Lockdown : lives "saved" ? Long term we'll be in deficit.
- Thread starter Justin Smith
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That's just it
I don't believe you and think we could if we had acted quickly - and then we wouldnt have had a lot of the lockdown costs - NZ had minimal infection/deaths until they relaxed restrictions once vaccination was underway, their closed borders managed to reduce inward infections enough they could track and trace any that got in and keep R <1 whilst it needed to be
They ended up with a total of 2687 deaths out of a population of 5million or 0.05% compared with our 0.3% so a sixth the death rate and a lesser effect on their economy
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Because it's a lot more complicated than that - you want everything to be simle and have easy answers - life is not like that.
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Is it any more complicated than:
Look who was in charge at the time, and their decision-making prowess.
The buck stops there, or is there some other excuse?
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A global pandemeic and how it gets dealt with is a lot more complicated than a single person deciding on something.
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Wasn’t a single person though was it Alan? There was a whole bunch of ‘em. The nightly fearcasts by the brothers Grimm. The graphs. The shouty three-word slogans. Oh what a mess they made ?
Arrested on a vast, wide-open beach for having a coffee anyone?
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That is harsh, I don't recall ANY of the other people who may have been in charge say anything different and despite a few individuals saying "go the Sweden route - go the New Zealand route" etc, the majority agreed and as we are a democratic society the majority hold sway. You cannot now blame them when they followed majority advice.
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I agree. Reality is often ‘harsh’. But, I ask you - was it a serious situation, or wasn’t it?
If those in charge insisted it was serious / dangerous / we must listen etc etc, but then behaved in a way that rubbished all of that - what are we to conclude?
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Quote upon quote upon quote that you dig up to suit your own purposes, most of which have already been dismissed. Money shouldn't come before lives - the lockdown was a good thing, it saved lives. Banks, companies and countries quickly make up deficits, but you can't resurrect the dead and that's the bottom line.
The problems this and every country now have are a mishmash of many things, not just covid.
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When you said those in charge thought you were refering to Boris Johnson. Although no idea what that has to do with Covid rates in Greece which is what I was commenting on - think you have have got confused somewhere.
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No I’m not. The very people who decided it was dangerous to hang out at parties, hung out at parties.
You not seeing the discord there?
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The difference is you see that as meaning it wasnt that dangerous they were saying it for other reasons - i see that as meaning , they had been told they needed the country to limit social interaction and they (with that extra info) decided that if the 99% of the country who are plebs did the no party bit that they the gilded elite could ignore the instructions without peril or consequence
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Well, maybe. But, it *wasn't that dangerous* for the vast, vast majority of people. I remind you again, the average covis death age was higher than life expectancy.
I also remind you about how they made people who didn’t want to be injected feel like lepers. Some even losing their jobs over it.
I for one, don’t take advice from people like that. Or take any value whatsoever in anything they say, because I believe that everything they say and do, is because of being power-crazed.
Thank you.
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And you singular don't matter
We are talking stats, epidemiology deals with populations not individuals - it is like MMR, not every child can have MMR but as long as the vaccination rate stays > 95% having 2 doses then the population is covered as a new outbreak will fizzle out.
I am sure there were conversations had in govt/cobra where scientists were very clear it was about getting a certain % to comply - that was what mattered not whether Simon Field complied but whether a great enough % did to keep R <1 until either effective treatment/a vaccine or a nicer strain emerged with the fear that a deadlier strain didnt emerge before we had treatment/vaccination sorted.
I suspect because people like BoJo were in those meetings he felt he could ignore the advice because the majority of people were complying and he is "special"
As I keep hearing the trouble is - his inability to follow his own rules mean next time something similar occurs the compliance rate will be lower because too many people will remember
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So in your opinion it is OK for the elderly to die??????? Thanks very much, in which case a fair proportion of us on this forum should keel over and push up daisy's.
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Please. You’re better than reducing it to some kind of Brexit=Racism lowest possible denominator type retort.
there are many, many things to which the very elderly and or / vulnerable may succumb at some point. We don’t get all hysterical about those things and start wielding faux-power about like a berk, effectively throwing money at people to sit on their arses. I believe this has helped to finish crippling this country’s economy and healthcare system which will probably mean a shorter life expectancy for millions of people.
Why is that ok?
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I say it again - people lives are worth more than money - the economy will recover - you can't bring the dead back. It wasn't just the elderly, it was those with the wrong genes where it affected the breathing and heart and those who, if they caught ti, would suffer with long covid. We were protecting all of those people, that other didn't is shocking, but to have protected those people was the right, humane, thing to do.
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Nobody has said money is worth more than life, stop debasing the argument.
What’s being said is that it’s all very well saying ‘yeah but we saved lives’, but if you don’t add ‘how many lives are to be lost as a result of undiagnosed diseases, lower living standards as a result of throwing money at people / the problem, as a result of the flip-flopping of policies?’
Basically, why do you think saving lives short term is better than losing many more lives in the long term?
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To quote a tweet I saw this morning:
‘A pandemic is horrifying but facing it whilst being governed by corrupt criminals was terrifying. It was their job to lead and keep us safe but we were left to fend for ourselves. They pickpocketed us as we died, now they’re scrabbling about in the gutter trying to cover it up.’
‘A pandemic is horrifying but facing it whilst being governed by corrupt criminals was terrifying. It was their job to lead and keep us safe but we were left to fend for ourselves. They pickpocketed us as we died, now they’re scrabbling about in the gutter trying to cover it up.’
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Read back through your posts and I think you'll find that's exactly what your saying and all your doing now is trying to distance yourself from it. You've already tried to trumpet the 'undiagnosed diseases' angle and were more or less advised you don't have a crystal ball so you wouldn't know and the best thing anyone could have done was save as many lives as possible at that moment in time with the best information available.
Also - as you've been told countless times - you don't know how many would have died if we hadn't locked down and given time for a vaccine to develop. Additionally, it's been pointed out to you there are costs to the economy because of people who caught long-covid prior to the lockdown and there could have been countless more if we hadn't locked down - so the economy might be in an even worse state with the workforce either dead or long-term sick if we hadn't lock down.
Countless of your links to information have been proven to be skewed and one of your links led to information from a man who was then proven to be a liar by his own governing body!
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Lots of end-of-life drugs were given out and quickly covered up.
Some interesting reading here:
Lockdown Benefits “Drop in the Bucket Compared to the Costs”, Landmark Study Finds – The Daily Sceptic
New study looking at 20,000 papers on the global impact of the lockdowns says the benefits were "negligible", whereas the collateral costs were "staggering". “Biggest policy mistake in our lifetime," the authors conclude.
dailysceptic.org
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has anyone mentioned the ridiculous depression and suicide rates caused by lockdowns? or the damage done by keeping people out of sunlight and fresh air? what about all the small businesses that were forced to close, causing families to go bankrupt and driving a lot of people into starvation and homelessness? food bank demand went through the roof - especially when coupled with farmers being paid to destroy crops, and livestock being slaughtered by the millions, and food factories having mysterious explosions.
ps. has anyone here been following the record-breaking doctor rashid buttar who was allegedly murdered recently? he had a lot to say about the damage done by lockdowns and related shenanigans.
ps. has anyone here been following the record-breaking doctor rashid buttar who was allegedly murdered recently? he had a lot to say about the damage done by lockdowns and related shenanigans.
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I don't even mind this. Homeschooling is better in every way as far as I see it. Only the social aspect is missing and this is best obtained by the family unit and leisure clubs in my opinion.
But the abuse the kids were put through including forcible suffocation (I was not diagnosed with asthma until late childhood) is absolutely perverse. In many cases they were told they could not take the mask off to breathe properly unless they earn points through academic or behavioural success. This is extreme torture-based conditioning.
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- Original Poster
- #673
The first casualty of war is the truth (in fact I used that very quote back in Apr 2020.....) but this really is chilling.
I have highlighted the most frightening quotes for those who do not want to read it all :
Exclusive: Ministers had ‘chilling’ secret unit to curb lockdown dissent
Critics of Covid restrictions targeted by counter-disinformation team at the heart of the Government
Daily Telegraph 2 Jun 23
A secretive government unit worked with social media companies in an attempt to curtail discussion of controversial lockdown policies during the pandemic, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU) was set up by ministers to tackle supposed domestic “threats”, and was used to target those critical of lockdown and questioning the mass vaccination of children.
Critics of lockdown had posts removed from social media. There is growing suspicion that social media firms used technology to stop the posts being promoted, circulated or widely shared after being flagged by the CDU or its counterpart in the Cabinet Office.
Documents revealed under Freedom of Information (FoI) and data protection requests showed that the activities of prominent critics of the Government’s Covid policies were secretly monitored.
An artificial intelligence firm (AI) was used by the Government to scour social media sites. The company flagged discussions opposing vaccine passports.
Many of the issues being raised were valid at the time and have since been proven to be well-founded.
The BBC also took part in secretive meetings of a government policy forum to address the so-called disinformation.
On Friday, MPs and freedom of speech campaigners condemned the disclosures as “truly chilling” and “a tool for censoring British citizens” akin to those of the Chinese Communist Party.
Much of the Government’s wider work on disinformation is shrouded in secrecy for “national security” reasons. Large parts of official documents are still redacted.
In America, Twitter has released similar information showing how the US government also introduced a secretive programme to curtail discussion of Covid lockdowns.
It can now be revealed that the activities of Prof Carl Heneghan, the Oxford epidemiologist who has advised Boris Johnson, and Dr Alexandre de Figueiredo, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), were monitored by government disinformation units.
Molly Kingsley, who set up a campaign to keep schools open during the pandemic, also had her social activity monitored.
As well as the CDU, the Government operated a Rapid Response Unit (RRU) in the Cabinet Office that hunted online for content it considered disinformation.
The CDU, which is still operating, was embedded in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
The department has “trusted flagger” status at social media companies including Facebook and Twitter, which means that requests for content to be removed are fast-tracked for consideration.
In some cases, individuals whose social media posts were recorded by the units have subsequently faced sanctions by Twitter and Facebook. Ministers denied asking for posts by Prof Heneghan, Dr de Figueiredo or Ms Kingsley to be removed.
The Government has said that the CDU “is focused on helping the Government understand online disinformation narratives and understand attempts to artificially manipulate the information environment”.
The Government also ran a Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum, which brought together civil servants from the DCMS and technology giants - including Facebook and Google - as well as the BBC to discuss how to limit the spread of what was considered Covid-19 disinformation.
This forum and the two units were not the only way the Government tried to apply pressure on social media companies during the pandemic.
The Lockdown Files, published by The Telegraph earlier this year, revealed that Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, repeatedly lobbied Sir Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister and now a Facebook executive, about vaccine misinformation.
Facebook has been open about its efforts to tackle misinformation about Covid. During the pandemic, it removed posts and in April 2020 alone put warning labels on about 50 million pieces of content.
The CDU was established in 2019 and was focused on the European elections before turning to focus on the pandemic.
During Covid, the unit worked closely with the Cabinet Office’s now defunct RRU, whose responsibilities included tackling “purported ‘experts’ issuing dangerous misinformation”.
The RRU has admitted in an FoI obtained by Big Brother Watch and passed to The Telegraph that it made requests for social media posts to be taken down.
As part of its work, the Cabinet Office also passed the CDU “media monitoring” reports.
Documents revealed that the material flagged to the CDU included articles published by The Telegraph.
One of these was a piece by Ms Kingsley published in February 2022, arguing that it was “indefensible” that children’s lives were still not back to normal when the rest of society was. She urged ministers to make a clear statement that children’s extracurricular activities should not be subject to additional curbs.
One of Ms Kingsley’s tweets from December 2020, in which she said it would be “unforgivable to close schools”, was also passed to the CDU.
Sir Gavin Williamson, then the education secretary, closed schools days later. However, he has since admitted that the decision caused a major row with Mr Hancock and that he considered resigning.
When the dispute was exposed by The Telegraph’s Lockdown Files investigation, Sir Gavin said the closure “wasn’t done for the right reasons” and that he regretted agreeing to it.
The RRU also logged articles by Prof Heneghan published in The Telegraph and The Spectator.
One of these questioned the science behind the rule of six – later abandoned by Government – and discredited the data used by the Government to justify the second lockdown.
He [Prof Carl Heneghan] had social media posts about face masks and the accuracy of coronavirus death data removed after the technology giants raised concerns about Covid disinformation.
The CDU has also commissioned reports from an external artificial intelligence firm, Logically, which uses AI to trawl the internet.
The company has been paid more than £1.2 million by the DCMS since January 2021 for work that included helping to “build a comprehensive picture of potentially harmful misinformation and disinformation”.
I have highlighted the most frightening quotes for those who do not want to read it all :
Exclusive: Ministers had ‘chilling’ secret unit to curb lockdown dissent
Critics of Covid restrictions targeted by counter-disinformation team at the heart of the Government
Daily Telegraph 2 Jun 23
A secretive government unit worked with social media companies in an attempt to curtail discussion of controversial lockdown policies during the pandemic, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU) was set up by ministers to tackle supposed domestic “threats”, and was used to target those critical of lockdown and questioning the mass vaccination of children.
Critics of lockdown had posts removed from social media. There is growing suspicion that social media firms used technology to stop the posts being promoted, circulated or widely shared after being flagged by the CDU or its counterpart in the Cabinet Office.
Documents revealed under Freedom of Information (FoI) and data protection requests showed that the activities of prominent critics of the Government’s Covid policies were secretly monitored.
An artificial intelligence firm (AI) was used by the Government to scour social media sites. The company flagged discussions opposing vaccine passports.
Many of the issues being raised were valid at the time and have since been proven to be well-founded.
The BBC also took part in secretive meetings of a government policy forum to address the so-called disinformation.
On Friday, MPs and freedom of speech campaigners condemned the disclosures as “truly chilling” and “a tool for censoring British citizens” akin to those of the Chinese Communist Party.
Much of the Government’s wider work on disinformation is shrouded in secrecy for “national security” reasons. Large parts of official documents are still redacted.
In America, Twitter has released similar information showing how the US government also introduced a secretive programme to curtail discussion of Covid lockdowns.
It can now be revealed that the activities of Prof Carl Heneghan, the Oxford epidemiologist who has advised Boris Johnson, and Dr Alexandre de Figueiredo, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), were monitored by government disinformation units.
Molly Kingsley, who set up a campaign to keep schools open during the pandemic, also had her social activity monitored.
As well as the CDU, the Government operated a Rapid Response Unit (RRU) in the Cabinet Office that hunted online for content it considered disinformation.
The CDU, which is still operating, was embedded in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
The department has “trusted flagger” status at social media companies including Facebook and Twitter, which means that requests for content to be removed are fast-tracked for consideration.
In some cases, individuals whose social media posts were recorded by the units have subsequently faced sanctions by Twitter and Facebook. Ministers denied asking for posts by Prof Heneghan, Dr de Figueiredo or Ms Kingsley to be removed.
The Government has said that the CDU “is focused on helping the Government understand online disinformation narratives and understand attempts to artificially manipulate the information environment”.
The Government also ran a Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum, which brought together civil servants from the DCMS and technology giants - including Facebook and Google - as well as the BBC to discuss how to limit the spread of what was considered Covid-19 disinformation.
This forum and the two units were not the only way the Government tried to apply pressure on social media companies during the pandemic.
The Lockdown Files, published by The Telegraph earlier this year, revealed that Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, repeatedly lobbied Sir Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister and now a Facebook executive, about vaccine misinformation.
Facebook has been open about its efforts to tackle misinformation about Covid. During the pandemic, it removed posts and in April 2020 alone put warning labels on about 50 million pieces of content.
The CDU was established in 2019 and was focused on the European elections before turning to focus on the pandemic.
During Covid, the unit worked closely with the Cabinet Office’s now defunct RRU, whose responsibilities included tackling “purported ‘experts’ issuing dangerous misinformation”.
The RRU has admitted in an FoI obtained by Big Brother Watch and passed to The Telegraph that it made requests for social media posts to be taken down.
As part of its work, the Cabinet Office also passed the CDU “media monitoring” reports.
Documents revealed that the material flagged to the CDU included articles published by The Telegraph.
One of these was a piece by Ms Kingsley published in February 2022, arguing that it was “indefensible” that children’s lives were still not back to normal when the rest of society was. She urged ministers to make a clear statement that children’s extracurricular activities should not be subject to additional curbs.
One of Ms Kingsley’s tweets from December 2020, in which she said it would be “unforgivable to close schools”, was also passed to the CDU.
Sir Gavin Williamson, then the education secretary, closed schools days later. However, he has since admitted that the decision caused a major row with Mr Hancock and that he considered resigning.
When the dispute was exposed by The Telegraph’s Lockdown Files investigation, Sir Gavin said the closure “wasn’t done for the right reasons” and that he regretted agreeing to it.
The RRU also logged articles by Prof Heneghan published in The Telegraph and The Spectator.
One of these questioned the science behind the rule of six – later abandoned by Government – and discredited the data used by the Government to justify the second lockdown.
He [Prof Carl Heneghan] had social media posts about face masks and the accuracy of coronavirus death data removed after the technology giants raised concerns about Covid disinformation.
The CDU has also commissioned reports from an external artificial intelligence firm, Logically, which uses AI to trawl the internet.
The company has been paid more than £1.2 million by the DCMS since January 2021 for work that included helping to “build a comprehensive picture of potentially harmful misinformation and disinformation”.
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- Original Poster
- #674
Part 2
In one of the firm’s reports for the CDU, a post by Dr De Figueiredo, the LSHTM researcher who also works for the Vaccine Confidence Project, was flagged.
He wrote: “People who think we should be mass vaccinating children against Covid-19 poorly understand at least one of the following: (a) risk, especially absolute risk (b) ethics (c) natural immunity (d) vaccine confidence (e) long Covid.”
When Dr De Figueiredo made the comment, the Joint Committee on Vaccines and Immunisation had opted not to recommend mass vaccinations for children.
Nadhim Zahawi, the former minister for Covid vaccines deployment, said he believed the Government included Dr De Figuerido’s tweet because of “c--k-up rather than conspiracy”.
He added in an interview for The Telegraph’s forthcoming podcast, The Lockdown Files, that the CDU was there to combat “clearly completely wrong or false information”.
Miriam Cates, a Conservative MP, said: “Any attempt by governments to shut down legitimate debate is hugely concerning, but to discover that DCMS actively sought to censor the views of those who were speaking up for children’s welfare is truly chilling.
“It is becoming increasingly clear that many of the foundations of our democracy – such as free speech and parliamentary scrutiny – were completely disregarded during the pandemic.”
Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “The very concept of ‘wrong information’ dictated by a central authority is open to abuse and should be considered far more critically, lest we mirror Chinese-style censorship.
“Whilst everyone would expect the Government and tech giants to act against foreign hostile disinformation campaigns, we should be incredibly cautious about these powers being turned inwards to scan, suppress and censor the lawful speech of Brits for wrongthink, as is shockingly the case right now.”
A Whitehall source said the comparison with China was “just plain wrong”.
The source added: “On the contrary, the unit was set up to counter the threats disinformation poses to, among other things, UK national security, much of which is spread by hostile states.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former Cabinet minister, called for the Covid inquiry to investigate government disinformation units.
“The inquiry clearly ought to investigate the oppressive methods used to override dissent,” he said.
“It is clear from Hancock’s messages that steps were taken to manipulate public opinion and now it appears underhand methods may have been employed to stop free speech.
“This is not what ought to happen in a free country.”
A government spokesman said: “The unit’s purpose is to track narratives and trends using publicly available information online to protect public health and national security.
“It has never tracked the activity of individuals and has a blanket ban on referring journalists and MPs to social media platforms.
“None of the people named in this report were ever referred to social media platforms by the Government and any claim otherwise is objectively false.
“The RRU, which closed in July 2022, tracked government policies and important issues – not individuals. It used publicly available information, including material shared on social media, to assess UK disinformation trends and narratives.”
A BBC spokesman said the broadcaster attended the Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum in an observer-only capacity.
In one of the firm’s reports for the CDU, a post by Dr De Figueiredo, the LSHTM researcher who also works for the Vaccine Confidence Project, was flagged.
He wrote: “People who think we should be mass vaccinating children against Covid-19 poorly understand at least one of the following: (a) risk, especially absolute risk (b) ethics (c) natural immunity (d) vaccine confidence (e) long Covid.”
When Dr De Figueiredo made the comment, the Joint Committee on Vaccines and Immunisation had opted not to recommend mass vaccinations for children.
Nadhim Zahawi, the former minister for Covid vaccines deployment, said he believed the Government included Dr De Figuerido’s tweet because of “c--k-up rather than conspiracy”.
He added in an interview for The Telegraph’s forthcoming podcast, The Lockdown Files, that the CDU was there to combat “clearly completely wrong or false information”.
Miriam Cates, a Conservative MP, said: “Any attempt by governments to shut down legitimate debate is hugely concerning, but to discover that DCMS actively sought to censor the views of those who were speaking up for children’s welfare is truly chilling.
“It is becoming increasingly clear that many of the foundations of our democracy – such as free speech and parliamentary scrutiny – were completely disregarded during the pandemic.”
Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “The very concept of ‘wrong information’ dictated by a central authority is open to abuse and should be considered far more critically, lest we mirror Chinese-style censorship.
“Whilst everyone would expect the Government and tech giants to act against foreign hostile disinformation campaigns, we should be incredibly cautious about these powers being turned inwards to scan, suppress and censor the lawful speech of Brits for wrongthink, as is shockingly the case right now.”
A Whitehall source said the comparison with China was “just plain wrong”.
The source added: “On the contrary, the unit was set up to counter the threats disinformation poses to, among other things, UK national security, much of which is spread by hostile states.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former Cabinet minister, called for the Covid inquiry to investigate government disinformation units.
“The inquiry clearly ought to investigate the oppressive methods used to override dissent,” he said.
“It is clear from Hancock’s messages that steps were taken to manipulate public opinion and now it appears underhand methods may have been employed to stop free speech.
“This is not what ought to happen in a free country.”
A government spokesman said: “The unit’s purpose is to track narratives and trends using publicly available information online to protect public health and national security.
“It has never tracked the activity of individuals and has a blanket ban on referring journalists and MPs to social media platforms.
“None of the people named in this report were ever referred to social media platforms by the Government and any claim otherwise is objectively false.
“The RRU, which closed in July 2022, tracked government policies and important issues – not individuals. It used publicly available information, including material shared on social media, to assess UK disinformation trends and narratives.”
A BBC spokesman said the broadcaster attended the Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum in an observer-only capacity.
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- Original Poster
- #675
I have never met a parent who thought remote learning was in any way an adequate substitute ofr thie kids going to school. I certainly did not think so
Obviously I have not spoken to many parents who home school their kids because, err, they're at home. So I am talking about the great majority of parents who send their kids to school.
>>Only the social aspect is missing and this is best obtained by the family unit and leisure clubs in my opinion<<
Seriously ?
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- Original Poster
- #676
I think we have a pretty good idea :
Covid deaths per million (though not all will actually have died of Covid, particularly since spring 2021, and even more so since early 2022) - data to 14 Dec 22
Peru = 6463 (0.65%)
Hungary = 5036
Czech Republic = 3910
USA = 3320 av age 38.1 (Florida = 3874 - av age 42.2)
Greece = 3342
Brazil = 3211
Poland = 3137
Italy = 3027
UK = 2887 (av age 40.4)
Belgium = 2840
Spain = 2492
France = 2441
Sweden = 2075
Germany = 1903
What is most interesting about this list is that some of the countries, like Brazil for instance, were "infamous" for their lack of anti Covid measures. Yet, excluding the outliers, most countries Covid figures were fairly similar.
Florida's figures are the most interesting because they were famously reluctant to suppress their society (and enforce masks). They had a slightly higher death rate than the USA as a whole, but the average age of people in Florida is higher, so once that is taken into account the difference is even less.
USA to Florida = 17% higher in Florida, but their av age is 11% higher
But the point is it should all (everything from masks to limiting social contact to vaccines) have been voluntary anyway because, err, we are supposed to live in a free country not an authoritarian dictatorship like China
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well i was simplifying. while homeschooling is superior in terms of average exam results as well as quality of life, in comparison to sending your kids off to 'indoctrination camps' as some people call them... technically there are still legal demands to follow certain curriculums that may be untruthful and unbeneficial to fill your kid's head with. 'unschooling' is the superior solution in my view, for the development and wellbeing of the child, even if it's technically illegal in this country.
the social aspect is best satisfied by family and community. by family i mean quality time with parents and siblings and plenty of time with extended family too. by community i'm talking sports clubs, leisure activities, any courses of interest, social gatherings, church if you're that way inclined, etc. this kind of social input, in my opinion, is far superior to being forcibly penned in and put to work with fellow indoctrination camp inmates who are likely to include and much higher rate of bullies and bad influences, and a much lower rate of good influences, as compared to the preferable alternative described above.
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My youngest daughter did far better in lockdown - her maths in particular as she was held back by having to go at the pace of the slowest in her class (even though it is/was the top set)
She is looking to apply to Oxford to study maths now
Quite honestly if she wasnt into ALevels now I would happily have her learn at home now, she does DofE, Cadets, Cadet band, an Orchestra and Rugby to county level outside school so it is not like she is isolated or missing out on activities (I am actually trying to get her to pare them back a bit)
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Anything else you think should be voluntary? Speed limits? Theft? Beating internet trolls around the head with a rolled up newspaper?
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the basic principle of common law is everything should be voluntary (that's how freedom works) so long as you're not committing harm on others. and the individual's rights always trump the communal rights of a society that tries to impose itself on individuals against their will.
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