Further Reading

Linear liner notes

The government are denying they said a thing that they all said on telly and we all saw it, there’s a few new variants in town and Priti Patel has to put her job on her coat or she’ll forget that she isn’t a weird vigilante. Plus Tiernan gives the wrong official name for the B.1.617.2 strain at least 5 times, and chats to interim director of Liberty (@libertyhq) Gracie Mae Bradley (@graciemaybe) about all the ways the government are damaging human rights.

Key links and sources of info from Gracie’s interview:

• Gracie Mae Bradley on Twitter – https://twitter.com/graciemaybe
• Liberty on Twitter – https://twitter.com/libertyhq
• Liberty website – https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/
• Liberty’s ‘Protect Everyone Bill’ – https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/fundamental/coronavirus/
• Sisters Uncut on Twitter – https://twitter.com/SistersUncut
• Black Lives Matter UK on Twitter – https://twitter.com/ukblm
• KillTheBill Twitter hashtag – https://twitter.com/search?q=%23killthebill
• Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants on Twitter – https://twitter.com/JCWI_UK
• Acorn UK on Twitter – https://twitter.com/ACORNunion
• Disibility Rights UK on Twitter – https://twitter.com/DisRightsUK
• Shelter on Twitter – https://twitter.com/Shelter
• Crisis on Twitter – https://twitter.com/crisis_uk
• Gendered Intelligence on Twitter – https://twitter.com/Genderintell
• Stonewall UK on Twitter – https://twitter.com/stonewalluk

All the usual ParPolBro stuff:

• Get 10% off at British Boxers with the code in the episode – https://british-boxers.com/
• Nowtflix – http://nowtflix.co.uk/
• Twitter – com/ParPolBro and twitter.com/TiernanDouieb
• Facebook – facebook.com/groups/ParPolBro
• Website – tiernandouieb.co.uk/podcast
• Donate to the Patreon – patreon.com/parpolbro
• Buy me a coffee – ko-fi.com/parpolbro
• Review the show on iTunes – apple.com/gb/podcast/partly-political-broadcast/id1075342863?mt=2
• Review the show on Stitcher – stitcher.com/podcast/partly-political-broadcast
• The Last Skeptik – thelastskeptik.com
• Kat on Twitter – https://twitter.com/chronicleflask
• Buy Kat a coffee (go on, spread the love) – https://ko-fi.com/katday

Transcript

Ep233

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Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, the comedy politics podcast that after just one listen will persuade everyone’s ears to push for heard immunity. I’m Tiernan Douieb and this week as the only person to use Watership Down as an aphrodisiac Priti Patel warns the BBC that their reputation has been highly damaged, does that mean the entire British Broadcasting Corporation is now qualified to be Home Secretary?

I’m not sure how many of the current cabinet ministers have children, or if they just let the Prime Minister and face drawn on a dead TellyTubby’s stomach Boris Johnson fulfil the quota for everyone. But if they do have kids, are those children taught the same morals and life lessons that other kids receive? Or, when their parents occasionally send them a postcard to wherever it is they’ve been left and neglected for thousands of pounds, do their offspring learn how to do life differently? For example, does the idea to ‘learn from your mistakes’ ever pop up at any stage of development, or is it replaced early on with ‘insist those mistakes never happened despite definitive evidence that even a stupid dog could find by falling onto a keyboard and entering something into google’ or even ‘what is responsibility? Sounds like a foreign word so I’d avoid it if I was you. Now have another endangered species on organic crispbread.’ This past week has been yet another barrage of reactions and ideas from the government that make you wonder if gaslighting is an adequate enough term for what they do, or we need to upgrade the phrase to perhaps just ‘British Gas’ as there’s currently enough of it circulating round Westminster to run several cities. According to former spad and forever scrapyard Mr Meeseeks Dominic Cummings, the government’s original plan to tackle coronavirus was indeed herd immunity, letting it just ravage the population until the only people left would then be deemed healthy enough to compete in Running Man events for survival. The issue with Herd Immunity as a strategy, as you well know, is it relies on letting quite a lot of people die, hospitals be over run and generally is like dealing with an escaped lion by just letting it eat people till it gets tired, full or decides the people that are left aren’t the right flavour, so it gives up. The government, have of course, denied that this is the case and the Home Secretary said it was absolutely not the original policy, which most likely means that it was the second or third idea after Patel realised that you can’t deport a virus and that even if you ask it nicely, it won’t donate money to the party or run for a seat in the Red Wall.

Maybe this government are hoping that the country is full of people who would see the reveal of the murderer at the beginning of Columbo and still be surprised at who did it by the end. Because you don’t need a former special advisor, or indeed investigative journalism, leaked papers or any sort of special revelation to know that the government’s original plan was herd immunity, when they did actually say that, out loud on the TV in front of everyone. Chief Scientific Adviser and early Jim Broadbent character Patrick Vallance said as much in a press briefing and several interviews last March, but then maybe I’m the idiot for taking it seriously when he could’ve just been mentioning it for a laugh to take the piss like how the government do with levelling up or doing their best. The Prime Minister told Phil and Holly on daytime TV that herd immunity could be the way and people could just take it on the chin, something he’s also said to many previous partners in the hope to avoid more costly offspring. Maybe it’s just a total coincidence that the failure to close borders in time, and for the Prime Minister to be out and about shaking hands with people in hospitals, caused COVID to get a free key to the land and show that herd immunity isn’t a thing when it can mutate to gain new skills like a germ version of the Highlander. Who’s to say? Well, the government apparently who insist that there’s no way you’ll remember anything from last year because every day in lockdown was the same and it could have just been a disaster movie on Netflix that you’re quoting actually.

It is hard to suddenly decide that we now trust the word of Cummings as he states enforcing lockdowns properly was necessary, like a man on a market trying to sell you your own bike back while lecturing you about securing your belongings. Who is the bigger liar, the liar or the man that advised him to lie for a year? Er…both, but every one of Cummings recent revelations are either already known or entirely unsurprising and so it’d be surprising if they weren’t true. Cummings also revealed that the government were hostile to learning from East Asian countries, like Taiwan that successfully halted COVID, as they believed that ‘Asians all do as they’re told which won’t work here’ and you have to ask is that really something the Prime Minister would sa….yeah no I can’t even commit to trying to pretend he wouldn’t have that on a tshirt. He has said that Boris Johnson didn’t attend those early COBRA meetings about the virus because he was working on a book about William Shakespeare in order to pay for his divorce, which, yeah of course he did. There’s some hope that he may have at least learned lessons from Macbeth or King Lear even though you and I know he just skim read Much Ado About Nothing and has written 4000 words referring to the bard as Old Willy and as all the world’s a stage he’s made sure all global exports are as now expensive as West End theatre tickets. Of course he did that, in the same way of course leaked documents this week revealed that Boris Johnson had a butler sneak £27,000 of organic takeaways into Number.10, all paid for by a Tory donor which seems like a waste of money when the Prime Minister is an expert at making a meal of things all by himself.

It’s still Cummings who is an expert at lying versus the government who are experts at lying though, which then makes it tricky to know just what to believe when it comes to current advice. Take travelling abroad. The Prime Minister said Brits should not go to amber list countries except in extreme circumstances like his dad owning a house there, but Environment Minister and powerless Esper George Eustice said you totes can go but only if you then spend a week at home when you get back which as anyone who like me, has said out loud ‘I need a holiday to get over that holiday’ sounds perfect. However, health minister Lord Bethell, the sort of man who looks like he had an operation to extract any remaining kindness, has said people shouldn’t even be going to green list destinations as travelling is not for this year, which sounds sensible but then you remember he took his whole shirt off to get his vaccine jab so its hard to know anymore. If you’re not even aware of the system, red list countries are total danger zones so you can’t visit there at all and not just because they’ve listed the UK as one too and won’t let you in. Green list places are fine to go to, but don’t tell Lord Bethell and amber list means get ready to go there but also don’t and maybe stop but ooh maybe you can go wait what was the light before this one? Personally, having heard all the advice, I’m going to stick to my guns and continue to not even be able to afford to consider a holiday in the first place.

Germany aren’t letting any UK travellers arrive there without a 14 day quarantine, as they’ve classed us as a ‘virus variant region’ so that’s another thing we can no longer export after Brexit. Which is odd as the government, who definitely didn’t want herd immunity as a strategy last year, are really unfussed about the new variant to the extent that Public Health England released their report about it on Saturday night without any press release as the rest of us were watching Global Britain get nil points on Eurovision because our entry looked like the sort of man who’d tell you he’s got a special discount for a nightclub as they know him there and talking sip lid Amanda Holden dressed up as British icon Emu and reassured everyone about how stupid we are. So why would PHE want to bother us during that when there’s nothing to worry and they didn’t even include the data on transmissions in schoolchildren being 3x the amount of 20 year-olds, because you know it obvs doesn’t matter when they’re only kids and don’t have any future prospects anyway. I mean why release a report at all when rather than have to tell us that vaccines are less effective against variant B.1.617 aka the Indian variant unless you’ve had both doses so it’s only young people who are out and about and being social again and working that are in danger of getting it and transmitting it, when they could’ve just said ‘ah this? Nah its nothing. You keep repeating how Iceland were robbed of victory last year and we’ll just get on with other things.’ Its only 55% more transmissible so that still means 45% not transmissible at all and that’s definitely how to look at it. It’s not even worth asking about the new Yorkshire variant that is a triple mutant meaning its almost all of the Ninja Turtles either and no it isn’t even more transmissible because its more stubborn than the other ones or works better in hard water. The Prime Minister still insists there is nothing conclusive on changing the roadmap for everything being open on June 21^st but based on how everything has gone before you’d be forgiven for wondering if we’ll be having an Indian summer. What is a relief is that with systems like Test and Trace in place, it will only help all efforts going ahead. Efforts of the virus that is as a glitch meant that more than 700 people and their contacts were not passed to local health teams allowing the Indian variant to spread more quickly. Still only spending £37bn on a herd immunity enabling systems shows that the government definitely weren’t serious about that as a method.

None of those are the real stories of last week though. No, the big must know story is that 26 years ago dodgy journalist and the dad from American Pie Martin Bashir faked bank statements in order to interview one of the only royals anyone liked Princess Diana. So apparently the BBC have ruined their reputation because of one person a quarter of a century ago who used deceitful behaviour but was selfish enough to use it to hold an interview that Diana said she was pleased to have done rather than join the government which is the correct place for such a skillset. Obvs the paparazzi from newspapers owned by Tory donors, who if you remember or if you read the Express have heard from Diana’s ghost, were actually responsible for her death, they’re still cool and need no regulation whatsoever. Johnson said he could only imagine the royal family’s feelings, though that could be because both he and they are incapable of actually having any. The Prime Minister said the failings that lead to that interview must never happen again because as someone who’s now made the same mistakes with COVID three times in just a year, he knows just what repeatedly doing the same awful shit can do and he’s afraid it may give the BBC a 10 point lead. I suppose it is very on brand to not erase history or indeed use it entirely for your own political gain and there’s no doubt that while this government refuse to be responsible for things they did 5 minutes ago, the BBC are now even more under threat with next year’s charter review meaning they could well have an external editorial board made up of people who rather than fake documents to interview a royal, will just insist its best to chase them off the road till they die.

Priti Patel was one of the people insisting that the BBC would have to reflect and learn lessons which is big from someone who can’t see themselves in a mirror. She spent the rest of the week blocking the report into the 1987 murder of Daniel Morgan, a private detective whose death the Met police have admitted wasn’t investigated properly due to corruption. The report was due out last week but Patel has blocked it in order to review it first as she obviously doesn’t think the Met need to reflect and learn lessons from things that happened over 20 years ago because it wasn’t as if they tried to interview Princess Diana or anything like that. Patel was also pictured joining immigration raids in person and surprisingly not wearing a homemade Batman suit or carrying a net as I’d have thought she would. Instead she wore a jacket that said Home Secretary on it, just incase the officers didn’t know who she was and carted her off too. Patel says the immigration raids, like the one in Pollokshields or ones she attended and got to tick off her bucket list so now she’s just got drowning puppies in a bag and stealing candy from a baby to complete it, that’s what the British public voted for and what they want. I don’t doubt that some shitty people, like Patel, did, but for most other reasonable types the only way we’d want officers bursting into people’s homes and sticking them on a plane is because they’ve won a holiday on a morning TV show.

Many Western countries have condemned Belarus for diverting a RyanAir plane flying over its territory so they could arrest a Belarusian opposition journalist which is a level of terror I wouldn’t even wish on the guy that gave me a 2 star review at EdFringe. The authoritarian government faked a bomb threat causing the flight to land in Minsk and the journalist will now likely face the death penalty for organising protests against evil Jimmy Greaves and leader Alexander Lukashenko. This is state sponsored piracy and an attack on press freedom, and it’s now up to the EU, the US and other powers to stand-up to Belarus and Russia. On the plus side, for the other passengers of the flight, landing 186km away from their intended destination of Vilnius meant most of them thought it was the closest city airport RyanAir fly to anyway. Transport Secretary and lost ground sloth Grant Shapps has told planes to avoid Belarusian airspace, which is weird as you’d think he’d tell the pilots. I’m almost certain he thinks that Pixar film was a documentary.

Grant Shapps announced the railways white paper with centralisation for the railway networks because why privitise when you can just make sure all the private sector cock ups happen under one roof with several smaller rooves underneath. Taxpayers’ money will now be used to finance investment in trains but not own them or say how much and in who the investment is being made. What could sum up railways in Britain more than a lot of money to not get you very far or how you wanted?

The new quango for rail happenings is to be known as Great British Railways, which I think is a brilliant name as long as you say it in a sarcastic voice. It would’ve have been even better with an ‘Oh’ in front of it.

The government are pushing for a trade deal with Australia that could leave British farmers exposed, something that in the current weather would definitely cause them to get pneumonia. The deal would reduce tarrifs on Australian meat products like lamb and beef, which could put British cow and sheep out of business, but the government insist it will open up new markets for them. So I guess that’ll be jobs and flea then.

Boris Johnson is to marry his fiancée and woman who is less Lady Macbeth and more Lady Oceana Charade Carrie Symonds in 2022, so I look forward to Johnson saying in 2023 that the marriage contract is now ludicrous, not what they agreed to when he said it was the best deal ever and must be torn up. The nurse that cared for Johnson while he was in ICU has left the NHS saying that healthcare staff aren’t given the respect or pay they deserve. It’s a real shame, not only because the government’s neglect of our most important institution is driving NHS workers away, but also that she didn’t choose to quit right in the middle of treating Johnson.

Conservative MP for Hendon who’s so tedious even his own forehead looks like its trying to leave him Matthew Offord also criticised the BBC this week, asking them to stop the broadcast of Desert Island Discs with legendary comedian Alexei Sayle, as they shouldn’t give a platform to anyone who excuses anti-Semitism. Yes Matthew, nothing like denying a Jewish person a platform to fight anti-Semitism right? If the BBC had been really clever, they’d have moved the recording to a university campus and then if the Tories had tried to shut it down, the new free speech policies would’ve allowed Sayle to sue them.

And lastly, Labour leader and English Electric standard model washing machine Keir Starmer has backed night closures at Primrose Hill park so it can only be accessed by very rich local residents. The area will have nine foot tall aluminium fences erected around it to stop a rise in crime apparently, though I reckon Starmer supported them as it gives him something to sit on when faced with political decisions. Starmer and his team have already fallen for the trap of agreeing to be in a fly on the wall documentary about him being leader of the opposition, because trust them to go for a late 90’s format and I wouldn’t be surprised if its only released on DVD too. People are already expecting it to be like an episode of the Thick Of It, but my concern is that no one will know the difference between when the adverts for faceless electrical appliances end and the show starts.

ADMIN

Yooooooo ParPolBrods. How goes it? I have just spent a weekend with friends who live by the coast and we went to a restaurant and sat indoors and hung out and it was almost, almost normal right down to my agent waking us up at 6am after I’d drank far too much the night before and somehow now, a day and a bit later, still feel rough. I don’t meant to boast, but it was amazing despite the weather being so shit I was almost certain a cabinet minister must have been in charge of it. I know not everyone can get out and do real life things yet but it is goddamn great to, you know, speak to other human beings and have lengthy conversations about Eurovision entries and how the entire show is clear proof that actually democracy doesn’t work. I am still a bit hungover though which is odd, its like a hang never over. I don’t drink very much anymore and I’m starting to think that now whenever I do have beer my body overreacts to try and dissuade me from doing it again. It’s a sort of condescending ‘oh not this shit again, you’re not 20 anymore’ and it so goes full on hangover as a deterrent. Still nice to do it every now and then to remind yourself that you can’t handle it and you’re so mortal you should probably just sit very still from now on.

Not much else to say this week apart from the usuals. Shall we go through them? Everyone loves routine and familiarity, don’t they? I regularly think of scrapping the bit at the end of the interview about all the ways you can contact this show, but then I realise, what if that’s the only reason you all tune in and I destroy the immense listenership overnight? Plus I’m too tired to think of something new. Maybe once it gets to episode 250 or something. But for now, should you fancy sponsoring this show and me churning this thing out weekly for increasingly small amounts, then please send over even just £1 or whatever you would spend on some ill-advised booze while watching Eurovision to ko-fi.com/ParPolBro, join the Patreon.com/ParPolBro which really, is what I’d love you all to do as it’s that monthly dosh that allows me to pretend to my family it is worth me doing this, even though they see right through that. And of-course there’s also the Acast supporter page but I’ve just sort of accepted that as a mystery now and I feel if you work out how to donate there you probably deserve a prize. Obvs if you can’t do that, some new reviews for the show on Apple Podcasts would be mighty tasty or failing that just tell someone you know to give it a go.

That’s it for chat this week. I am on another podcast called Raf Chats that came out on Friday, where a nice man called Raf, well, chats to me. It’s fairly self-explanatory, but we talked loads about things from diabetes to comedy and all that. Do check it out if you need more me in your week.

And this week’s show has the brilliant Gracie Mae Bradley, currently interim director at human rights advocacy group Liberty all about the ways the government is infringing on our human rights, and in the middle just a wee bit on the report this weekend about everyone’s fave new variant.

INTERVIEW WITH GRACIE

Human rights? Where will it end, I ask? Animal rights? Special rights for children? It’s always baffled me as why any humans would want to inflict restrictions on human rights, but I suppose maybe it’s a personal thing when like the British government you are a bunch of barely human wrongs. When it comes to ticking boxes on the Human Rights Act, the UK do alright just by signing up to having one and therefore immediately getting a starter pack for at least grasping that they are a thing that should exist. In comparison to a number of countries that haven’t managed to tick off step one, grab a pen to start considering it or picked up the right leaflet, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland might seem like places with more freedom than Braveheart on a nudie beach. But in reality, access to the full gamut of human rights very much depends on how many loyalty points you have on your British card, and the current government are pushing through a number of policies that will chip away at some already highly fractured freedoms. A terrible analogy from me because if the freedoms were indeed statues, there’s a high chance that there’d be more policies put in place just to protect them and stick a union flag on the top. The government have distorted findings of judicial reviews, blocked certain press from asking questions at briefings and removed MPs, the people’s representatives, the right to analyse bills properly by proroguing parliament. A move that is classic Johnson’s cabinet because they chose the only workplace in the world where a sudden week off a pain in the arse. So much of our personal data collected through public institutions like the health service has been sold off to companies such as Amazon, making Article 8: ‘Respect for your private and family life’ really depend on what you class as privacy. No Jeff Bezos isn’t going to be peeping through your keyhole as you sleep, but Alexa will be telling him how many times a week you listen to the soundtrack for Three Men and a Little Lady and openly weep. Article 7: No punishment without law doesn’t seem to apply to anything the Home Office put people through, as though they’ve only gone to that part of the act and added a comma after the first word. And over the past year of the pandemic, this push to limit certain aspects of freedom has become more of shove. No I don’t just mean because you couldn’t have a pint indoors while licking people you didn’t know. I mean things like the upcoming Policing Bill which is threatening to really stretch the limits of Article 11: Freedom of assembly and association. No, it’s not going to clamp down on Lego building or the scouts, but by giving police powers to break up any protest they deem annoying, you’ll only really have freedom of assembly or organisation, well, if you are Lego building scouts. Or the new call for Voter ID which will infringe on people’s access to voting as well as meaning even more people will see your embarrassing passport photos, or the limiting of how the government can be challenged in court by judicial reviews meaning that it will get to the point the only way someone can make the government accountable for their regular horrors is by dying and haunting them as a ghost until they give in. So, what can we do, if one of the best bits of them human rights is the ability to protest against infringements of human rights and we might not be able to do that anymore? Is it as simple as training our pets to become incredible detectives and vigilantes and hope they’ll be more powerful than before due to the Animal Sentience Bill? Or are there better ways to defend human rights? While the thought of touching most of the people in government makes me feel sick, how do we stop them becoming untouchable?

This week I spoke to Gracie Mae Bradley, currently working as the Interim Director of Liberty, the UK’s largest civil liberties organisation that for over 80 years has been fighting to save the rights of anyone who is under threat. I actually had Gracie on the podcast ages and ages ago when she was part of Against Borders for Children tackling data collected on kids by their schools on order of the government and then used against migrant children as part of the hostile environment policy. So it was lovely to get Gracie back on the show in a different but similar capacity, as with Liberty it’s not just state surveillance that she’s tacking but also a myriad of different ways the government are trying their best to make sure that fair treatment of people just means the rigging the coconut shy and being very skilled at dodgems. Near the end of this chat I say something that I meant completely differently in my head and the way in which I phrase it makes it sound like I’m being miserable and demeaning what Gracie has just said. I did check with her afterwards as I felt awful, but Gracie said she knew what I was trying to say so was fine with it. Anyway, I’ve left it in, and you can hear my brain muddle and me sound like an idiot. Enjoy that and of course enjoy this whole inspiring chat with Gracie. Here she is:

INTERVIEW WITH GRACIE PART 1:

And we’ll be back with Gracie in a minute but first…

MIDDLE BIT –

The last thing you want is more chat about COVID, but that doesn’t mean is the last thing you need. The last thing you need is me insisting on giving you more chat about COVID and that’s why I continue to make sure this podcast stays cult rather than actually popular by telling you a little bit about the current variant situation, as B.1.617 looks like it’s already becoming the dominant strain over the Kent variant strain and the one I get from trying to open the jar of marmite that has got stuck due to too much congealed marmite. B.1.167 is currently more commonly known as the Indian Variant but I’m aware there’s concern that, much like when Trump called COVID the China flu, could lead to racist finger pointing of the type that will make people avoid Indian restaurants or something stupid. Which I hope isn’t true. I mean the Kent variant hasn’t made people avoid things from Kent has it? Like, er, cricket or oast houses. I hope not. But for this bit, rather than keep saying B.1.167 like I’m listing a background Star Wars droid, I will say Indian Variant because I trust that if you listen to this show, you’re not going to go round finding every person of Indian origin and blaming them for taking all the Kent variant’s jobs.

A report into the Indian variant was released on Saturday night without any press release or any big news shebang which is exactly what I like to do with jokes I don’t really want anyone to see, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s all a bit fishy. What did it say? Well, that on May 15^th it was on the cusp of being the dominant version of the virus in England, so we can assume that it’s probably there now and if not it’s really not trying. It is of course partly dominant over the Kent one because well, there’s not as much Kent one left being knocked out by the last lockdown and vaccines, but it’s also because the Indian variant is now growing twice as fast and is about 50% more transmissible. So pretty much the exact opposite of this podcast. It’s mostly growing in the North-West of England, London, the South-East and low but growing in the South West, and growing but less in Yorkshire and the Midlands though Yorkshire is very much doing its own independent virus production right now which we’ll get to in a minute. Most cases aren’t people who’ve travelled anywhere so this virus is currently on home delivery. Or at least successfully delivering at work which makes it better than Yodel. But the good news is there’s currently no evidence to say it causes more severe illness than the Kent variant did, and having two doses of the vaccine is almost as effective against the Indian variant as it was against the COVID 1.0. Woohoo!

Now the bad news, sorry, I should’ve checked which one you wanted first. I can say the good news again at the end of this bit if you like? The bad news is that Public Health England and SAGE are pretty concerned about vaccine effectiveness, because while double doses is super strong in punching COVIDS, its only from after 2 weeks of having the 2^nd dose. Only 43% of adults have had both and 33% of them are more than 2 weeks since they got jabbed. Overall, only 30% of the population including children who selfishly can’t get vaccinated because apparently, they can’t do clinical trials on kids even though my agent wants to eat enough E-numbers to qualify for some sort of science experiment. PHE reported that two doses of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine is only 60% effective against new shiny variant. Over 80s have an 8 week wait for a second jab, under 80s a 12 week rate with it then being a two week wait till its super effective and with AZ that’s only 60%, which would all be fine if the Indian variant wasn’t doubling in growth every week. But some more good news is that vaccines may and should hopefully reduce symptoms in those that get it, even if it means they can still carry it, so could potentially mean less hospital admissions apart from all the people who catch it off someone who’s avoided a hospital admission oh wait sorry, I was trying for good news. My bad.

But it could be fine, we don’t know yet. It could also be not, which is why SAGE are recommending over-reacting rather than risking a third wave which would mean more deaths, more restrictions, and more importantly than any of your lives or family’s lives, I won’t be able to shout at drunken stag dos on a Friday night for at least another year. Come on, have some sympathy. The report didn’t contain data about transmissions in schools, which it should have done, and local reports said secondary school children had 3x rates of infection than 20-year-olds, which they then spread to those they live with. So, it seems odd that this report was delayed until after the local elections and then delayed until after the lifting of restrictions last week, which included school children not having to wear masks in school. It was obviously more important to let everyone go to the pub than you know, wait and see what happens and curb infections before they start. As someone who’s been to the pub since they reopened, I’d definitely have preferred to wait three weeks than have to say, remember that pint fondly as we head into another 4-year lockdown. The report also shows that once India was added to the red travel list, there was a sharp drop in cases from people travelling, so had Johnson been less bothered about trade deals than people’s lives or the NHS and done that week’s before, it might have been different.

But the government are still super keen on us heading straight at June 21^st for our and the new variants freedom, which could still be fine you know if test and trace actually worked for us instead of Dido Harding and the coronavirus, if vaccines were being dished out even quicker with shorter time frames between doses, and people were supported to self-isolate. The latter is something that’s being trialled with 8 areas receiving a £12m pot of dosh to give people mental health support if self-isolating as well as provide alternative accommodation to people who may be sharing with someone who tests positive. You can still get a £500 grant if you have to self-isolate but only if you qualify with the right criteria, and in January, two 3rds of those that applied were rejected so you know, the government seem to think you’ll be incentivised to stay at home through sheer want to help others while not being able to feed your kids or pay your rent. Yes definitely, that’s the key. Save lives by starving to death. What a winning situation.

So, I’m not doomsaying but I’m also looking back at the past year where the government insist, they weren’t pushing for herd immunity while telling Philip Scofield that the way ahead is herd immunity, you do wonder if they’ll get this right. If not, let’s hope variant B.1.167 gets bored of socialising before we all have to, again.

Oh, and in Yorkshire, there’s now a new triple mutant variant which sounds like something the X-Men would have to fight. There’s only 49 recorded cases so far and again, currently no evidence that it makes vaccines less good or causes severe illness. But it is curious as its got its own strange combo of variations which mean it’s totally doing its own thing and fair play to Yorkshire for doing its own community virus investment.

And now back to Gracie…

INTERVIEW WITH GRACIE PART 2

It was so great to get Gracie back on the podcast after all this time. You can follow her at @graciemaybe on Twitter, and Liberty HQ can be found at libertyhumanrights.org.uk, and all the links to join up as a member or find and follow their social media accounts can be found there too.

What other issues or political areas haven’t I had someone on the show to talk about yet? Has someone written a book, article or piece of graffiti on a motorway bridge that you’d like me to talk to them about? Let me know which you can of course do @parpolbro on Twitter, the Partly Political Broadcast Facebook group, the contact page at partlypoliticalbroadcast.co.uk or email me at partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com. Or you could have your organic recommendations secretly smuggled to me in unmarked bags by a butler but to be honest I think round my way a butler creeping about would be the most out of the ordinary noticeable thing and the Next Door mob would have the police on them in minutes. So as always, it’s probably just best to email isn’t it?

END

And that’s all for this week’s Partly Political Broadcast podcast. Yes really. Yes, I know it’s hard to accept but that is it. But turn that frown upside down because this will return next week no matter how many times you try to destroy it. It’s like a curse. But you know, one I hope you enjoy. If you do, tell your social spheres to give it a try, craft some word poetry in a lovely 5 star review for the show on your podcast app of choice and why not rid yourself of all that pesky cash you have unfairly taking up space in your bank account by donating it all to this show at ko-fi.com/ParPolBro, join the Patreon.com/ParPolBro or via the Acast supporter button.

Thanks a million, and four to Acast, my brother The Last Skeptik and Kat Day.

This will be back next week when Dominic Cummings reveals that Boris Johnson never had a plan for what happens after Brexit and we all have to act surprised so he doesn’t get too upset.

BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s show was sponsored by Herd Immunity, the new spray that will always stop you from being trampled by sheep.

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