Boris Johnson 8pm televised address - official match thread

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

That's utter shit chap, again. Apologies for having to resort to those words, but maybe you'll finally take notice before I back out of these discussions.

I have never liked Boris Johnson. I was unhappy that he was finally able to position himself as leader of the Tories, since it moved him closer to the office he now holds. I didn't vote for him. I couldn't vote for him. I will never vote for him. That, as a country, we were left with a Johnson v Corbyn decision, was simply appalling.

I agree we locked down too late first time round. Government dithered until the country started locking itself down and they had little choice but to rubber-stamp that.

I agree that schools should not have opened yesterday, saying as much here numerous times, but I also understand the desire to try to keep schools open, since closed schools is incredibly damaging for many, many children less fortunate than those of most who use NSC.

My one hope when Covid-19 entered our world was that Johnson, being a lazy sod afraid of big decisions, would essentially step aside and allow those who know what they are doing to do what needed to be done. He would be the frontman - rolled out in front of the country every now and again to let us know what was going on. It would play to his strengths and would also mean his weaknesses wouldn't be allowed to damage our response.

I'll leave everyone else to it. Have a nice day.

It was this (below) that gave me the impression that triggered my comment. You posts are almost always literal, and not facetious or satirical. Can you see how someone might infer what I inferred from what you wrote?

 

[Neville's Breakfast]

It was a reaction to an impression given that critics of Boris are all red rosette wearing lefties. Explantion elsewhere.

An over-reaction, most likely. Demonstrating my own lack of leadership qualities and tendency to needlessly alienate people. I am the exact opposite of Brois

I’m not alienated old chap

 

[crodonilson]

Director of Public Health in Brmingham has said that if vaccinations go exactly to plan and all of the first priority groups are vaccinated within the time frame we will return to a toughened up tier system by the end of Feb with further easing of restrictions in July/August.

 

[Super Steve Earle]

Very good! While my biases may urge me to leap on this and wax lyrical about the value of the feminization of the workplace (something I consider to be very advantageous) I suspect this association is just chance, and that wider cultural and meterological issues are the main players here. Most of Africa is run by gun-toting shagmonsters, yet covid is low there. Nice idea, though

As a victim of a glass ceiling for men, specially installed to allow feminization of my workplace management structure, it isn't always advantageous

 

[darkwolf666]

Judging by my company, most feel safe at work and want to go in...thats a big change since March, mind you the Suns not out !

Ouch!

Mind you, who wants to be stuck in with their kids on a wet January day!

 

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

By how much could the spread of the virus have been mitigated if Boris had used the introduction of the new lockdown to withdraw his shopping list of exemptions from wearing face coverings in shops and on public transport?

I have noticed an increase in selfish individuals refusing to wear masks in shops. When you can buy an "I'm exempt" lanyard on Amazon for £1.99 (+P&P) it's not really a surprise. NOBODY should be allowed in shops if a face covering is not being worn.

It only takes a shopworker who is asymptomatic, and has invested their £1.99 (+p&p), to potentially infect dozens, if not hundreds, of people a day.

This is not the time for selfishness; wear a face covering or stay indoors.

This 100%. There may be 1 in 100 or maybe 1000 non-mask-wearers in shops who have a valid reason. But most are just able-bodied chav c***s tho eh? I get it that small shops don't really fancy the aggro, and don't really blame them, but major supermarkets have really no excuse. Pretty sure there's many a licenced club bouncer who would welcome the money to man the door and refuse entry to these selfish twunts

 

[GT49er]

By how much could the spread of the virus have been mitigated if Boris had used the introduction of the new lockdown to withdraw his shopping list of exemptions from wearing face coverings in shops and on public transport?

I have noticed an increase in selfish individuals refusing to wear masks in shops. When you can buy an "I'm exempt" lanyard on Amazon for £1.99 (+P&P) it's not really a surprise. NOBODY should be allowed in shops if a face covering is not being worn.

It only takes a shopworker who is asymptomatic, and has invested their £1.99 (+p&p), to potentially infect dozens, if not hundreds, of people a day.

This is not the time for selfishness; wear a face covering or stay indoors.

Couldn't agree more - been saying the same thing myself for months (including in several posts on NSC!)

'Don't like wearing a mask' is not a reason for exemption - in fact there should be no exemptions. 'Wear a mask or f*** off home and stay there' should be actively enforced, with penalties for non-compliance. Covid has racked up enormous financial burdens on our national debt - covidiots who bleat about their civil rights not to wear a mask if they don't want to should be made to start paying back some of it now!

 

[Hugo Rune]

He’s done a cataclysmically bad job. I’ll be honest, I’ve never been keen on Boris Johnson - there was perhaps a time when his harmless japery was a refreshing change from your typical po-faced politician, but I’ve never wanted him anywhere near number 10. I remember joking a number of years ago - “imagine if Boris Johnson and Donald Trump got into power. At the same time!”. There’s definitely been a feeling like I’ve been living in a dark comedy these past few years, and last year in particular.

I’ve always, always voted Tory. Until January of last year. I just couldn’t do it. Partly because I opposed (yet gracefully accepted) Brexit, but mainly because I couldn’t abide by a man who had manipulated and manufactured his way into the hot seat. Perhaps cleverly so, but it was manipulation nonetheless.

All that said, I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt back in March. We were undoubtedly heading into the most challenging situation since the Second World War, so the man needing cutting some slack. So, fresh start in my mind.

Then we had the herd immunity debacle, though I don’t necessarily hold him accountable for that. It was a rapidly developing situation, and if ‘the science’ changed then so be it. But the notion that they were ‘following the science’ was just that, a notion. It was just another way of saying “If we fúck this up, don’t blame us, blame poindexter over there”.

Throughout this whole charade, Boris Johnson has constantly ignored calls to lockdown to various degrees until it was way too late. They say hindsight is a wonderful thing, but Italy gave us hindsight in real-time.

Why didn’t we lockdown then? Why did we continue to allow thousands of foreigners in from countries known to be under siege from the virus? Why did we have the fúcking Cheltenham Festival? Why didn’t we have a circuit breaker in September, like, y’know, the scientists said. Why did we give the virus the chance to spring a variant of itself that is virtually uncontrollable?

Why? Because Boris Johnson is a popularity whore. He is terrified of making a decision which might annoy his followers, even if it’s the right one for them. He is pathologically incapable of making tough decisions until such a point he literally has no option, and even then it’s only because everyone else is doing it. I swear, if Nicola Sturgeon jumped off a bridge, he’d fùcking do it.

And now, here we are. Another bloody lockdown. I’m no longer even bothered about the personal inconvenience, or that fact the kids are going to barge in on me in the middle of a conference call, fourteen times a day asking me to buy them another game for their iPad. I’m bothered by the needless harm we have done to our economy and long-term prosperity. Let’s not forget that it’s less than a decade ago that the youth of London were literally burning their own towns and boroughs down because of how shit, austere and opportunity-less their lives where. I’m not condoning that behaviour by the way, but that’s not the actions of people whose lives are great. What about those people now?

But more than that, and I say this because I am so very fortunate not to have been financially affected (yet) by the pandemic, it is absolutely criminal (and I use that word deliberately) that so many people will now die as a result of gross incompetence and ineptitude. Quite literally millions of life years lost unnecessarily.

Anyway, best get to bed, I’ve got the school run in the morning. Oh wait, school’s out, innit. I don’t know what pisses me off more; that I have to explain to my children in the morning why they went to school this morning but won’t get to go again until March at the earliest, or that the butchering of their education was so, so avoidable.

Alas, we are fúcked.

Amen.

I offered up a similar argument in the early days of the pandemic after the late lockdown and failure to close or restrict border access; I put the blame solely on the shoulders of Johnson. Despite saying I thought the likes of Thatcher would have done a much better job (I think authoritarianism is the way forward in a national emergency), I was jumped on by the ‘no one could have done better than Johnson’ brigade and the ‘your argument is invalid because you are anti-Tory’ mob. There is literally a Conservative MP for everyday of the year that could have handled this better than Johnson; he does not have effective leadership skills FFS. The Brexit ordeal (no matter which side you are on) resulted in the Country electing the least capable sort of person for a pandemic possible, I suspect Johnson’s leadership will be the biggest downside of Brexit. We have paid for this with 40,000 deaths more than Germany. A recent study put the price of the late lockdown at 20,000 souls, it was unforgivable and I’m never going to cut a person slack after that mistake.

Thousands upon thousands of people were going to die in this Country no matter who was in charge but the advantage of time and being an island nation was never taken up by this Government; it’s unforgivable but at least this particular pig with a blue rosette will be strung up by the trotters by those in his own sty prior to the next election and won’t be facing Starmer.

 

[atomised]

2 days in a row of Boris. They're spoiling us. Press briefing at 5 with Whitty and Vallance and no doubt some graphs

 

[WATFORD zero]

Couldn't agree more - been saying the same thing myself for months (including in several posts on NSC!)

'Don't like wearing a mask' is not a reason for exemption - in fact there should be no exemptions. 'Wear a mask or f*** off home and stay there' should be actively enforced, with penalties for non-compliance. Covid has racked up enormous financial burdens on our national debt - covidiots who bleat about their civil rights not to wear a mask if they don't want to should be made to start paying back some of it now!

Although I agree with the gist of this

I have asked this question a number of times on here and never got an answer. If there is anyone on here with a valid 'mask exemption' could they explain why they can't wear a visor instead ?

 

[Springal]

Couldn't agree more - been saying the same thing myself for months (including in several posts on NSC!)

'Don't like wearing a mask' is not a reason for exemption - in fact there should be no exemptions. 'Wear a mask or f*** off home and stay there' should be actively enforced, with penalties for non-compliance. Covid has racked up enormous financial burdens on our national debt - covidiots who bleat about their civil rights not to wear a mask if they don't want to should be made to start paying back some of it now!

Agreed - I went to a post office in Durrington yesterday and with 10 people in the queue, 3 people were wearing these lanyards. I struggle to believe that 3/10 people at that time really had some medical condition that absolutely meant they could not wear a mask. Coupled with 2 50+ year olds manning the post office also not wearing masks and it is not difficult to see why we are in the situation we are. It'd be interesting to see how many students get to university or medical school to be doctors, medics, dentists and have to drop out because of previously unknown conditions that prevent mask wearing. Or even mechanics, people working in manufacturing, people working in factories, people working in beauty salons etc etc......

 

[Charity Shield 1910]

I'm not sure if you noticed my reply, but I have relatives in Germany and friends around Europe. Death counting is not a science but an art and at the moment I wouldn't form many views around them at the moment. Certainly my German relatives wouldn't agree with them being better off. I posted earlier:-

I thought I would raise a non British viewpoint.

I have a German uncle, and with my aunty they live mainly in Germany. Brunswick has been given circa 1000 vaccines for a population of 250,000. My aunty and uncle are now their 70's and they say that they will be unlikely to get vaccinated before June/July. This is not a leave or remain post and don't wan't it read as such.

However the UK have been more successful in it's procurement of vaccines than the EU. The way things are in Germany, virtually all of the UK will be vaccinated before my German uncle and aunty will get their vaccine.

As for when my cousin in Germany will get his vaccination is anyone's guess. This does not mean that the EU have done something deliberately wrong, or have been negligent, it's just they made a call on procurement and it has not gone well. It happens and the EU will now be between 3 to 8 months behind the UK in vaccinating people, with all the implications on lives and the economy.

If the UK gov had got it's procurement wrong then this would be all over the press, but I have only very briefly heard it mentioned on Times radio and by a presenter who was very keen to excuse the mistake. The BBC and ITV seem to have not mentioned this at all. Either way, procurement of the vaccine is one of the biggest calls to make and the UK gov should get credit for getting it right. We might also think about the people of pensionable age around the world who won't have been vaccinated before all of us, who are younger than them, get our vaccine. That's my two penneth anyway.

 

[rippleman]

This 100%. There may be 1 in 100 or maybe 1000 non-mask-wearers in shops who have a valid reason. But most are just able-bodied chav c***s tho eh? I get it that small shops don't really fancy the aggro, and don't really blame them, but major supermarkets have really no excuse. Pretty sure there's many a licenced club bouncer who would welcome the money to man the door and refuse entry to these selfish twunts

But is there really ever a "valid reason" for refusing to wear some form of face covering? If there is, by inference there is then a "valid reason" for an asymptomatic shopworker to potentially infect dozens if not hundreds of people just because they don't want to wear a mask.

If you won't wear a mask, wear a plastic faceshield and if you won't do that, stay indoors.

This is the point I'm trying to make. The "I'm exempt" merchants pose a real danger to us all. Time for it to stop.

 

[Nobby]

2 days in a row of Boris. They're spoiling us. Press briefing at 5 with Whitty and Vallance and no doubt some graphs

Jesus H

Will we have another Matchday thread?


What now?

I’m going for Aliens have landed and they’ve brought a plague of Martian locusts to eat all of the crops in the world

So the new calculator is on which date you will starve, dependant upon personal fat reserves




Sorry, I think I’m going all doolally

 

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

But is there really ever a "valid reason" for refusing to wear some form of face covering? If there is, by inference there is then a "valid reason" for an asymptomatic shopworker to potentially infect dozens if not hundreds of people just because they don't want to wear a mask.

If you won't wear a mask, wear a plastic faceshield and if you won't do that, stay indoors.

This is the point I'm trying to make. The "I'm exempt" merchants pose a real danger to us all. Time for it to stop.

Well I saw an interview a month or two back with one poor lady who'd been raped and who suffers horrendous flashbacks if any kind of covering gets put over her face. She got given serious grief by other customers at the hairdressers. But such cases are few and far between mercifully. Most non-mask-wearers are just chavscum who will go around doing exactly what they want to do until they're institutionally called out over it

 

[GT49er]

But is there really ever a "valid reason" for refusing to wear some form of face covering? If there is, by inference there is then a "valid reason" for an asymptomatic shopworker to potentially infect dozens if not hundreds of people just because they don't want to wear a mask.

If you won't wear a mask, wear a plastic faceshield and if you won't do that, stay indoors.

This is the point I'm trying to make. The "I'm exempt" merchants pose a real danger to us all. Time for it to stop.

There isn't a valid reason. This problem is, I'm afraid, down to Boris. Boris, although a true-blue Tory, is also an uber-libertarian, and there is one word which is absolute anathema to him; pure poison, and one which he (and the prats who won't wear a mask) would like to see removed from the language altogether.

That vile word is, of course, 'must'.

 

[Blue Valkyrie]

can gnomes get covid ?

To be fair, most garden centres are out doors and large. Supermarkets are the worst places.

They get Cor-gnome-ovirus.

 

[Thunder Bolt]

You've only been in Tier 4 for just over a week, how do you know it wasn't working?

It looks like it's been making a difference in London and Kent where it's been in place for longer:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/05/coronavirus-uk-covid-cases-and-deaths-today

Closure of places like hairdressers where there is a lot of close contact should also make a difference.

That said these things follow a natural curve in any case.

It's making a difference in Hastings & Rother, where it was really bad a couple of weeks ago.

 

[amexer]

I'm not sure if you noticed my reply, but I have relatives in Germany and friends around Europe. Death counting is not a science but an art and at the moment I wouldn't form many views around them at the moment. Certainly my German relatives wouldn't agree with them being better off. I posted earlier:-

I thought I would raise a non British viewpoint.

I have a German uncle, and with my aunty they live mainly in Germany. Brunswick has been given circa 1000 vaccines for a population of 250,000. My aunty and uncle are now their 70's and they say that they will be unlikely to get vaccinated before June/July. This is not a leave or remain post and don't wan't it read as such.

However the UK have been more successful in it's procurement of vaccines than the EU. The way things are in Germany, virtually all of the UK will be vaccinated before my German uncle and aunty will get their vaccine.

As for when my cousin in Germany will get his vaccination is anyone's guess. This does not mean that the EU have done something deliberately wrong, or have been negligent, it's just they made a call on procurement and it has not gone well. It happens and the EU will now be between 3 to 8 months behind the UK in vaccinating people, with all the implications on lives and the economy.

If the UK gov had got it's procurement wrong then this would be all over the press, but I have only very briefly heard it mentioned on Times radio and by a presenter who was very keen to excuse the mistake. The BBC and ITV seem to have not mentioned this at all. Either way, procurement of the vaccine is one of the biggest calls to make and the UK gov should get credit for getting it right. We might also think about the people of pensionable age around the world who won't have been vaccinated before all of us, who are younger than them, get our vaccine. That's my two penneth anyway.

You will soon find yourself banned if you come out with anymore positive comments like that

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

This 100%. There may be 1 in 100 or maybe 1000 non-mask-wearers in shops who have a valid reason. But most are just able-bodied chav c***s tho eh? I get it that small shops don't really fancy the aggro, and don't really blame them, but major supermarkets have really no excuse. Pretty sure there's many a licenced club bouncer who would welcome the money to man the door and refuse entry to these selfish twunts

I dont disagree that some people (the vast minority) are not wearing masks.

But if the lack of mask wearing is such a big issue, why has flu pretty much vanished?

Would that have happened if enough people were not wearing them?

As I said before, my 9 months temping in a supermarket I very rarely saw anyone without a mask - I can only go on what ive seen of course.