Heroic Tim Martin lashes out at quack academics, the Daily Mail & the Government on Covid as Daily Telegraph hackette Helena Horton goes mad

Once again the heroic boss of JD Wetherspoon has dared to speak out against the GroupThink gripping academia, the media, and the political classes on the subject of Covid. As an example of this madness, rather silly Daily Telegraph reporter Helena Horton was today lecturing the actor Laurence Fox on twitter about his idea of meeting six folks for a drink tonight.

She tweets: If you’re going to do this ridiculous childish shit, do it in your house or in a park, do NOT put pubs at risk of closure or force hospitality staff to be in such an uncomfortable position! They have to make sure people obey the rules or they risk being closed!

In the old days, Telegraph staff who understood GroupThink would have questioned the utterly insane rule of six introduced by the Government. Why is it that Laurence Fox risks Covid spread by meeting six folks in a boozer when we are all being urged by the Government to go back to work in offices where there are far more than six people? But Helena thinks her job is to support Government lunacy by berating impudent actors and she does so without looking at whether there is any hard data to support this. On that matter, over to Tim Martin who actually has some facts, something the Telegraph used to regard as the basis of a good article.

Tim says today:

Pub company Wetherspoon reports that it has had approximately 32 million customer visits to its 861 open pubs in the 10 weeks since 4 July. There have been 66 positive tests for Covid-19 among its 41,564 employees during this time. 811 pubs have reported zero positive tests, 40 pubs have reported one, six pubs two, two pubs three and two pubs four.

Most of the reported cases have been mild or asymptomatic and 28 of the 66 employees have already returned to work, after self-isolating in accordance with medical guidelines.

Ends

So 32 million folks went into Wetherspoon’s pubs and that resulted in how many cases? Does that data really mean that Fox should only go drinking with five pals, not six?

Tim continues:

“The situation with regard to pubs has been widely misunderstood. For example, Professor Hugh Pennington, of Aberdeen University, has said, without scientific evidence, that pubs are “dangerous places to be. This sort of negative view about pubs may have been fuelled by inaccurate press headlines. The Daily Mail (11 September), for example, said “Britons have promised to run riot” during the weekend and referred to the situation as being like “the last days of Rome”. In fact, trade was very quiet over the weekend, as the public weighed up the evidence about the alleged dangers of going out – Wetherspoon sales were 22.5% below the equivalent Saturday last year.

It is clearly not the case that pubs are “dangerous places to be. There have been more positive cases at one farm in Hereford than at all Wetherspoon pubs – and over four times as many at one sandwich-making facility in Northampton. As Swedish epidemiologist Johan Giesecke has said, strong scientific evidence shows that handwashing and social distancing, as practised by most pubs, work.

In this connection, Wetherspoon has invested around £15 million on comprehensive social distancing and hygiene measures. These include reducing capacity, spacing out tables, the installation of screens between tables and around tills, and an average of ten hand sanitisers per pub. Bad decisions are built on false presumptions, like those of Professor Pennington and the Daily Mail.

As Councillor Ian Ward, leader of Birmingham City Council, has recently said “The data we have shows that the infection rate has risen, mainly due to social interactions, particularly private household gatherings. In shops and hospitality venues there are strict measures in place to ensure they are Covid-free, whereas it is much easier to inadvertently pass on the virus in someone’s house, where people are more relaxed and less vigilant.”

If pubs are closed, or restricted so much that they become unprofitable, a great deal of the strenuous effort of the hospitality industry’s 3.2 million employees, currently engaged on upholding hygiene and social distancing standards, will be lost – leaving the public to socialise at home or elsewhere, in unsupervised circumstances. A major difference between the UK’s and Sweden’s approach, as reflected in comments from the Daily Mail and the approach of the government, is a lack of trust in the public.

The UK has adopted a colossally expensive “big brother” approach, based on exhortation, lockdowns, bewilderingly frequent changes of direction and other heavy-handed initiatives. In Sweden, public policy is based on trusting the people and this will eventually lead to far superior results.”

Ends.

Of course, the Swedish policy is already delivering superior results – a far lower death rate than the UK and whereas cases (though not deaths) in much of Europe are rising sharply, in Sweden case numbers are falling. And the economy has not been trainwrecked.

The real risk to jobs in the pubs & hospitality sector comes not from Fox having a beer with six mates, or from me refusing to wear a mask if I enter a restaurant in Scotland, or from me giving my name as Anthony Blair if asked to register by my local boozer. The risk comes from insane Government policies driven by the media and political GroupThink and refusal to look at hard data.

Of course, this is not the first time the Telegraph has gone into bat for the Government on the matter of Covid displaying manifest dishonesty 

Now if only the Telegraph had once had a journalist on its staff who had penned a book on Groupthink for silly Helena to read….