement pretty much said……“I'm bored of this now……you lot figure it out" approach to pandemic. It lacks leadership. It lacks confidence. It’s madness.
Trump Lunacy Rating: 10 / 10
And Finally……
“You get what you settle for.”
Thelma and Louise
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