Welcome first for Dawkins
I DO not have much admiration for Richard Dawkins but, by gum, he is right to tell woke students who have demanded the removal of “ableist, transphobic, classist and misogynist” content from University reading lists that they should leave Oxford to make way for those who understand what a university is for.
Perhaps he should go further and suggest that those with such myopic attitudes should never be there in the first place but should be weeded out ruthlessly at application stage.
IDO not join in the derision at the Government’s new slogan of “stay alert”. Sticking with “stay at home” would be profoundly confusing when we are being told to go to work but some warning is needed, so that we all remember there is still a lurking danger in our midst.We must be alert. That does not mean to say I think the crisis has been well handled. I still maintain that when nine out of 10 deaths have occurred in people with one or more underlying health conditions and when four out of five people who catch the awful disease will not even notice anything more than mild symptoms, then a universal lockdown which has ruined the economy was the wrong approach.
We now also know that less than one per cent of deaths have occurred in the under-40s and that figure includes those with underlying health conditions.
The statistics appear to point to telling the under-40s to live normally, including association and eating and drinking together in pubs and restaurants, while the rest of the healthy population should also be told to keep the economy going by working and volunteering. Only those with relevant health conditions or who are in advanced old age should be forbidden to leave home or receive visitors until we reach safer times.
YES, that would mean that a small number of healthy people might still die, which is horrible but hardly enough to overrun the NHS, which currently has a long queue of people who may also die because they haven’t got their routine treatment. Meanwhile, what’s new? We have been allowed throughout to leave the house to go to work. In practice nobody counted our exercise sessions and there have already been increasing numbers of cars on the road. But there is the prospect of real change in June with some return to school and the opening of non-essential shops. So at last we have some real hope of some semi-normality.
JENNI Murray says she now has to work from home because she has just turned 70. There could be no clearer demonstration of the futility of the rules of lockdown than that. If Jenni is in any danger at all it is not because she’s suddenly crossed an arbitrary age line but because she is... um... pardon me, a little bit tubbyish.