Gavin Williamson, Teachers, Parents, Sanctions, Evidence, the WHO and Zero Community Transmission Strategy - Saving Lives Matters.


Education Secretary Gavin Williamson cites 'harms' for which he does present any reliable evidence, in order to argue for reopening schools before Easter, even as community transmission levels are above the levels they were on March 23rd 2020. 

The reason for this is simple enough. He knows exactly what harms his atrocious governance and policy has caused, and he cannot cite those harms without incriminating himself, as outlined in a recent National Audit Report. Once again we see the tactic of citing the harms caused by bad management of the epidemic to argue the case for worse management rather than best management - zerocovid.uk
Bylinetimes described it well :

“This report confirms what parents and teachers have known for a year: that a whole generation of children and young people have been let down by an Education Secretary who lurched from one crisis to the next, wreaking havoc on their lives,” Daisy Cooper, Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Education, said.

“From the free school meal U-turns, the ‘A’ Level grading fiasco, the shamefully slow roll-out of laptops, the botched schools re-opening plans, and the failure to take decisive action on this year’s exams, Gavin Williamson is the worst Education Secretary in England in a generation. He’s made such a hash of it, it is quite frankly beyond comprehension that he’s still in post.”

Meanwhile, Meg Hillier, Labour chair of the Commons Public accounts Committee, said that, with no contingency plan, the Department for Education’s reaction was slower and less effective than it could have been.

“DfE’s failure to do its homework has come at the expense of children – and has hit those who were already disadvantaged the hardest,” she said. “DfE must now ensure its support is properly targeted to prevent the gap between disadvantaged children and their peers from widening even further.”

 Mr. Williamson claims that 'children are falling behind due to being out of school' even though we know that remote learning has been operating efficiently and for many, many primary schools and secondary schools it has been effective, given the circumstances.  he cites no numbers, no qualitative or quantitative survey data to prop up his case. 

"Although based on self-reported views, the findings from our YouGov survey show that three-fifths of the teachers responding were quite confident that they were providing a high-quality education through their school’s remote education solution when this was needed.


 In addition, just over half were confident their solution was sustainable for the future. On this basis, it is likely that a large proportion of schools in England providing a remote solution are doing well at mitigating the amount of learning loss that children experience"

source : https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/remote-education-research/remote-education-research

What we do know is that where there are difficulties it is most often due to a lack of resources and funding, localised poverty and deprivation. The Government promise to provide laptops to all families experiencing poverty never materialised,  as did the promise to provide free broadband to the poorest families to assist with remote learning.  The fact that £22 billion can be set aside as a budget for an inadequate contact tracing system and a testing system equally inadequate suggests Government inertia and disdain rather than technical difficulty as the underlying reasons for these failures to provide for remote learning.

The reason families in poverty are having difficulty with remote learning then is beyond mere attendance at school and this speaks to the Conservative Governments historical and generalised approach to the children of poorer families - they can do with minimal support, they can endure using foodbanks, they don't 'deserve' free school meals and as a demographic their parents are to be dehumanised in media as work-shy scroungers, and a burden on the tax payer - thus Williamson cites harms caused by Conservative policy which the Government has refused to address. Gaslighting again, Mr. Williamson!

We know most schools are open for vulnerable and at-risk children and for the children of key workers, all of whom are benefiting from smaller class sizes and the extra attention they gain as a result. Teachers are doing superb work in this regard. 

We also know that teaching staff are working flat out to provide remote tuition, and the vast majority of children and parents at home are succeeding in meeting the curriculum time tables. 
We know that teaching staff in schools are feeding, counselling, clothing and nurturing vulnerable children at every turn and doing a very fine job under very difficult circumstances not of their own making, when all other social services are hampered by the repeated shut down cycles. 

Parents are doing superbly, for the most part. For everyone these are indeed trying times, made more trying be the deliberate inadequacies of this Conservative and Unionist Government, behaving as an elective dictatorship.

It bears repeating - the evidenced harms the Education Minister does not cite in his gaslighting approach to the welfare of students, teachers and parents are many. These unmentioned harms are indeed caused by the proven bad management of the epidemic for which he and his Cabinet colleagues are wholly responsible and thus his current proposition is to argue for worse management rather than argue for better management of the epidemic.

He is not arguing for approaching a zero community transmission status. In fact he and his colleagues have dismissed any discussion of attempting to approach a zero community transmission status, in spite of advice and expertise from the global science, virology, epidemiology and public health community and World Health Organisation and partners. They dismissed zero covid in parliament because to discuss it is to reveal the central weakness in their stance since January 2020. They are not following science or evidence at all. Their position is ideological, seeking political gains, enhancing their powers over duty of care for the lives and well being of the citizens.

1. Gavin Williamson is demanding that all children return to schools, and that schools be run fully open. He is demanding that all remote tuition be ceased in order to coerce this move. He is demanding that Schools fine and penalise parents who refuse to bring their children to schools that we all know are unsafe. That is bullying. 

He is using the institutional power of the Office of Education Secretary to impose these conditions.

He claims the power to enforce attendance lies with Local Authorities and Heads, not with the Government, exploiting the sanction based legislation governing school rolls and attendance which government has imposed - which the government set aside during the shutdowns. Cake and eat it, he likes.

2. He is demanding they do this when community transmission is above the levels recorded in March 23rd 2020 when the first Lock-down was imposed, a lock down that was made necessary by the Governments failure to limit community transmission of the virus. That guarantees future spread. That is profoundly irresponsible and dangerous.

3. He is demanding that children, who are proven spreaders of the virus, (through no fault of their own) be exposed to the virus, which will carry the virus to their families, to teachers and to other students, some of whom will develop symptoms, 20% of whom will be asymptomatic and thus unaware of their status as transmitters of the virus. This is assured to lead to surges within 4 to six weeks, with the attendant illnesses, fatalities and another shut down to prevent uncontrolled transmission surging through the affected communities..

4. He is claiming a majority of children are falling behind, but he cannot cite the evidence to support that claim as it incriminates him and his policies this past year. Thus he is misleading in public to push a bad policy.

5. Mike Ryan in the WHO Live Q&A broadcast on March 3rd was unequivocal that we must look to countries where the levels of community transmission are low, where they are on top of the virus, where deaths and illness are kept very low as exemplars of the correct strategy in managing and suppressing the virus and bringing local epidemics and the global pandemic under control.

6. Boris Johnson  and his entire Cabinet are deliberately ignoring the evidence. They are individually and collectively responsible for the excess fatalities and all other costs that their policy choices have caused.

7. Is it not the case that in order to protect children, adults, elders and the vulnerable, the NHS frontline workers and ancillary staff and shop staff and all others that we therefore need to stop this government from implementing it's current inhumane policy which is causing so much harm?

8. Is it not the case that we need to bring in a government of national unity to implement an efficient, humane zero community transmission policy so that we can end these cycles of shutdown, open up, shutdown, open up and bring our economy and social system back to a more balance state as Vietnam and New Zealand and the Governments of 1.8 billion people across East Asia have ably demonstrated this past 12 months?

9. The coercion being deployed against parents, students is carefully laid out by a barrister, Mark McDonald. This is a hugely important matter. The stress imposed upon hundreds of thousands of parents is one thing. The combination of existing legislated school registration sanction regimes with Government intransigence is really unjust. Using those sanction regimes to coerce parents whose genuine wish is to protect their children and relatives, especially CV and CEV cases is inhumane.

There are examples of clear cut cases of bullying tactics being deployed against genuinely concerned parents.






Kindest regards

Corneilius

 "Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

Being biologically male or female is an accident of conception - time we got over it, don't you think?

In the most simple terms, I am a person before all else.

All the cultural labels are imposed upon the person and they form a cultural persona - a mask, a veil worn for approval and through dull habituation internalised - thus 'fitting in' to a hierarchically violent cult. Babies are people, persons from the get go. We all are. Rather than externalise our emergent selves, we are forced to endured internalisation of the cult's approved proxies.



My maleness is an accident. Of conception. Of something that happened in the womb. Nothing I did. It just happened that way.  
Nonetheless I am a man. Male body.

When I was a late teen I recognised in myself, within, that I was 'androgynous' in that I was neither male nor female as played out by those around me, in the character of my mind and psyche. Or at least when I discovered the word 'androgynous' and put it into that context I felt it made sense of my inner reality. I did not feel the roles laid out by culture fit within me. I could not talk about 'women' the way other men did. I wanted to meet minds. I was interested in bodies too, and shy with that, yet it it was the mind that I was really interested in. The person. Who are you, what do you think?
And because I did not understand that the discomfort I felt (around culturally imposed male and female roles) and behaviours was accurate I thought that there had to be something wrong with me, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not internalise those values. I have always felt deeply uncomfortable around the typical male - female behavioural dynamic. When members of either biological sex talk of the others as if they were another species I always felt something was deeply wrong.
I think I need to get over it. I am not the only one. Women are not a separate species, a mystery. Women are person, minds embodied. So here goes. I now understand that those cultural imposed conditioned roles are intrusions into the psyche of the person, they are what we call part of poisonous pedagogy.
Poisonous pedagogy, in Katharina Rutschky's definition, aims to inculcate a social superego in the child, to construct a basic defence against drives in the child's psyche, to toughen the child for later life, and to instrumentalise the body parts and senses in favour of socially defined functions.
There's a long history of culturally male behaviour that punishes women for not complying with male demands for sex as if access to women's bodies was some kind of inherent right. Incels are one expression of that. Women as chattels is another. Pornography has elements of that too. Eroticism less so. The idea that masturbation is not really sex. The bluster that penetration is an expression of that 'right to sex' by virtue of phenotype that is entirely a cultural construct.

There is no inherent right to sex with anyone other than oneself. There is a need, indeed, but it is primarily for intimacy and for procreation - and even so it must be governed by informed egalitarian consent unsullied by any form of power differential, formal or informal. We see a long of anger in the male culture, a lot of pain around this. We see a lot of punishment of women around this. It is there. It cannot be denied or played down. The impacts are too vast, too disruptive of conviviality, mutualism and collective coherence. I do not feel in any way diminished when a majority of women protest - "too many men, too many times, too much impunity". I know they are not talking about me. I get how they must feel. Not least because of what my close female friends have disclosed and what I have seen myself, and how I have intervened at different times in my life to stop harassment and abuse. I do not feel the need to say 'not all men'. At all.

----

Being biologically male or female is :

a) an accident of conception, yet not in the same what that the class one is of is an accident of birth. Class is created by a hierarchy cult. It is not natural at all. Class is artificially imposed. Obviously the Hierarchs hold that class is natural. They have to believe that or their self assured stated withers before their eyes. Being biologically male or female is :

b) really easy, I don't have to do anything at all. Being proud of it is silly. Humility is a more accurate approach.

c) Avoiding the dominant culturally imposed definitions of what maleness/femaleness means is difficult. That is something to be proud of, glad of. It is difficult. It is scary. And yet it must be done to become the full person I am. My body and mind is in evolutionary terms so much older than this dominator culture, by a million years or more. Personhood is older than this culture. Personhood is deeper than anything this culture has ever philosophised. I laugh at the history of Philosophy mostly for it's lack of sensitivity. Way too serious, not playful. Not like my being at all. Where is the philosophy of nurture?

d) I experience my natural personhood as asexual, non gendered and I feel this sense of self is way more sensitive than the dominator cultural value sets delineate. Super alive. Super alive to the world and to feeling. Super sensitive. Playful. Creative. Joyous. Kind. Vulnerable. My music is not male. My writings are not male. They are both of the person I am. And when I feel maleness and this male sexuality, I delight in it, on my own and with my partners. It's got nothing to do with anyone until I consent. It's nobody's business. Until I choose to invite contact and that is always in the context of the other person. It's personal, it's person to person.

e) The struggle or discord between that natural ancient evolutionary base - the person - and the cultural overlay - the persona - is immense and intense and it is a taboo subject. The cultural overlay is a wound.

I internalised an identity given to me by a bully cult. It never fits. I have never been comfortable with that inside me. I have learned that it is not of me, does not belong with me. I decide what maleness means in as much as I am a person, who just happens to be male, and the maleness is a small part of me, it is not the whole of me, not by any stretch. Maleness is an aspect of my body and how that relates through my personhood is for me to define, to decide. Emergent.

f) I think there are many culturally conditioned males who are taking it personally when women are speaking as persons in such large numbers demanding that this misogyny, this unwanted attention, harassment and sexualised violence that is happening as a daily occurrence in so many lives MUST STOP. Now! I also know there are bullies and professional predators who are gaming all of this, for power. They are grooming the cultured males and females for political, economic and psychological advantage. I know there are cultured males and females who do see the wound of this behaviour and want it to stop and are confused as to why it is happening at all. I get that some feel a strong male or female identity and that it's a big part of who they are. I hope it is emergent for them, rather than a cultural internalisation. All of us are caught between a rock and a hard place within the culture that is a hierarchy of power and violence.

f) I think that there is a fear to see the wound that the women are drawing attention to. And I think it is in part that for culturally indoctrinated men to see it, to be really honest here, to submit to the truth as it really is to lose that culturally imposed identity, that internalised value set of the good male, or the bad male, whatever - it was not what I was born with, but by golly it is who I am now - is something can be perceived as, or imagined as a loss of self, a dissolution, a death of sorts.

When it's a liberation. It IS a liberation. To be truly male is to nurture.

g) What if we are not really men, not really women, we are really persons, and we need to meet and live as persons in order to deal with this dreadful wound?

h) How much of the dominant culture collapses in that realisation?
Boys! Our maleness is an accident. Of conception. Of something that happened in the womb. Nothing you did. It just happened that way.

I think we need to get over it. Free our minds. Our hearts. Come home to who we really are. You do know there is no such thing as a male brain, a male liver, a male kidneys, or even male lungs?

Kindest regards 

Corneilius 


 "Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

"It is too many men, too much of the time" , with too much impunity - it is the culture we live in.

If, as a male, a man, a person and my response or reaction to the calls of women on the issue of sexual harassment, sexual abuse, misogyny and gender prejudice is 'it's not all men" and if I make that statement to defend myself, if I make that statement because I feel personally insulted, slighted, labelled or that I am being made the object of prejudice, as one of a class, then it's pretty certain that I am missing the point.

More importantly it's clear that my reaction is about me, rather than the quality of the welfare, the health and and the safety of women who live with being mistreated by many men, within a culture of misogyny and sexism. women. Which is missing the point. I'm not the point here. The lived experience of women. Matters.


 A woman wanted to speak at the band stand and was impeded by police action.

The women have not said that it is all men, they have said it is too many men, too much of the time, with too much impunity.  Black Lives Matter do not say it is all white people, they said it is too many Racist police, too much of the time with too much impunity. And that is a fair point, because it is true. There are too many Racist policemen causing harm to black citizens because they hold wildly inaccurate views about Race, and too many of those who get away with the harm they are causing.

It is too many women, who too often endure gendered, sexist and sexualised abuse and never receive justice within a patriarchy rooted social power system.

Too many men, too much of the time, with too much impunity. It's not aimed at me, as a personal attack.

I know I am not that kind of person. and that it has nothing to do with the accident of my maleness.

Yes, I did not chose my born sex, nor did I chose the role dynamics the culture imposes.  It's an accident of birth. I can choose to reject those culturally imposed values and I do. Because the culture that imposes those 'values' is a rooted in patriarchal violence and bullying. I saw through that a long time ago.

That said,  I do und erstand that when meeting a woman who does not know me, that if her lived experience has shown her that some men are predators, that some men can make a predatory move when it is least expected, and that there is no accurate measure or means to predict this, and she has been hurt, wounded, terrorised by that behaviour, and she knows other women have similar experiences such that it is common place, then she will be wary of me. Well yes, of course.

If I were in her shoes, I'd be wary too.

I have been assaulted a number of times. I understand. I don't fully know what it is like to be subject to uninvited stares, sexual advances, lewd comments, 'banter' day in day out. It can't be comfortable.

-----

The men who react with "it's not all men!" have not heard the majority of women cry "It is all men!"

There may be a few women who do make that assertion. They are a minority. Elevating them to the majority in defence of a fragile sense of maleness is a logical error, and it is also a tactical play generated by the bully culture, the macho culture, the authoritarian culture. It's important to not to fall for that tactic.

"It's not all men!"  means that I am not listening and I am not hearing what is being said, and instead I am taking it personally. That aligns me away from the women who are making a fair and honest statement.

That inadvertently aligns me as a bystander, a faux neutral position that flows with the abusers and with the abuse system itself. Even if I oppose the abusers with all my heart. Unless I do so with action, I am mute.

I really must just listen to the women, and hear them, and be with that for a while. I need to understand that because most men are not active in confronting misogyny it continues. Just as most 'White' people are not actively confronting Racism, it continues. 

What women want is my fullest empathy, moral, practical and active support to confront this awful systemic misogyny. 

It is partly because I am a Survivor of childhood abuse and violence, and have also survived three physical attacks on my person in adulthood that I join with these women and say to those who are misogynists, sexual predators, gender bullies and otherwise violent men - there are too many of you, and what you do afflicts us all, too much of the time. Enough is enough. As a man I disavow your behaviour as evidence of maleness or of masculinity. It's abuse, that is all it is. Nothing more than abuse. Ugly. Dysfunctional. Harmful. Abuse.

The issue of dealing with too many men, too much of the time causing harm to women with such degrees of impunity  is also a Cultural Problem, because it is too many men, too much of the time.

And in that sense, the ubiquity of this harmful behavioural pattern means that all men and all women living within the culture are involved in this. 

Some men, too many men, are predators and bullies, other men are bystanders, they watch and do nothing, others are willing to stand with the victimised and the oppressed and a few are actively working to prevent the harm, by education, by presence, by their own learning and by seeking to enact better legislation and better practices in all areas this problem affects.

A cultural problem.

It is a cultural problem in that most incidents of sexual abuse are not reported and often that is because when they are reported, formally or informally, most reports of sexual abuse do not lead to justice. 

It is a cultural problem in that most police forces are still inadequately trained in trauma informed responses to this kind of harm causation being reported. It is a cultural problem in that known abusers of women can be elected into the highest positions of power in any democracy.

It is a cultural problem, in that the most honest histories are those that record the insight of ordinary folk who live through whatever historical patterns are driven by the decisions of the powerful -  the lived experience of those most harmed by Power tells the truth that Power dares not utter, and we see quite clearly that the Establishment narrative is blind to the truth of the lived experience. 

Johnson claims hundreds of thousands of avoidable fatalities from an infectious disease is a 'world beating' success. Keir Starmer decries the organic removal of Statues that celebrate historical abusers. Tony Blair claims Iraq is better of without Saddam Hussein, having caused more harm than Saddam Hussein could possibly have caused in Iraq and beyond. Osborne claims Austerity is a necessity. Iain Duncan Smith claims Universal Credit is a benign benefit system whilst extolling the need for sanctions against poor, disabled and vulnerable people to nudge them into better behaviour. Johnson claims the British Empire was a good experience for the world. His father claims that over population is the problem, and that the ideal population for England is 12 million.

Establishment history is a dishonest cultural hagiography.

The British Empire was a force for good. Invading Iraq was about bringing Democracy to the Middle East. The Hillsborough Fans were drunk and disorderly and caused their own deaths. The Police Forces are innocents, doing their very best to protect and serve the communities. These are all well known establishment lies promoted as truth.

Feminism?

Women joining in in the systemic abuse of Power already entrenched and dominated by a Patriarchy is not Feminism, it is not equity. 

It is compliance with and enabling of the Patriarchy systemic abuse system. In posing as Feminism it is another culturally approved establishment lie.

The so called glass ceiling is, de facto, a see through lid on the coffin of the natural and equitable aspiration of women and men who genuinely work towards an egalitarian culture. Theresa May, Priti Patel  and Cressida Dick are part of the power structure, they are not a challenge to the power structure nor do they confront problems of this power culture in any way, shape or form.

The Culture of Power

The policing of the vigil on Clapham Common is a case in point.  

A young woman disappears on a routine walk at late evening night time. The young woman was abducted off the streets of London. Calls go out to locate her. 

Then it is discovered, a week later, that she was abducted by a serving police officer, who was already known to be an serial sexual harasser and yet was still able to wear the uniform, do shifts.

When it became clear that he murdered this young woman, there arose an emergent sense of disgust, outrage and anger that became a coalescence of the feeling among women, who as a class are exposed to so much sexualised abuse that they feel oppressed within this culture  A feeling not alleviated in any way by the sheer frequency of harassment and assault, the rareness of a conviction when they report, the lightness of sentencing and a general indifference by bystander men to their plight.

Spend a day reviewing the statistics on ONS. Spend a day listening to women tell you the truth of their lived experience. There is a cultural problem here. 

Witness

A Vigil was called to express grief at the loss of another young life, to express a collective solidarity with all women who experience sexualised assault, who are subjected to physical, psychological and emotional harm at the hands of too many men, too much of the time, and for whom justice and prevention are a foreign land, bordered by a male dominated patriarchy on permanent guard duty.

The London Metropolitan Police, advised by the Home Office, objected. On the grounds of protecting people from spreading the virus. Whilst schools are forced to re-open without the necessary systems in place to detect and suppress outbreaks. Laughable. Irrational when subjected to a critical analysis.

The Vigil people went to court to assert their right to hold a well organised, covid19 safe Vigil. The Court asserted that the Vigil was indeed lawful, that the organisers had proven they could manage it in a covid19 secure manner, and that the London MetPol interpretation of covid19 regulations as permitting them to ban the vigil  was in error and thus unlawful.  


What a respectful Vigil looks like. Even without organisation. Just women calmly grieving.

source : New York Times

The organisers had 1 steward for every 30 attendees. They had PA systems and all the infrastructure to manage the Vigil well. Local Police (Lambeth) and Council agreed. The Home Office and Scotland Yard dissented.  The MetPol conceded the point in court, and then withdrew from the case in order to avoid a court declaration that the Vigil could proceed - they did this to allow for their own 'discretion'. 

They still opposed the Clapham Common Vigil. 

Media reported that as a stalemate. That was not quite true. It was more a matter of London MetPol stonewalling a legitimate gathering, using clever tactics to leave open an act of discretionary policing.

Tactics to obscure the truth, to mute the voices of survivors.

I remind readers of the recent tactical settling a case of unfair dismissal against a senior civil servant that would, if it had been allowed to proceed, proven that the Home Secretary had bullied her staff and others below her in rank. The settlement meant she could avoid the truth being publicised. A bit like the Vatican settling with survivors of child sexual abuse by clerics. "Here's some cash, take it or we will make your life hell. Good, take it and now just Sshhhsssshhut up!"

"We have an image and status to protect!" and Institutions will and do use every tactic to do that.

The London Met Police did not stand with the women who grieve in public - they did not openly criticise the murderous man who was a team member, a team player, one of their own, they do not decry alpha male ideology, they do not train in empathy and de-escalation, and they do not prevent sexual harassment and assault. They do close ranks when ever one of their own is exposed as an abusive bully.

"How many bad apples in that barrel, Inspector?" 

"You knew he was abusive?" 

"None of your business!"

The organisers of the Vigil proceeded to cancel the Clapham Common event, and others then moved ahead with well organised Vigils elsewhere in England, Wales and Scotland. They all went really well, and as far as we know they were facilitated with sensitivity. 





Bristol

Compare and Contrast


Rangers: No arrests at Ibrox as police urge fans to follow Covid restrictions.

Apart from the Vigil on Clapham Common.

That Vigil was a respectful gathering, and it was exercised without the infrastructure the RTS organisers had been ready to put in place. Police were told that, even as the RTS organisers used all means to cancel their Vigil, used their extensive media and online presence to communicate that their participation as an organiser would not go forward, that it would not prevent people who are grieving and upset and angry from gathering. The Police acknowledged that.

Therefore it looks very much like the Police tactic was to let the gathering happen, then to use force to break it up which, given the context of the court hearing and rulings, looks like a deliberate set up.

People gathered in the late afternoon, in daylight. Peacefully, respectfully.

People in the out doors with masks, taking care to reduce virus transmission to a minimum.

A peaceful and genuine Vigil, a public prayer meeting of sorts, that was an act of respectful, grieving solidarity. It was outdoors, people were all masked and everyone was being respectful.

"No, it's not all men. 

It is too many men, too often. 

It is too many women, too often."

The London MetPol could have stood by, they could have chosen to facilitate the gathering, they could have stayed there all night, in rotating shifts, to ensure that no harm would come to anyone.

They could have done that. Given the circumstance they really ought to have done that.

Think of the PR coup that might have represented. The Police standing with the people!

The London MetPol could have demonstrated solidarity with these women, these men, and thus by practical means have publicly condemned their team mate (and any others like him, lurking behind the cover of uniforms and institutional defence lawyers) and shown that they too stand with the people, as the protectors of the people.

Their Command chose not to do that.  They waited. Until it was dark. As people wanted to hear the speakers on the bandstand some moved in closer.  Social Distancing was reduced. Masks were being worn. People were chanting.



Witness: 


Writing in Bylinetimes Sian Norris gathered evidence of what happened during the Vigil on Saturday evening.

“There were more and more police around the bandstand and then they marched single-file into the bandstand,” she added. “That moment felt very uncomfortable. Very unnecessary. And it was not clear at all from a close bystander’s point of view why they were doing it.”

Flora told Byline Times that it was this moment when things started to shift. 

“Nothing was kicking off – it was very static, the atmosphere was unpleasant but nothing was changing,” she said. “Then, all of a sudden, they filed in – almost as if they had decided enough was enough, ‘let’s move things on’. They intervened and it changed because of their actions.” 

Sophia witnessed the police move onto the bandstand, “making themselves the focal point of our hurt and sadness,” she said. “Everyone was looking at the bandstand and then suddenly we were all looking at the police. I turned around and the police had also moved in behind this. We were caged in.”

“It was quite intimidating for the crowd,” said Katie.

Sisters Uncut said: “It’s important to be clear that the anger was felt in our bodies. It was not one we enacted. The people who were aggressive and weaponising anger were the police.”

Other Agendas

While the vast majority of women and men had come to Clapham Common, and to similar impromptu vigils across the UK, to pay their respects to women who have been killed and to make a statement against gender-based violence, “there were people there who hadn’t come to fight for women’s rights or against state violence,” Katie told Byline Times

“That really upset me,” she said, describing how some male attendees were aggressive towards the police or vandalised police vehicles. “It took away from what was happening.” 

This was typified by a man who took to the bandstand to give an uninvited speech against lockdown and the police more widely.

“The first person to speak was a man – no one asked him to,” Katie said. “People started chanting ‘not your place’.”

“As I was leaving, it became apparent that a lot of people were arriving who weren’t there for the reason I was,” Coleman said.

So what we see here is that there were people within the setting who were hijacking the event, (more about that below). People, men,  whose publicly stated opinions, beliefs and attitudes feed into more spread of the virus - anti-lockdown, anti-zerocovid,  which is aligned with the reality in outcome terms of UK Government strategic position - Herd Immunity is the way out of the Epidemic - and the Police, who are an arm of Government using force to break up a Vigil, claiming to wish to prevent the spread of the virus, whilst also citing the behaviour of the people who were hijacking the event, all co-inciding as part of the news and online media led protection of the policing as it was handled.

Power not wisdom.

What reason, what exactly gave the police the excuse to push through the crowd and break up the gathering on the bandstand, with 'reasonable force', in order 'to prevent spread of the virus'?

A gathering of mostly women, mostly in quiet mournful respect, quiet enough to listen to a non amplified female voice speaking from the bandstand, all wearing masks, all outdoors?

Was that a wise move? Who ordered it, on what basis?

Or was it because within the culture of power, to urge to be dominant (which is the driver of sexualised assault) also drives the command chain. Impose your will. Assert the Power of the command chain, from Home Office to the streets. The Home Secretary's power will not be challenged!

Compulsory Education is every child's introduction to the realities of Institutional Hierarchy, Authority and Power. 

You are compelled to be educated.

Compelled by a greater power than any parent or child can muster. Dominance.

No Child Left Behind.

Compulsion Education instructs children what to think, in ways that ensure that they never learn how to think. School children who leave secondary school and who do not know what the English Civil War was about. School children who leave secondary school and who do not know what their Human Rights are, and why and how they are enshrined in Law. School children who leave secondary school and who do not know that Racism was invented, as a legal instrument, in Virginia in 1681. That's just irresponsible in educational terms.

That is the utilitarian instrumentalization of education as a part of how oppressive bully cultures function.

Self education is every child's responsibility - removing that response ability by coercion is key to the maintenance of the bully cult. 

Bullying in schools.

1 in 5 school children in England report being bullied on School premises in 2018.

Compulsory Education is key to maintaining the practices of nationalist indoctrination, is key to sustaining the myth of a benign patriarchy and essential to the inculcation of approved gender role identifications and behaviours that separate men and women as persons, and classifies us as separate genders, with exclusive  lingo, behaviour and memes rather than unite us as persons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisonous_pedagogy

"Poisonous pedagogy, in Katharina Rutschky's definition, aims to inculcate a social superego in the child, to construct a basic defense against drives in the child's psyche, to toughen the child for later life, and to instrumentalize the body parts and senses in favor of socially defined functions. " Boy's don't dry. 

Thus compulsory education is a toxic mime of self directed education and it serves to undermine the person in favour of approved persona. Look to the celebrity role models. Persona. Images. Faux Reality.

Power and powerlessness entrenched by disempowering dynamic structures.

Hence the inability of parents, teachers and students to unite even as they are being abused by Government and News Media in the midst of an epidemic. Gavin Williamson bullies millions of people by virtue of the Office he holds and gets away with repeat offences that cause thousands of deaths.  The Media refuse to confront his obvious gaslighting. Starmer refuses that analysis and supports the Government.

Power

Sexualised Assault, Misogyny and Racism are all extreme bullying behaviours rooted in false premises. 

"I have a right to your female body because I have a Penis, Men are Superior to Women, White skinned people are Superior to Black skinned people, Disabled people are freaks, the Poor are lazy." All falsehoods.

This is all about power, a pecking order of who exercises power over others.

Co-opting the Vigil 

Bylinetimes published an article showing how some of the people attending the Vigil had other agenda's to promote, exploiting the situation for their political viewpoints. Anti-lockdown, anti-vaxxer, right Libertarians among them.

"Toby Young, general secretary of the Free Speech Union and editor of the Lockdown Sceptics site, has also used the events of Saturday night to promote an anti-lockdown narrative. 

Writing on Lockdown Sceptics, he said that the people criticising the police response were “the very same people who’ve enthusiastically supported the lockdowns, including the suspension of the right to protest, and who’ve condemned anti-lockdown protestors for being ‘selfish’ and ‘irresponsible’”. Young stated that the arrests of women in Clapham “were on you”.

A woman who attended Saturday’s vigil told Byline Times that the Metropolitan Police’s decision not to engage with the grassroots organisers of the event was, in part, responsible for how she believed it could be co-opted by those with different agendas.

“When the Metropolitan police refused to work with the organisers, and the organisers stepped back, that left a vacuum which was filled by people who had a different agenda,” she said.


Again the dishonesty of those who claim to oppose abuse of power yet whose own actions amount to an abuse of their position, status and power that favours more abuses of power is made clear. Misogyny is shameless.

We want to change the culture?

Tell the children the truth. Stop lying to the boys and girls.

Prevent people like Michael Gove and Gavin Williamson from leveraging institutional power to cause harm to our children, our teachers, our families.

Tell the truth about Power Hierarchy. Tell the truth about Oligarchy, Plutocracy, Externalised Costs, Patriarchy, Racism, Conquest, Misogyny and Gender Roles.

Make telling lies in Parliament a criminal offence, with a mandatory custodial sentence. Make publishing misinformation and lies as 'News' a criminal offence.

Thus we will be better situated to prevent the youth growing into the kinds of dysfunctional adults that are exploited by power, to sustain power over the people. Ensure children leave school equipped with critical analysis and thinking skills.

Brexit, the parachute that opens on impact - Brexit was of course a vast political grooming exercise, exploiting vulnerable people, exploiting people who lack accurate information. Austerity was a national scale act of deliberate abuse of vulnerable people, protected by gaslighting the public about lack of Government funds due to 'debt', which was a lie.

Zero Community Transmission is dismissed as 'impossible' - that is a lie.
 
Critical thinking would make such lies unlikely to survive more than a few days at most.

There is no truly single issue - there is one cultural issue, we are ruled over by bullies. That fact distorts all of our lives. 

Tell the truth.

The truth is essential to the Working of Mutual Democracy.  WMD.

Obviously lacking an equitable voice across English Institutional Power, obviously lacking an equitable voice in the English News Media, nonetheless the truth of the lived experience of the powerless is everywhere among the decent people, who stand apart from the minority of bullies, the politically groomed, the woo woo woolly eyed, the nativists, the xenophobes, the Racists and the misogynists who largely defer to the systems of power, who walk in our midst.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.

https://patreon.com/corneilius

https://www.reverbnation.com/corneilius

https://www.corneilius.net

https://www.soundcloud.com/coreluminous

COVID-19 : Opinion is lethal, Evidence saves lives.



The World Health Organisation and many other eminent expert bodies are saying that the COVID19 Pandemic is still a long way from being dealt with, 15 months on from the first proven cases of the disease.

Estimates vary depending on who is presenting a narrative and where they are presenting from.

People in New Zealand and Australia are more confident of an end to the pandemic than people in USA, Germany or UK. People across East Asia are confident they will remain with low fatalities, yet are not so confident the pandemic will cease in the West and other places where zero community transmission is not chosen as a strategy, anytime soon. This chart lays out in bleak lines the background to the variance of opinion. It is of course incomplete, and does not reflect the full scope of the situation. It is indicative. 

More cases is always the result of increased transmission, lower cases is always the result of lowered transmission. It is that simple.


source for this graphic : zerocovid.uk

Right now, as I am typing, zero community transmission strategies are protecting the lives and economies of 1.8 billion people across East Asia and Oceania. In these countries deaths from COVID-19 have been kept to a minimum. In these countries they have not been subjected to repeated National level shutdowns.  In these countries the people's economies are robust and thriving, given the global circumstances. These are the effects of zero community transmission strategies.

Granted international tourism is shut down. International passenger travel is shut down.  Some people's livelihoods in  tourism are adversely impacted, and they are mostly getting support from their governments to get through the pandemic.

Across East Asia and Oceania children are attending school, young adults are attending universities,  the bars and restaurants are open,  local tourism is open,  shopping malls are open. Weddings, funerals and wakes are happening. Life goes on, pretty much as 'normal'.

1.8 billion people.

Protected by an evidence led set of strategies, without the utility of a vaccine.

People still wear masks. People living in East Asia and New Zealand are aware that any outbreak that occurs must be suppressed, and they are well are informed and fully engaged thus when outbreaks do emerge, they and their Governments, local and national, take the appropriate action and suppress the transmission until all cases are traced, all contacts quarantined, the ill are given best possible treatment and all of this is carried out until the virus dies out due to finding no new hosts.

Zero Community Transmission not complicated, it is complex, it is expensive yet cheaper than high fatalities, high long covid rates and repeated economic shocks - it is epidemiology and public health practice at its best, and it is not an extreme set of actions and behaviours, it is mostly a matter of common and collective caring. 

It is not rocket science.

Right now, in the USA and UK and EU and Brazil, a different set of strategies are being deployed and these strategies and policies have caused millions of avoidable horrific deaths, millions of avoidable long term chronic disease cases (1 in 10 of all disease level infections), vast economic harms all of which have disproportionally impacted and afflicted the low income, the poor, the destitute, the chronically unwell and the vulnerable and disabled cohorts of their populations.

Evidence ignored, opinion and belief promoted, every single wheel re-invented turned out to be square, appalling death tolls, long term sequalae for hundreds of thousands of people, vast economic harms.

These slow spread herd immunity strategies are causing immense psychological and emotional harm to hundreds of millions of people through badly managed lockdowns, followed by openings, surges of transmission  and yet more lockdowns, with no end in sight and barely 20% of the UK population  (where I live) exposed to the virus, as these governments push their populations towards a mythical herd immunity in order to 'protect the economy'. It's utter nonsense to claim they are protecting their economies with these strategies.

These strategies have cause wholly avoidable economic damage - from small businesses to self employed, from the live entertainment industry to international tourism we see millions of job losses, businesses going to the wall, entire industries failing.

Here, in the UK where I live, rocket science is nowhere to be seen, and neither is common sense epidemiology. 

There is a pattern where those in power and others online cite the harms caused by bad management to argue for worse management rather than better management as in epidemiologically sound, proven and reliable zero community transmission strategies.

Behavioural Science, Data Modelling and Economics.

Government Scientists and Advisor cite behavioural science and data modelling as the source of their policy strategies. They do not cite epidemiology, they do not cite virology and they do not cite best practice public health.  The UK Government have claimed all along that they are protecting the British Economy, that "having a strong economy is the best way to ensure a strong National Health Service".

They are failing even in that simplistic task.

Here where I live we have seen multiple waves, shutdowns followed by opening up while community is active, followed by shutdowns as hospitals are over whelmed, and the death toll rises. Cycles of death and harm, all totally avoidable. Yes, the NHS has managed to deal with being pushed to it's limits again, but at the cost of the general service that it provides. Meanwhile American insurance firms buy up local health providers paving the road of insurance schemers 'good intentions'.

Each and every death by covid19 is a horrific, tortured death. 140,000 and rising horrible, painful and very stressed lonely deaths. 

Long Covid is estimated to affect 1 in ten of disease level cases. 

Asymptomatic cases account for 20% of infections, and these people spread the infection without knowing they are doing so. 

There is, within the UK, no effective localised contact trace system.

There is, within the UK,  no effective, localised quarantine support system.

There is, within the UK,  no effective, localised isolation treatment system.

Some people are being paid to not go to work, others must work and be exposed to risks because they are 'key workers' - shop staff, services staff, police, fire brigade, ambulance, sanitation staff, meat processing staff, Amazon staff, factory workers and builders, and many others.

And there are others who are forced to work because the economic support systems are inadequate for low wage earners - people who are low earners who become symptomatic choose to work because the support for quarantine is inadequate, slow and cumbersome. Food banks are feeding hundreds of thousands of families. The charities and their workers are forced to take risks.

This week, 8th March, 2021, we see the UK Government coercing students, parents and teachers to return to fully open schools whilst community transmission is at levels above 23rd March 2020 when the first shutdown was imposed. 

A year later we see no shift to an evidence based epidemiologically sound strategy. A year  later we see the continuation of policy options that are causing avoidable fatalities and long term harms to the people of the UK and to our economies.

The evidence of the lived experience in the UK is that the policies of the UK Government are causing vast harms, and when compared to countries following zero community transmission strategies, the variation in policy and outcome is clear.

In simple terms the difference is between opinion and evidence.

Opinion is lethal, evidence saves lives. 

Opinion, belief and ideology is lethal, honesty and evidence saves lives.

Gavin Williamsons opinion is that schools are safe for full attendance re-opening. Williamson cites a .002% case rate among students during the September re-opening period. Sounds like a small figure. .002% of 8.9 million students is 17,800+ cases. That is not a small number. Factor in the inadequacies of a centralised contact tracing system that has failed on almost every metric then we have a situation where were do not know how many infections are linked to those cases, what their index cases were, where the virus was transmitted... Gavin Williamson is playing tricks with numbers to push a deliberately egregious policy. 

A recent study on school safety makes this clear. 

"On Feb 22, 2021, the UK Government announced that schools in England would fully reopen on March 8, 2021. 

While returning to school as soon as possible is imperative for the education, social development, and mental and physical welfare of children, not enough has been done to make schools safer for students and staff. 

Without additional mitigations, increases in transmission are likely, this time with more infectious and possibly more virulent variants, resulting in further lockdowns, school closures, and absenteeism. Even when schools were supposed to be fully open, at points of high community transmission, 22% of secondary school children were not attending due to self-isolation. 

In some areas, attendance was as low as 61%.
Arguments that schools do not contribute to community transmission and that the overall risk to children from COVID-19 is very small have meant that mitigations in schools have received low priority. Yet the evidence cited for these arguments has serious limitations.  
Primary and secondary school closures have been associated with substantial reductions over time in the effective reproduction number (Rt) across many countries (including England) and time periods.  
In contrast, data from the Office for National Statistics' (ONS) 2020 COVID-19 Infection Survey show that the prevalence of infection among children aged 2–10 years (2%) and 11–16 years (3%) rose above the prevalence for all other age groups before the 2020 Christmas break (appendix p 4). 
Both modelling and real-world data in preprint showing rising cases in regions where the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7 variant was prevalent during the lockdown in November, 2020 (when schools were open),  suggest that opening all schools now without robust mitigatory measures in place will probably lead to Rt rising above 1 in almost all scenarios. Modelling data by the University of Warwick and Imperial College London suggest that at least 30 000 more deaths from COVID-19 are estimated under the proposed reopening scenarios. 
Throughout February, 2021, despite fewer students being in school at this time, teaching staff were at higher risk of infection. Recent school outbreaks in northern Italy, where the B.1.1.7 variant is prevalent, are also concerning."

The study goes on to outline a series of mitigation steps to suppress transmission within the school community.

None of which is currently provided as logistical support or funded by central government at this time. 

A former OSTED chief urged teachers to put their lives on the line, for the future of the children they are teaching.

I saw the interview and to my mind he was impatient and dismissive rather than attentive to the needs of the teachers and the students. He was not calmly presenting evidence. 



Mary Bousted, of the NEU, corrected his assertion that schools were not functioning, which was a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts - she pointed out that teachers are in already in schools teaching key workers children and vulnerable children, and are helping children in a variety of ways to make up for the fall off in social services provision, as well as running remote online tuition.

Ideology, belief and opinion are lethal, honesty and evidence saves lives.

More from the study...

"
Although COVID-19 is unlikely to cause severe disease in children, estimates of the prevalence of long COVID symptoms based on the ONS Infection Survey suggest that 13% of children aged 2–10 year and 15% of those aged 12–16 years have at least one persistent symptom 5 weeks after testing positive.

Given uncertainty around the long-term health effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection, it would be unwise to let the virus circulate in children, with consequent risk to their families. Reopening fully in the setting of high community transmission without appropriate safeguards risks depriving many children of education and social interaction again, worsening existing inequalities.

By contributing to high community transmission, it also provides fertile ground for virus evolution and new variants."

What kind of person demands that children take these risks? The same kind who launched a war against a country based on a careful set of obvious lies, claiming that they are bringing Democracy to an oppressed people? That went well.... not!

Ideology, belief and opinion are lethal, honesty and evidence saves lives


This country really needs a Union of Teachers, Parents and Students who are studying the evidence, who are learning about the evidence base for zero community transmission strategies, because it directly affects their lives now and into the future to confront this situation and to support the NHS by confronting MPs, local councils, local media, national media and any other arena's of influence with the evidence.
We cannot leave that study to the News Media or The Government. They are deliberate in their failure to present accurate and timely evidence since last December 2019.

We need the 8.9 million school children, the 2.38 million university students to be studying the evidence that exists on zero community transmission strategies. We need their parents to be on board, as learners in this.

We cannot trust the UK Government to be honest, so we must be the voices of honesty within the UK.

We need this cohort to engage with NHS staff and with other representing organisations to co-ordinate a push back at every level of society, aware that the Government and Media will not support this push back and will actively resist the most honest, evidence based analysis.

If I have repeated myself, and I have, it is only because the frustration of seeing what is possible being deliberately ignored by so many for such little purpose with so much harm attendant that I persist.

Not yet blue in the face, not yet breathless, I will continue to posit zero community transmission strategy until it is in place. It is the only strategy that makes humane sense.


Kindest regards

Corneilius