23 Jan 2021
Lockdown sceptic Sir Desmond Swayne MP predicted that unless the government devises an exit strategy for coronavirus restrictions, Britons will “rise up” and demand the laws be changed.
“I think it comes down to this: as hospital admissions decline with the progress of vaccination, the notion that ordinary people are going to be prepared to tolerate going on living like troglodytes in this rediculous way is absurd,” Sir Desmond told talkRADIO host Julia Hartley-Brewer on Friday.
“We were told… that [lockdown] was protecting the NHS [National Health Service] and reducing hospital admissions. As they reduce, the burden of lockdown becomes intolerable,” Sir Desmond said, adding that the government continues to move the goalposts of what influences lockdown.
I’m a victim of unjustified inner-city mask rage
The current rules don t insist on a face covering outside and yet an unsettling encounter with an angry woman made me question everything
22 January 2021 • 7:00am
I’m no snowflake but I do get a bit upset when strangers shout abusively in the street, not least because they might have a knife. Joking. Not joking; inner city gentrification only extends so far.
“Go home!” yelled the woman. I was so clueless I whipped round to see which malfeasant she was addressing. It turned out to be me.
I was walking along a residential road, returning from my daily exercise-cum-dog walk, when the unsettling encounter occurred.
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Fixating on the R number isn’t real science
on data drawbacks
“I’m not sure of the precise alchemical reaction that occurs when a set of conversations is converted into a data point, but what I do know is that they often calcify into something that brooks less dissent. The R number is a snapshot of a set of data-based judgment calls, no more, no less. But for a while it became the apex upon which jobs and lives hinged. Happily it seems the government has started to go cold on scientism. The decision about when to end lockdown will now be based on. well, No 10 hasn’t been entirely clear about that. This is frustrating but it is also a fairer reflection of the scientific reality, which remains far more clouded by doubt than a single data point can portray.”
The inconvenient truth about art – ugly people can create beautiful things
Social media calls to erase Phil Spector and his evil ilk from the canon are impossibly naive – it would be easier to expunge art itself
Phil Spector with his ex wife Ronnie, in the 1960s
Credit: Redferns
Does great art transcend morality? Or, more demotically, can we still listen to The Ronettes now we’ve all been inconveniently reminded that Phil “Wall of Sound” Spector spent his last years in prison for the gratuitous murder of a young actress?
A flurry of social media snowflakes playing catch-up want to cancel the former music producer on the grounds of his heinous crime (which took place in 2003, kids). Admirers of Spector’s pioneering contribution to pop are less hardline: “Hey guys, so he shot a woman but he produced the Beatles’ album Let It Be, wrote River Deep - Mountain High and worked with Leonard Cohen, for chrissakes.”
The reasons why we are optimistic about 2021
After a year to forget, 40 well-known figures tell us why they’re feeling positive about the future
Brighter days will follow
Credit: Illustration: Ellice Weaver for the telegraph
Is there too much negativity in the world? If there is, it’s probably our fault – the media, that is. Famously in the hard-hearted world of journalism, “if it bleeds it leads,” and our tendency to highlight bad news may have made an objectively terrible year seem even worse.
Scary headlines hold our attention because of negativity bias – the human desire not only to seek out bad news but to give it more credence. It’s why people remain scared of plane crashes when 99.99997 per cent of commercial flights land safely, and why the majority of people think extreme poverty is rising when it’s falling fast. (In one survey, only one per cent of respondents knew that it had decreased by half in 20 years. The rest were too pessimistic.)