{"id":1228,"date":"2020-10-25T22:09:12","date_gmt":"2020-10-25T22:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=1228"},"modified":"2020-10-25T22:09:12","modified_gmt":"2020-10-25T22:09:12","slug":"sunday-25th-october-2020-day-223","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2020\/10\/25\/sunday-25th-october-2020-day-223\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday, 25th October, 2020 [Day 223]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today in the wee small hours of the morning is when the clocks were turned back one hour so this morning we were engaged in making sure that our various clocks and timers were all pointing in the right direction. Fortunately, our computers and clock radios which receive a signal automatically will update themselves without human intervention whilst\u00a0everything gets our manual attention. I always find that the clock provided in the car always takes some thought but\u00a0fortunately I remembered how to do this as well. I ‘cheated’ a little by\u00a0going down to collect the newspapers by car instead of walking down and back as I\u00a0normally do. Then, after the Andrew Marr<\/em> show, which is a\u00a0regular feature of Sunday mornings, Meg and I walked down to the park and\u00a0got into an interesting conversation with a cyclist who was out taking the park air together with her father. We found that we both had solved a common problem i.e. at the age when children were old to\u00a0acquire something like a\u00a0juvenile or adult size bike but were not safe enough to be let out on the roads on their own, then one or both parents would buy an\u00a0adult bike and accompany their youngsters on the open\u00a0roads. We do have a few cycle lanes, of\u00a0course, but\u00a0they are actually \u00a0 few and far between an then one has to take a decision whether to risk\u00a0the main roads (legal but not very safe) or ride along the footpath (safer, but of dubious legality). We then had a rather thrown-together type of Sunday lunch before we\u00a0settled down to a really good long read of the\u00a0Sunday newspapers. The Sunday Times<\/em> had done a massive exposure on the ways in\u00a0which in the early days of the epidemic (approx April) when admissions to hospital were rising at an alarming rate, then the government introduced a type of\u00a0rationing system. In this the over 80’s,\u00a0particularly if they had other contributing conditions such as heart disease, obesity or diabetes, were routinely\u00a0denied admission to hospital or\u00a0else were decanted into residential homes (often infected with virus) where they subsequently died. Some of the most severe\u00a0rationing was eased somewhat when it was evident that the peak had passed but in the meantime, there were probably thousands of people throughout the\u00a0country who lost loved ones early by them not getting the treatment that\u00a0they needed. Of course, the government has denied the impact of these reports but the depth of the investigative reporting by the Sunday Times <\/em>is impressive and it\u00a0hardly likely that the journalists and investigators would have lied (whereas governments of all political persuasions have often taken the easy way out be being ‘canonical with the truth’ i.e. lying to their electorate)<\/span><\/p>\n

The American elections, as you might expect, are extensively analysed and discussed by the British media. It is now becoming apparent that as a Biden victory looks more likely than not then the British government is finding itself badly wrong footed. Normally, a British\u00a0government would make sure that it had constructive links with both sides of the electoral divide in the USA on the grounds that you wanted to\u00a0establish good\u00a0relations with whoever won. However, the Boris\u00a0Johnson\u00a0government has made\u00a0practically no efforts to establish any links with the Democrats, preferring to see themselves as a natural ally of Donald\u00a0<\/span>Trump. According to Andrew Rawnsley in ‘The Observer<\/em>‘\u00a0then ‘Being Britain’s Trump goes down almost as\u00a0poisonously being Trump himself among many in Team Biden. They are bracketed together in the minds of the Democrats …because both are rule-breaking populists who have\u00a0polarised their countries and trashed historic alliances.’ <\/em>It looks as though this is impacting upon the Brexit negotiations – in the (now very unlikely) prospect of a Trump win then a deal with the USA may be on the cards and therefore a ‘no-deal’ Brexit more likely. But in the absence of any\u00a0kind of\u00a0sympathetic deal with the US, then the UK may be ‘forced’ by economic logic to accept some kind of minimal deal with the EU, even though they would ideally like to walk away. COVID-19 and Brexit are\u00a0related,of course –\u00a0many on the Tory right (i.e. the majority of the\u00a0current Tory party) are salivating at the prospect of ‘no- deal’ with the EU because the undoubtedly economic cost would not be identifiable when the COVID-10\u00a0induced recession bites really hard.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today in the wee small hours of the morning is when the clocks were turned back one hour so this morning we were engaged in making sure that our various clocks and timers were all pointing in the right direction. Fortunately, our computers and clock radios which receive a signal automatically will update themselves without […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1228"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1231,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions\/1231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}