Some things to think about or worry about!

A friend of mine is getting very stressed about not being able to visit her aged mother in Germany.since she retired my friend had got into the habit of popping over to Hamburg every six weeks or so to see her mother and also to stock up on various German delicacies, particularly bread. (Personally, I don’t understand quite why she needs to stock up on German bread when we have perfectly nice bread here. I suppose it’s a matter of having grown up with a certain kind of bread and maybe feeling the need for a link with home. Chacun à son gout!) Since lockdown she has had one flight after another cancelled. Her most recent booking for early September has now also been cancelled by EasyJet and there won’t be another until October, if then. Friends have suggested going to stay with her daughter and catching a flight from a London airport but, while she has steeled herself for air travel, she really does not want to do all the public transport involved in travelling from London. Oh, boy! This is what foreign travel is turning into!

Dognapping is apparently becoming a problem. Lots of people have acquired dogs during lockdown. For some it’s been a matter of company while others have used it as a reason to go out for walks. I have no problem going out for walks without a dog but maybe if I lived in a city centre I would feel differently about it. Presumably there has not been a shortage of dogfood to go along with the shortage of loo roll and of baking ingredients. But now the price of dogs has sky-rocketed. Silly prices are being asked for pets. What is more, dogs are being stolen especially pedigree dogs and among them especially fancy breed like cockapoo. Keep an eye on your dogs, folks!

Here’s something else to worry about:- plastic.

“Small crustaceans can fragment microplastics into pieces smaller than a cell within 96 hours, a study has shown. Until now, plastic fragmentation has been largely attributed to slow physical processes such as sunlight and wave action, which can take years and even decades. Environmental scientists at University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland studying the 2cm-long amphipod Gammarus duebeni found that microplastic beads were not only ingested but were also fragmented incredibly quickly into nanoplastics.”

When I first read the headline to this article I thought it was perhaps good news, that it meant that plastic could biodegrade after all. But, no! It means that the tiny plastic particle can get into the food chain more easily. Unless we reduce our plastic use we will all end up with plastic in our bodies. Not a good idea!

And then there is the Channel Tunnel. We might be leaving Europe but the Chunnel still exists. Now the Brexit negotiations have another stumbling block. The EU wants the Tunnel to remain under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in the event of any kind of legal problems. Brexiteers are, of course, looking for a different system, “away from European control”. Just another problem that perhaps should have been thought about before the referendum!

I read a report about our Prime Minister Boris repeatedly using inaccurate and misleading figures that exaggerated the government’s record on poverty. This comes from the UK statistics watchdog.

“The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) was responding to a complaint by the End Child Poverty Coalition that the prime minister had three times used official poverty data “selectively, inaccurately and, ultimately, misleadingly”.
Speaking at prime ministers’ questions and in an interview with the BBC, Johnson said the number of families or children in poverty had fallen by 400,000 since 2010.
The coalition of poverty charities, campaign groups and unions said this number, along with other poverty statistics used by the PM, had no basis in fact.”

Is it a case of pulling numbers out of the air to support an argument during a debate? Or does the government consciously mislead with false statistics. Here are some more examples from the article I read.

• Coronavirus testing In June, Matt Hancock was criticised for his use of Covid-19 testing figures. The chair of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir David Norgrove, accused him of painting a picture that was “far from complete and comprehensible”. The health secretary had promised 100,000 tests a day by the end of April. To reach that target, test kits put in the post were included – even if they were never returned. Hancock’s aim, Norgrove said, seemed to have been to “show the largest possible number of tests, even at the expense of understanding”. 
• Taking back control of £350m Boris Johnson, while serving as foreign secretary, was reprimanded for a “clear misuse of official statistics” over a Daily Telegraph article in which he repeated the debunked Brexit campaign claim that the UK would “take back control of roughly £350m per week” after Brexit. Norgrove said he was “surprised and disappointed”, while Johnson accused the statistics chief of a “wilful distortion” of the article.
• Rough sleeping In April 2019, the UK Statistics Authority said government claims on rough sleeping were not to be trusted until ministers explained how some figures may have become skewed. The government boasted of cutting rough sleeping in England by 2% in 2018. But Norgrove said official figures from that year should be discounted until concerns over claims of deliberate underreporting were addressed. 
• School funding The Department for Education was involved in a running battle in 2018 with the UK Statistics Authority, which criticised the DfE for its “potentially misleading” claims over school funding and repeated failures to correct problems identified by the authority. 

 Just a few things to think about!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!