I watched that video of the presumably met police chap Gary Brown going full 1984 on a journalist who was out for their exercise.search article link It really got me angry, it was a total abuse of power (that they don’t have as shown above) and to be shouted at that you’re killing people., by being out for your daily exercise and filming the police doing something possibly beyond their remit.
It does seem as if the police are desperate to shut everything down way beyond their legal power, (except the bridge mess). Perhaps it’s just a small minority, but it comes across as pretty disgraceful.
Off_Field wrote:
It does seem as if the police are desperate to shut everything down way beyond their legal power, (except the bridge mess). Perhaps it’s just a small minority, but it comes across as pretty disgraceful.
Let’s keep some perspective. It is clearly just a minority.
hmng wrote:
Not to mention that you can always choose comparisons and time frames:https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/excesswintermortalityinenglandandwales/201415provisionaland201314final
“An estimated 43,900 excess winter deaths occurred in England and Wales in 2014/15; the highest number since 1999/00”
If you look at the underlying data, you can see that even in the worst week, there were “only” 14,628 deaths.
2014-48 10,017
2014-49 10,473
2014-50 11,360
2014-51 12,256
2014-52 12,941
2015-01 14,428
2015-02 14,628
2015-03 13,425
2015-04 12,453
2015-05 12,186
2015-06 11,663
2015-07 11,834
2015-08 11,368
2015-09 11,324
2015-10 10,825
2015-11 10,513
2015-12 10,486
2015-13 10,717
2015-14 10,581
2015-15 10,166
2015-16 10,008
For comparison – here is where we are now in the UK
2020-13 11,141
2020-14 16,384
2020-15 >20,000 (provisional)
It is worth noting that the expected average number of deaths is around 10-11,000 during that time of the year.
If you cherry pick data, make sure it proves your point…
Peter wrote:
The car park has been blocked off by some jobsworths, so just a few people up there on bikes, sitting around on the grass, spaced out by 2m, and looking miserable.
We’ve had that here a lot after they tried before Easter how people would act without restrictions. Unfortunately it showed quickly that there were too many who simply did not give a rat’s ass and so the police had to interfere. Also this weekend, they were very busy sending people away and fining those who would not listen. We also had the viewpoint parkings to the airport sealed off with concrete blocks even as people gathered there, what the heck for I wonder as there are no airplanes.
LeSving wrote:
This starts to look like “the other” long “international” thread. It seems like it is a necessary aspect of all legal UK law/regulation/advice that it has to be incredibly complicated and overly irritating with a large dash of draconian flavor And the more, the merrier
Actually, the UK guidance is based on minimal legislation, probably deliberately to enable common sense to prevail, but many are over-interpreting things and referring to things as “laws” which clearly arent, even the police.
Here in France, “The Law” is very strict and there is no common sense applied anywhere that I have seen, so there are very many derogations that needed to be authorized afterwards. I live about 7-8 miles from one of the longest continuous sand beaches in Europe, yet it is not actually legal for me to drive there to go for a walk – even though on the most crowded summer day you could easily maintain social distancing due to its shear size… Ironicly the closest contact I have had this last 6 weeks outside my family home is with the Gendarmes that check I have a signed paper to go to the supermarket…
Regards, SD..
Cobalt wrote:
If you cherry pick data, make sure it proves your point…
Nice cherry picking… of my post :-) I said there is excess mortality, only in countries WITH lockdowns. Asked about what scaremongers say about Sweden and Japan. The yearly figures were meant to keep things in perspective to the crowd that kept saying millions were going to die.
I said there is excess mortality, only in countries WITH lockdowns.
Think about that one a little more.
Something I’ve noticed on the local forums is the fun police.
If anything outside is fun (e.g. taking your daily exercise by mountain biking in the vast and almost empty plantations) there’s a crowd who strongly condemns this. If you take exercise anywhere except the ugliest most built up area, this “should not be allowed”. Walks across a near deserted beach are somehow “irresponsible” (despite that nearly everyone here is within walking or a short bike ride of a beach, and when I went past Gansey Beach the other day, the walkers were all 100m away from each other because at low tide it’s a vast amount of space). Some people clearly have hankerings of being the Taliban and demand that anything you do outside has to be completely joyless or the Police are implored to deal with it.
Fortunately the Police replies in social media have largely been very sensible to some of these suggestions, reminding people it’s fine so long as they aren’t gathering in groups.
People are dobbing in neighbours for perceived infractions (which actually aren’t). The “clap for the NHS” thing is also rapidly becoming the Two Minute Hate from 1984 – while the sentiment is different, the suspicion you’ll get for not joining in this mass virtue signalling exercise is palpable. (The Poppy Appeal has become like this too – instead of the moment of quiet and private contemplation it should be, it’s becoming a virtue signalling competition).
IOW, people are pretty much the same everywhere, and both pilots and the police are drawn from the community 
You are lucky to be in the tiny % of people who live in or near the countryside.
All islands seem to have come down really hard. I guess because they do actually have a chance of containing it (stop boats and planes; nobody will swim there) but also because they have a huge concentration of self-important people. The island airports around the UK are massively “yellow jacket / security” territory – other than Guernsey but that works well only because ASG is smart about it.
I thought this caricature is spot on too – what we get on the TV every day (she is the main BBC “interrogator” during the daily briefings)
Interestingly, I’ve just heard that the UK did actually buy a load of PPE back in January, to replenish emergency stocks which they could see were going to run out. It was bought from China and turned out to be either wrong stuff, or crap. Well, yeah, you can’t just “buy from China”. I’ve been doing it fo over 20 years. There is a better than 50% chance that something from there will be crap. One has to do a lot of due diligence beforehand, establish good communications first, get samples, test them, go through a few iterations to iron out issues, and then you buy a production quantity with plenty of time in hand in case it is a duff batch. And if you reorder something you haven’t bought for say a year, the stuff is likely to be completely different (because they don’t actually make it, never did make it; they are actually a reseller who got it made by some other outfit down the road which cannot export directly because nobody there speaks English) and then you find nearly everybody, or possibly totally everybody, who you were in contact with a year ago has gone. And since most stuff has to be paid cash in advance, most Chinese companies could not give a sh1t are not particularly fussy about selling you something slightly different; this is known as fait accompli and is a technique which cowboy builders are familiar with 
The whole situation is then made worse by the procurement procedure where the NHS prob99 doesn’t buy directly from the Chinese manufacturer but buys from an importer, and this importer is stuck between a rock and a hard place, with a supplier who is difficult as described above, and a customer run by Univ of Upper Warlingham fake-MBA types who have cornered the world’s supply of hair gel and who periodically send in “senior vendor auditors” to harrass him and who want JIT deliveries, so he has to carry all the buffer stock (there is no “JIT” – it is a modern idea which works when a customer can shaft a smaller supplier) at his expense, and when he gets a duff batch from China he has to sort it out again at his expense, and usually this means getting a replacement batch by air freight instead of sea freight. And guess who pays for the air freight
skydriller wrote:
Actually, the UK guidance is based on minimal legislation,
The Swedish legislation is even more minimal…
