By any reasonable assessement the UK’s response has to be counted in the “Rubbish” category.
So, Johnson might, or might not (but the circumstantial evidence is a bit damming) spent the weekend in Italy.
Problematic perambulations for Putin’s puppet in Perugia perhaps?
TBH it’s starting to look like Johnson needs to stay in office to stay out of jail.
1 Like
In other news it looks like we’re “looking at options” having finally realised that we bought the wrong satellite company - oops.
There’s certainly a plane that made a flight from Luton to Perugia on 13th September returning to Northolt on 14th.
The story is also here - I can’t read the Torygraph! https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/uk-goverment-could-rejoin-eu-s-galileo-system-1-6848108
… but will the EU allow them to «rejoin» galileo 
«so sorry ol’ bean but our partners have to be in the European club which you just left…»
and
«given your stance on disrespecting internationl law, how could we be certain that you won’t just flounce off again taking all our secrets with you to sell to the ruskies» 
It was Tony Blair who went to Italy not Johnson.
the plot thickens…
If my memory serves me well, the EU said for security reasons the UK could no longer be part of Galileo. Didn’t they? So it’s not a matter of the Government examining anything.
I think that was at least part of it - or, at any rate, that we decided that the agreement that the EU wanted for access to the military grade bits was not one we could enter into.
Just trying to watch the Johnson address. Is he taking the piss?? Damn man looks as if he’s smirking! What a load of hot air and smarminess…put me off my diner… Grrr. Give me a serious Macron address any time!
2 Likes
He,s less believable than his spitting image puppet.
Idiot!
Boris said we will have a world beating satellite system.
2 Likes
He just failed to set the criteria by which we would beat the rest of the world.
Just watched Newsnight so caught up on all the new ‘rules’. I’m getting scared, not sure I can do another year of virtual lockdown if we end up going the same way here.
I find it strange that in both his statement in the HofC and on tv last night that he made multiple references to what has happened in France and Spain like the 2 countries are in a much worse position than the UK yet in France little to be being done to ban crowd gatherings and households mixing etc or have I missed something?
We were discussing it with french friends here, and to me it seems that the french have pushed a lot more responsibility for control downs to local level and are relying on testing being ramped up (more effectively than in UK).
So our local small town now has made mask wearing mandatory in the street, our gym has big préfectoral notice on door about what is and isn’t allowed. And in red zones there are controls on bars, gatherings, restrictions on people visiting etc like in UK. So stuff is being done, but just not a big media fuss about it perhaps?
Aren’t the new restrictions in the UK largely what France has been doing all along?
They are a radical reversal of what the UK government was saying a few weeks ago - when they were encouraging, indeed incentivising people to get back out to the office, bars and restaurants, etc - but France never did this; the new UK restrictions on bars and restaurants - masks, table service, early closing - and the general new mask-wearing requirements, are not dissimilar to what has become the norm here, are they?
The main difference seems to be that France is less inclined to interfere with people’s private lives - family and friends meeting at home, etc - which personally I find a worrying aspect of the UK’s approach.
John, that’s standard UK procedure. I first noticed it in 1982 when I was living in Grenoble. Of course you couldn’t get BBC TV there then but I’d travelled to the UK for some reason and was amazed to see the BBC news reporting some “disaster” in Grenoble which I knew was a complete exaggeration.
I then started to notice that whenever bad news of a certain level is reported on the BBC, it is immediately followed by a worse piece of news (even if exaggerated) from abroad. The strategy as far as I can see is “it’s shit in the UK but it’s shittier in…pick your country.”. Thus the viewer goes off thinking about “the Country” not the state of things at home.
French television used to do the inverse with advertising. After each ad break a cartoon of sorts would play before the programme resumed. The logic was that the last ad to be shown shouldn’t have a disproportionate impact.
So all Johnson was doing was using the tried and tested ploy in “we don’t want to end up like France”. What he should have said was that he and his team managed to kill more people in the last wave that any other country in Europe. That his team is World class at killing people with Covid (and that was before Dido Dolittle was in charge) so follow the rules or we’ll start killing you again.
It might also have been a help if he’d aligned the messages in his speech in the Commons with his TV broadcast and if both of them had supported the panic the Whitty and Valance duo are obviously feeling.
5 Likes