‘We are being duped; 900 people are killed or maimed on UK roads every day but we don’t put a lockdown on motoring’
By GORDON KERR – Squash Mad Correspondent
In the past few days we have seen how politicians (and their unelected advisers) treat the public as fools. But even more irritating than the elitist culture ever-present at the heart of governments is the refusal to relax the Covid-19 lockdown despite mounting evidence emerging that this extremely expensive policy was a mistake, that governments have been duped as they now continue to seek to dupe us.
I write this article as a long-time personal friend and distinguished Masters squash champion lies in a London hospital fighting to recover from an especially nasty attack of this virus.
These may be unusual words to read on a squash website but the people responsible for this deception are the same individuals who are responsible for keeping all of you – fit, healthy people – locked out of your squash courts. When we do return, it looks like we will be allowed to extend a version of the knock-up to 40 minutes but not be allowed to play an actual match.
Given the now proven gross exaggerations offered by fame seeking scientists at Imperial College, it is worth considering the science that the UK government chose to ignore. Whilst the Imperial team speculated that without lockdown 250,000 to 500,000 UK citizens would die, their Oxford rivals said that half of us have already had it and favour a policy of ‘herd immunity’, assuming that most of us will catch it at some point.
No effort was made to prevent planes arriving from China or other hotspots, none expended to turn back virus-riddled asylum seekers chugging across the channel, and the predictive Imperial College model which the Government has championed has now been exposed as risible.
I reach two conclusions. Although nasty and in many cases deadly, the virus is killing or maiming a tiny trickle of fit middle aged or young people. The modelling, let alone the maths, behind the lockdown panic is bunkum. The virus is hanging around, but unless you are prepared to self-isolate for years, trying to avoid the virus by staying isolated is unlikely to work.*
The only remainingly credible justification for lockdown is that, without it, the NHS may have been overrun. I accept this. Maybe that justified a very brief lockdown but on balance I would still have opposed. Unlike governments, I do not seek to force these views onto you; my point is simply that we should be making these decisions for ourselves. What I would urge readers to do is to campaign hard for a full return to normal squash.
As I suspected at the time the UK locked down, the costs of this policy in human health terms as well as economic ones are now being shown to have overwhelmingly exceeded the benefits. There is good evidence to suggest that the lockdown has already directly resulted in about 3,000 non COVID related deaths per week in the UK. When the reduction in human health and fitness from the banning of sports is taken into account, let alone domestic violence, lifting the lockdown is overwhelmingly sensible.
Of course I accept that the chances of catching a nasty infection are reduced by staying indoors with family. But the chances of being killed or seriously injured on the UK roads are totally eliminated by staying at home. Some 900 people (almost none of whom reside in “end of life” care) are killed or maimed on UK roads every day, very few of these with such severe pre-existing conditions that they were in any event near the end of their lives. Nobody has seriously suggested staying at home and shutting down the economy, or banning cars, for this reason.
The H1 2020 virus panic has exposed many western governments, with the singular exception of Sweden, as bandwagon chasing scaremongering panickers. Governments are meant to make and implement rational policies based on the trade-off between public and private finances and human health. In the NHS they do this all the time. Many patients die because life-saving, or perhaps better put – life prolonging drugs – are considered too expensive. But no such rational assessments lie behind UK lockdown.
From the hotly disputed statistics I have read these past nine weeks it seems to be generally agreed the that the number of UK virus-related deaths of people aged under 45 is around 500. 95% of UK virus linked fatalities are reportedly of people with underlying serious health conditions such as obesity, high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes. Of the 500 under 45s, we have precious little information as to how many, if any, were otherwise healthy let alone athletic and committed regular sportspeople. How many of these 500 had illegally entered the country in the back of lorries or in smugglers’ boats? *
Migration Watch has just reported that 1,200 people have already crossed the channel illegally since the lockdown began. Many of these hail from virus-soaked Iran, none are tested and only 6% of those arriving in this way were in 2019 either returned to France or the EU country they first entered under the Dublin convention. Ironically, owing to the virus I suspect that the 2020 returns policy has been suspended. As Migration Watch opine, enforcement of border security has in effect been suspended.
Personally, I am wary of government policies. I subscribe to the view that self-preservation is the principal strategy of government departments. My professional focus, the health or lack of it in the banking industry, is a prime example. Most UK citizens accept the patently false statements of ‘experts’ in the Bank of England. Despite years of reassurances by the Bank of England, a recently published paper by my professional colleague, Kevin Dowd, analyses the shape that banks are in today in considerable detail.*
The UK banking system today is in far worse health than when it visibly collapsed in 2007. The Bank of England, in complete denial at the time that there was any solvency issue – merely a shortage of ‘liquidity’ was the then narrative – has simply devised a money printing process to mask systemic banking insolvency, in tandem with pushing for the adoption of a global system of false metrics; measures that appear to indicate that insolvent banks are well capitalised.
If the Bank of England was the Emergency Fire Service, rather than actually fight any fires they would invent thermometers that generated a ‘cool’ temperature reading. From the Executive Summary: “The BoE’s ‘Great Capital Rebuild’ narrative about a strongly recapitalised UK banking system is little more than an elaborate, and occasionally shambolic, window dressing exercise.”
Sadly, the fawning promotion of ‘science-led government policy’ by the BBC and other mainstream media has for years encouraged a culture whereby individuals need to display a bit of backbone to face down the abusive derision heaped on rational questioning of UK government sponsored predictive science.
Take the subject of Global Warming, where the term has been changed to “Climate Change” to take account of the ten years of global cooling leading up to 2009. Despite the hysteria reserved for sceptics, former chancellor Nigel Lawson put his reputation on the line to challenge the orthodoxy and write “A Cool Look at Global Warming” in 2009. He struggled to find a publisher.
Why do I link together three seemingly disparate examples? The virus, global warming, and the banking crisis. The link is that in each case rational common-sense assessment no longer has any place in policymaking, but has been replaced by predictive modelling. Lawson points out that prevailing ‘climate science’ – basically complex, often secretive models whose variables are simply occasionally tweaked, long ago failed the basic Popperian test of any scientific proposition, namely that it be capable of refutation.
As for banking, I have written a little book illustrating how easy it is to game every accounting, regulatory capital and ‘mark to market’ rule using modern derivative and securitisation techniques , and create profits and fake capital out of losses and thin air at not inconsiderable cost to societies. Sadly, large incomprehensible models have only increased in usage in banking; I wager a great deal that no regulator understands complex transaction modelling, which is why they have just about given up and fallen back on the false metric argument.
The Imperial College virus model* which predicted up to 500,000 UK deaths has been dismissed by disinterested industry professionals as “fundamentally unreliable” , or “a tangled buggy mess”. It is hard not to question the motives behind Imperial’s advancement of such apoplectic predictions; the personal power and prestige that comes with being the main expert driving government policy.
I have enormous respect for virologist’s opinions and analysis regarding the severity of this virus. But I have little time for any scientist plugging his predictive model. Life involves too much randomness. I commend Taleb’s Black Swan to readers who wish to consider this point further.
When the dust settles on this first half of 2020, I expect that these months will be rightly viewed as the apotheosis of political correctness squared . Outdoor exercise limits were imposed irrespective of age or personal fitness levels, death statistics were reported as if each lost life were a tragedy, and the virus taming benefits of isolation, national economic ruin, and suspension of sport were touted with scant evidential support.
Tellingly, at no stage were the costs of these measures assessed and compared with the claimed benefits. Such hoped for future, cool assessment of this ill-thought through lockdown policy could, with luck, lead to significant public and social benefits. Provided that predictive modelling is treated with the contempt it deserves. Cigarette packets offer large enough surfaces for manual predictive modelling calculations.
These draconian lockdown restrictions, encouraged by self-preservation led government officials and ‘sold’ to us by lame politicians for whom every death of even a 90 year old is a tragedy, would make the great political philosopher Karl Popper turn in his grave. I have been driven by lockdown madness to re-read his magnum opus “The Open Society and its Enemies”.
He starts by analysing Plato’s views in Republic, that the ideal society is a city state governed by a ‘kingship of the wisest and most godlike of men’. But even such a state changes. Why? Because of the entry of Heraclitus’ strife; strife and panic are the driving cause of societal change, not driven by noble motives, but by self-interest of a material and economic kind.
Popper’s humble quotation from his own preface, written in 1945, is worth reflecting on in the context of lockdown. “If in this book harsh words are spoken about some of the greatest … intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not …to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our society is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men.”
Footnotes and links to research:
[2] http://eumaeus.org/wordp/index.php/2020/05/06/can-uk-banks-pass-the-covid-19-stress-test/
- Policies vary internationally, so forgive my focus on the UK.
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