Thoughts of a carer

  'Health is more important than Finance' How far does that apply? The UK, already suffering ‘lockdown by stealth’ after pronouncements by various media-appointed ‘experts’ on what is going to happen,  is now apparently on the verge of a ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown to ‘Save the NHS’. What about saving the economy? We are led to believe that everything must take second place to Public Health, no matter what the consequences - to the point where the government does not even undertake an impact assessment before bringing in a non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) recommended by a scientific advisor. But there are costs - we have seen them over the last couple of years; huge government borrowing (which we shall all be paying back over the next fifty years or so), a broken economy (inflation moving up - RPI now 7.1%, interest rates are going up too), society seems to be falling apart (for example - tragic deaths of children who missed the protection a normal education could provide...

The problem of innumeracy today  In some ways I was lucky. I may have had what today's generation might think to be a ghastly childhood, but I did get some opportunities that seem rare today. One is in education: the chance to learn mathematics and science from teachers who actually understood their subjects. The above may sound bitter, it may sound like a swipe at modern schools. Maybe it is, but I have helped two youngsters - one my own son, another the daughter of a friend - with their maths one thing they told me was that their teachers did not seem to know what they were talking about. (In my son's case, it was post-GCSE, at the start of A-level, when he was being taught the basics of calculus - differentiation and integration. He didn't get it. He asked the teacher to explain, who couldn't, at least not so that my son could understand. In fact, the teacher's stock answer to most queries seemed to be 'look it up on the internet'. (Maybe that invention, ...

 As a child I was encouraged by my parents to trust 'knowledgeable people' - teachers, vicars and the like. Growing up I noticed that many of these people had achieved great things, for they tended to display an alphabet of post-nominal initials; I also noticed, though, that many of them seemed to be lacking in aspects of knowledge that other, more 'ordinary', people seemed to take for granted. Recently there was an example of a mother who, faced with looking after her disabled son unsupported during lockdown, had a mental breakdown and killed him. In order to protect us (or the NHS) from the effects of Covid, our leaders, on the advice of highly qualified experts (in SAGE), had set up an environment where the most vulnerable could not cope. To me, and many like me, it was obvious that this sort of thing would happen - and that it will continue to happen for years, long after lockdowns, as a result of the measures that have been implemented. Surely, in a civilised soci...