Social media help with Lockdown … forget data protection legislation!
It is now abundantly clear: there’s no ‘Silly Season’ as far as ‘Our MSM’ are concerned – the ‘Silly Season’ is present all year round. The wonderful thing is though that the readers of the various articles, provided they are permitted to comment, are more and more scathing when expressing their opinion.
Moreover, the themes occupying the eminent minds of our broadsheet writers show that they have lost their faculty of critical thought. Given that they are freely mixing plain reporting with their own opinion there’s only one critical attitude we can discern, and that is “government bad”. Pertinent questions are not being asked.
Take for example the ‘news’ that Ms Patel ‘will set out’ that Immigration Points system’ today. We’re told that EU criminals with jail sentences of more than one year will be banned from coming here (link). That article heaves with phrases such as ‘Border Force will …’ and ‘Immigration officers will …’. Given the recent reports on rubber-dinghy-immigrants, one cannot help but remark ‘oh really?’.
On the more specific subject of Channel-crossing illegals, The Times has a lofty report about Ms Patel meeting her French counterpart. We’re told that:
“Yesterday the authorities in France prevented about 200 migrants from crossing the Dover Strait and the Home Office said that Britain intercepted almost as many. A search and rescue operation was launched as Border Force and agencies including the Coastguard and Kent police responded to several incidents off the British coast.” (link, paywalled)
Oh really? We’re not told if those ‘rescued’ by the British Border Force were generously taken to centres here in the UK and given a hearty and expensive welcome but read:
“It is not clear if the agreement includes measures to return migrants picked up in UK waters to France.” (link, paywalled)
Yes, well, sending them back would be racist, wouldn’t it, dear MSM writers! So better not ask! Just as reporting on those sweatshops in Leicester was deemed to be racist and thus questions weren’t asked. That this latest ‘initiative’ is actually farcical becomes obvious when next we read what that French minister said;
“Mr Darmanin said that “for the first time six British police officers and six French officers will be able to work . . . on the traffickers who prey on human misery and who are doubtless not punished enough at the moment”. (link, paywalled)
“Twelve police officers”? Oh my giddy aunt! Hasn’t people trafficking been a crime for a long time, without ‘authorities’ having done anything about it? Isn’t this just like the drug gangs where the authorities are apparently incapable of tracing the ‘masterminds’? A short while ago there were reports on how a ‘top-secret criminal chat network’ was ‘busted’ across Europe (link). These were ‘only’ drug & gun running criminals, you understand – nothing about people trafficking.
One wonders how seriously all those authorities here and in France are going to take people trafficking, never mind those 12 police officers. After all, just because ‘Our MSM’ were focused on CV-19 didn’t mean the usual taxi service across the Mediterranean had been disrupted!
Instead, there’s a new turn to the Lockdown screw being implemented: ‘local lockdown’, praised by Hancock. Apparently, local authorities, after ‘testing and tracking’, can implement a local Lockdown, of districts or even streets, for example Leicester, or that farm in Herefordshire:
“The Health Secretary said many outbreaks are being dealt with “swiftly and silently”, through small lockdowns and new testing regimes such as portable walk-in centres. A farm in Herefordshire became the first such business in the country to go into lockdown on Sunday, after 73 workers tested positive for Covid-19, leading to concerns over further outbreaks happening as seasonal workers gather for harvest time.” (link)
Wait a minute – aren’t furriners checked when landing at Heathrow, or is it only Brits returning from holidays? The truly worrying point is that these Lockdowns are being imposed ‘silently’: have local authorities been given that power? By whom? Will the residents in a district, in a street, now being treated officially as lepers whom even their GPs won’t see for routine illnesses? It’s not as if even people who’re not in ’silent and swift’ local lockdowns are getting the medical treatment they need! There’s a report in the Times about cancer patients dying at home in Scotland:
“The Covid-19 lockdown has been linked to an increase of almost 900 cancer patients dying at home. National Records of Scotland data shows an additional 873 fatalities at home between mid-March and the end of June compared with the five-year average over the same period. There were 575 fewer cancer deaths than normal in hospitals over the same period. Politicians and campaigners have questioned whether terminally ill patients received sufficient care and are demanding that cancer services are restored.” (link, paywalled)
This is in Scotland where Ms Sturgeon wants to impose a closure of the border to England, where Ms Sturgeon has made the wearing of masks obligatory. With Johnson apparently going to do the same here, we may ask how our wearing masks in shops is going to prevent those avoidable deaths!
Do read the letter from an anonymous doctor in the latest edition of Lockdown Sceptics. Not only won’t you find it in ‘Our MSM’ because, as we wrote last week, Ofcom’s ‘guidance’ means that such things are not allowed to see the light of day in ‘Our MSM’, there’s worse: ‘Our NHS’ has forbidden doctors and presumably nurses to speak out in public:
“all NHS staff have been warned that if they talk to the media they’ll be suspended without pay.” (link)
If it’s not reported by the BCB or The Times it simply didn’t happen! Observations, information from ‘anonymous sources’, are only published when those ‘sources’ are “Whitehall insiders” or “government sources” briefing with intent.
But that’s not all, not by a long chalk! While professionals are prohibited from speaking out, there was this jaw-dropping report in yesterday’s Times, with this headline: “Coronavirus contact tracers sharing patients’ data on WhatsApp and Facebook”. It is horrifying:
“Details of Covid-19 patients are being shared on Facebook and WhatsApp in breach of data protection laws as staff turn to colleagues for help to do their jobs. Screenshots have contained the names, NHS numbers, contact details and case IDs of people who have tested positive for the virus. They were posted in unregulated social media groups.” (link, paywalled)
This is unbelievably bad – a fine example of how those ‘tracers’ are apparently oblivious of the data protection legislation which bloggers must comply with:
“Thousands of workers have joined social media groups that act as informal support networks attracting dozens of posts each day requesting help with IT problems and advice on how to handle cases. In one post, a clinical contact tracer shared in a WhatsApp group a screenshot of an internal system listing the phone number and name of a patient who had tested positive. Next to it, she asked for help after being assigned a case and said she had “no idea what to do next”. In June, a team leader posted a screenshot with a patient’s ID number in a Facebook group with more than 800 members.” (link, paywalled)
Why were they not trained properly? Never mind that this horse has bolted – apparently, this has been going on since May! Rather, let’s kindly sweep under the carpet that it was ‘Our MSM’ who screamed for ‘Test and Trace’ to be implemented. Let’s’ also sweep under the carpet the numerous reports from insiders that this NHS ‘test and trace’ would have serious implications regarding privacy legislation – after all, these observations were only made in blogs, not in the BBC and The Times, so they didn’t happen.
This ‘system’ is the basis on which local authorities or whoever it is are ‘swiftly and silently’ implementing ‘local Lockdowns’. This is how our Laws and indeed our civil liberties are ‘swiftly and silently’ being eroded and taken away. “GDPR” – that blunt instrument which every blogger, every internet outlet, every internet trader had to comply with is blatantly being eroded. So don’t mind that, if you’re ‘good’ and get yourself tested, your medical history might now be published on social media, for all to see, because Lockdown overrides everything else.
This is what ‘government’ created, driven by ‘Our MSM’ who prefer to scream and screech rather than ask pertinent questions, not even when their own freedom has been taken away by Ofcom guidance. It’s no wonder ‘Our MSM’ are fine with making everyone wear a mask in public because, after all, they’ve been fine with wearing a metaphoric muzzle ever since March 23rd.
KBO!
Viv,
can you tell us, has anyone produced a history book of UKIP since the Referendum. Warts and all. Surely there’s an ex copper here somewhere who can build up the picture and thereby show a future pathway.
I just wondered. . for example, has Diane James ever said why. Also Nuttall, also Bolton. ( Without the vast barrowloads of words.)
Secrecy is not productive.
If we cannot find out now. Then clear the lot out.
Well, neither Diane James nor Paul Nuttall nor Henry Bolton have said anything – but I highly recommend you buy Paul Oakley’s book “No One Likes Us – we don’t care – a UKIP Brexit Memoir”. You can get it from amazon – but before you do, read my review of said book, here on INDEPENDENCE Daily:
https://independencedaily.co.uk/no-one-likes-us-we-dont-care-a-ukip-brexit-memoir/
I recommend all who are interested to at least check out that review!
Thank you.
Thanks Viv. I’ve just bought the kindle version. Prices down all round now folks. If you can find it on amazon uk’s website. You need to specify the brexit memoir bit. Oh, I didn’t use the link.
We said before they came that the immigrant farm workers should not be allowed entry. But of course the government gave way to pressure. Now we are supposed to applaud them for swiftly and silently dealing with the outbreak.
I despair.
Many Thanks Vivian. – Really you have said it all for me. – Total agreement, with little interest in our MSM, as they have all gone down the drain !
”Swiftly and silently”. How sinister that sounds. Yet I haven’t noticed many people jumping on those words – but they seem to say it all about how we should be seriously concerned about these ”powers” the government are assuming.
Publican yesterday took my order down on an order pad for a pint outside his premises to be consumed outside the premises.
‘And what is your name and telephone number please’?
‘You have got to be kidding’!
‘No, it is the law that I take names and contact details with all drinks and food orders’
‘With respect, you are wrong sir. There is no law that mandatorily demands you take customers names and telephone numbers when taking food and drink orders; you are mistaking government guidelines for the law and there is no law’
‘No I am not – it is the law’
‘Sorry, but I must cancel my order’.
Down the road was a garage with an off-licence and deli/baking section, a coffee and tea dispenser with no such unecessary nonsense in place.
Had I sought to reserve a table to eat in the pub I would have happily given my name and telephone number which is accepted practice even in normal times but not for a quick pint sat at a table on the large lawn area outside with only two other people about.
Bet that publican is not alone in misunderstanding the rules in this atmosphere of anxiety and fear whipped up by the Government and its agencies.
This publican knows that so far ” the regulations have not changed”. Courtesy Environmental Health. But you are right, people are gold-plating in all directions and adding layer after layer of obstacle to their operation.
In my pub we’ve stayed as close to normal as possible, including coming to the bar for a drink or food order (it already being a metre deep) and only yesterday I was hearing from a couple who waited 40 minutes another pub….for their second, waiter-delivered drink… Think my trade might benefit. We certainly got hammered over the weekend and almost ran out of all the draughts.
But we had to borrow £50k just to survive long enough to open again so whether we survive long term…..who knows.
Alan Wish you all the best -you deserve to come through this and prosper. As you say some are gold plating rules and this can cost businesses dearly in time, money and energy that can be more usefully employed in other areas.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/pubs-opening-rules-contact-tracing
By the end of the year, when we have all the data, we may conclude that the effect of the virus will have been to squeeze deaths that would have otherwise have been spread out over the course of 2020 into a narrow window in March/April, without increasing the total.
Lockdown Sceptics
Save the NHS ! (Another runaway nationalised industry ) of which governments are frightened.
Everybody in the NHS should be washed in chlorinated water.
Why does anyone in a call centre need internet access? Certainly not social media or email.
I do not understand all this testing craze, or the shock horror, maniac ( BBC ) statistics, the feverish anxiety, the voodoo of masks etc, that surrounds someone taking your temperature. None that are shown on telly show throat swabs. Or is that Bureaucrat stage 2. Where is ‘spitting Image’ when you need ’em.
Definitions:-
Local outbreak = 1 in a thousand will die of it
Flare Up = ditto
City Lockdown = ditto.
Prison Population of young healthy adults without Vit D deficiency etc = ditto.
Dear God it’s boring
They’ll be telling us next that a beard is as good as a mask and we have all got to comply ,
I understand and can, if I want to be bored, do statistics. I am seriously irritated at the way in which many important people on telly use words to imply that they know what they are talking about. When actually, they are best described as ignorant. As am I about this subject,by choice.
Finally, “testing” is a beaurocrats way of isolating irritants. ie you’re actual ” patient” and putting it somewhere else, its a spurious WHO trick, they latched on to, to get themselves listened to.” manna”.
Throat swabs
My daughter has a lump at the back of her throat. She has tried to get an appointment with a doctor – no chance and treated like the return of the anti-Christ.
Appointment to see a doctor? But if he did see my daughter, he would certainly die. No-can-do. No-shall-do. Nothing to see here, move along please.
(Incidentally same story with my dentist).
You can see the auxiliary nurse as long as you only ‘see’ her.
Daughter said ‘have you ever thought about taking a swab of the back of your throat *yourself*? It’s not easy Dad’.
No doctors, no dentists, no opticians but eleven pct employees national insurance and twelve percent employers ‘contributions’ are still plundered from the wage packet.
You’ve got cancer – walk it off son, walk it off.
Save the nhs? What’s there to save?
That lump needs to be checked pronto. Could be a goiter on the thyroid.
Only police in ‘stealth ‘uniforms on the streets, but uniformed police guarding the exits of the farm in Herefordshire to prevent the trailer living people who work there who have been ‘asked’ to remain and isolate from leaving . Not to worry about essential supplies for them though the ‘local authorities’ are to provide food parcels for them , at whose expense I wonder. Welcome to the new ‘English ‘ Normal.