COVID-19

You really must be on some strong drugs

 

I’m not sure @Fordy117 is that far off the mark. The current approach to schooling is unsustainable - year groups and schools are being sent home more and more. So unless we’re prepared to take a more robust approach to managing the risk of living with this virus in society - which is exactly what we should be doing - a more resilient means of teachIng will be needed. And when the catastrophic effects of balancing the books after the economic impacts from Covid become clearer, nothing will be off the table. It’ll make the Austerity measures look like a tea party. How long before someone puts a cost save value on 1 teacher being able to remotely teach 60 kids instead of 25-30 in a classroom, or how many schools can be decommissioned through a more ‘flexible teaching model’. Don’t discount the idea entirely, we’re going to increasingly see changes across society that would have been unimaginable 12 months ago.

 

Boris Johnson’s own constituency now has a higher infection rate than Bradford did in July, when we were put into local lockdown. Yet nothing for Boris mates?
Who can make this shit add up? No one. Why are we listening to these clowns any more?

 

Not to worry mate some foolish northerners thought that Borris cared about the North and would sort out that North-South divide. SUCKERS!.

It just shows that with Boris not putting his own constituency highlights to be me that Boris Johnson is a bigger joker than I thought. He knows local lockdowns don't work because infection rates going up in these area's.

The government needs to start showing evidence why certain things are required because I am not listening to them anymore.

 

This is a good listen and explains how the rule of law has been destroyed by this government

 

Copied and pasted from Facebook.

'The Tories have blasted a whopping £12 billion on their privatised shambles of a Test and Trace system, that's based on a hopelessly botched, outdated version of Excel, which is fantastic news for the corporate spivs running it ... but they're allowing the creative industries to die off, and telling actors, artists and musicians to "adapt to the new reality" by getting jobs outside of the creative industries.

The creative industries aren't just a frivolous luxury to the UK economy, they're worth over £100 billion per year, and it's one of the few sectors in which the UK is still an indisputable world leader.

Also, where on earth are the victims of this Tory indifference to the creative industries going to find new jobs, given the scale of mass unemployment across virtually all the other economic sectors too?'

 

Genuinely @Offcomedun what do you want the government to do to help the creative industries?

Without it being sensible for people to congregate together what is the actual solution?

They can't even film a multi million dollar blockbuster at the moment so how is the rest of the industry supposed to cope?

 

Aye, but at least we'll save the lives of thousands of people who weren't going to die from this virus anyway.

 

Very good listen. Thanks for that

 

Maybe most of them could get work as Guardian columnists...!!

 

Those at risk who shielded before are set to be told to shield again. Probably taking them beyond Xmas?

 

Well they could start by making it easier for the 200,000 or so professional musicians, and other freelance workers who currently can't work because of the restrictions, to claim benefits. Musicians who have followed the rules and saved income to pay their tax bills are now being told that money disqualifies them from getting any support. Ridiculous.

I understand the point that people working in unviable jobs or running unsustainable businesses can't be propped up forever. But many of the arts are not unsustainable. The post below from the band Hayseed Dixie explains that. There has to be a way to get our world beating music industry, theatre etc through this temporary hiatus so that the cultural life of the country is not destroyed.

"There have been a handful of "you chose to be an artist, so don't whine" sorts of responses to our last post here about a lack of UK government support for the professional music industry. So let me say the following with as much clarity as I can muster, because there seem to be a couple of key misunderstandings for a few folks:

1) Nobody that I know in the professional music industry is currently whining. And I know and talk to a lot of music industry professionals. I'm also going to assume that if you were somebody who wanted to live in a society without professional music, you wouldn't be on our page to begin with.

2) Artists are not more important than anybody else doing any other job. But neither are they less important. If the government is going to support one sector which makes an overall contribution (i.e. banking) then they should support every sector which makes an overall contribution (i.e. the arts). Otherwise, it's just social engineering - picking one industry to succeed and intentionally letting or causing another to fail.

3) Most importantly, our industry is not currently suffering because we are not financially viable or because nobody wants to buy what we're selling. Quite the contrary. For example, the UK tour Hayseed Dixie had to call off back in March was mostly sold out in advance. We have made an acceptable living from this band for the past 20 years, paid our taxes, and happily worked our hillbilly asses off without complaints providing a service that we, and a lot of other people, think is important and worthwhile.

But . . . since March, and into the indefinite future, we have been prevented from being able to work by government actions. Otherwise, we would be doing a show tonight. Yes, these government actions were in response to a global pandemic, and no, we are not arguing that those actions were or are inappropriate.

But we did not choose to stop working any more than any other business person. And even more importantly, our customer base (that's you, the fans) did not decide that they no longer wanted our services.

Nobody here is lazy, nor are we obsolete. We have been legally forbidden to work, and now we are being told by the UK government to go seek other careers?

I don't hear them telling bankers or lawyers to do that. Back when the banking industry crashed in 2008-2009, a crash caused entirely by that industry's own collective greed, corruption, and dumb-ass bad business dealings, the governments of the world could not throw enough money at them to prop them up and bail them out.

So are bankers and lawyers more important to the overall culture and society than professional musicians? That's a judgment call. I'm certainly not saying they are less important, but are they more important? Do they contribute more to the total GDP? That's debatable. Does a typical banker pay more tax in a year than this band? I honestly doubt it, in part because we can't hide our income offshore in Belize or Guernsey.

Conclusion: the UK music industry alone contributes 5.2 billion UK Pounds per year to the country's total economy. It employs nearly 200,000 professional people - none of whom are lazy, all of whom have been told that they legally cannot work since March. And now these dedicated professional people are being told to just abandon the music industry and go do something else?

That's bullshit.

Are you content for the next decade or two to have no more professional music in your life? Because that's what this will mean if most of the musicians, lighting people, sound techs, riggers, drivers, security guys, and the rest all go off and re-train as something else, if all the venues go to the wall and are converted into flats. People won't be able to just step back into touring and live music once government restrictions are lifted. If our industry dies, and it is "our" industry including the fans who make it all possible, then it will take a generation or more to rebuild."

 

As to the benefits - isn't that the same for everyone? If you have enough savings then you don't qualify for benefits. Isn't that right?

The post from Hayseed Dixie (who I love by the way) is fine and I have a lot of sympathy for them but it's based on a false premise. They haven't been banned from working, they are completely free to work. Just their preferred industry isn't possible to work in given the current situation.

Nobody is saying that the arts aren't valuable both in a financial sense and a social sense. They are. Nobody is saying that they don't want it back. Everybody does.

If the 'old way' of providing this style of entertainment is gone until a vaccine is available or people are willing to trade it off for significantly increased deaths then that's just the way it is. Bankers can work, they've always been able to work. The comparison is a typical populist one not a like for like one.

Everybody is really good at pointing out the problem but everyone knows what that is. What I can't see at all is what the solution is apart from the taxpayer paying people who happened to be in these industries to sit at home indefinitely. I don't see why these people can't find alternative employment in the short term, nobody is forcing them to give it up forever but just adapt to a situation which has made their previous industry impossible to work in.

 

4m people and counting out of work as it it. Them people mainly won't have the skillset for change.

What have you been doing for the last 5 years? Oh I have been singing at the Albert Hall..."You do realise that you are going for a job as a lawyer?" Yes, but @Aaron Baker thinks its easy to switch careers. ..Right then I am going to hire you if he says so!

 

I know and I feel sorry for all of them regardless of the industry they came from. Fortunately we have a benefits system for the people who needs it but are we proposing paying all 4m people their previous wage instead? What's the solution?

I mean. The example is clearly ludicrous. If the bar is that you can't get a job as a lawyer then nobody would ever change industry. That would be a full career change rather than just something to tide them over.

 

Point is 4m people out of work and counting with a skill set for their sector, so for someone to change sectors now is going to be extremely tough. The competition is massive and if you want to get back into work then you have more chance in staying in the sector you know.

It's just something that's easy to say. Change jobs!

I'll tell you what the solution is that the government has failed to do and that encourage people to start their own business. Some really smart people in the 4m plus unemployment but the government has failed to drive this message and support those that want to it.

Also the government might want to start offering businesses incentives for recruitment.

People have bills to pay and no lockdown is going to work while people have mouths to feed and it goes back to getting the testing, track and trace working correctly.

The government way now is starting to effect children of 5 years old...It's a mess! What the government is doing isn't working!

 

Universal basic income becomes more and more appealing

 

Yet we can still go to the pub. Baffling

 

I agree the competition is massive - although if your sector is dead, albeit temporarily, then you have zero chance of getting into that so anything else is a higher chance.

Change jobs is the easy thing to say but it's the only solution. If you get laid off then you find something else or you live on the benefits you are entitled to. Nothing has changed on that front.

As for your ideas I am intrigued by them. How would encouraging new businesses to enter the current market or recruitment incentives work? Would these just be the the taxpayer guaranteeing the risk or funding the wages

And I'll keep saying - what your idea of TT&T "working correctly" is both a logistical and social impossibility. Could it work better from both an organisational and social point of view, yes, can it replace the reduction of interactions between people? No.