The Pace Of Change...

The death knell has been sounded for the traditional landline telephone. From 2025, all households and businesses will need the internet to make calls under a major digital shake-up.

It means millions of customers will be pushed online for the first time or forced to rely on a mobile phone instead.

Can you still call them 'customers' when they've not got a choice? 

Strangly, this isn't being pushed by the Tory government's relentless 'change everything' policies, for once:

Those without internet may need an engineer to visit their home to get them set up and those with older phones could need to buy a new handset.

Industry insiders compared the move to the switch to digital TV in 2012, when broadcasters stopped transmitting traditional analogue signals to household rooftop or indoor aerials. But while that change was led by the Government, the switch to 'digital' calls is being driven by the telecoms industry.

And while it's not going to affect me much, since my landline merely serves to generate spam calls and 'Microsoft engineers' who want me to go online to fix things on my computer (I just laugh and hang up) there are real fears for a lot of customers:

...experts have raised concerns that millions of older and vulnerable households which are not online, do not use a mobile phone or live in a rural area with poor connectivity are at risk of being left behind.

One thing's for sure - this is to benefit the providers of the service, not the consumers of it. 

Close, Hugh, But No Cigar...

Hugh Muir in the 'Guardian':

One could dismiss this as a football terraces thing, but I suspect it is the sharp end of something that’s happening more widely in society. I think we have reached the point in the race in Britain debate where a section of white establishment Britain is saying: “That’s it. We have heard your plight and George Floyd was terrible and yes, perhaps you do need a few more jobs and we can do that, but you keep going on about it and you are making us feel responsible and uncomfortable: we have heard you, but we have heard enough.”

Well, no, Hugh. 

It's more a case of: “That’s it. We have heard your constant whining about your supposed awful life in this country and how you are 'in pain' for the not-untimely death of yet another member of your wretched 'community' across the pond who spent his time on earth preying mostly on you, and we are just about reaching saturation point; if you don't like the way we run our country, you're free to leave, and frankly, we'd be happy to see the back of you.” 

Six months ago the pollsters Opinium asked people what they thought about BLM and were told that 55% of adults polled believed BLM had increased racial tension.

One wonders just what the other 45% think - surely it can't be that they've decreased it?!? 

Why Are You Blaming One Man..?

My dad, Cliff Anderson, 88, was twice misdiagnosed and sent home from hospital a week before he died with Covid.

On the first occasion he was diagnosed with hypoglycaemia. He was diabetic, but religious in taking his medication, so I thought that was rubbish.

On the second, his notes said he had a chest infection, an unexplained dry cough and shortness of breath. I thought it could be Covid, but the tests were negative.

On the third occasion he had collapsed with an enormous Covid-induced stroke. The ambulance took four and a half hours to arrive at his home in Higher Shotton, north Wales.

And that was the last I saw of my dad. The consultant rang to say: “Your father has had a significant left lobe stroke and he’s Covid positive, and has Covid pneumonia.” And I just thought: “I’ve known this for a week. A week!” He had typical symptoms for the elderly.

He'd been shielding but they think an asymptomatic carer brought the virus into the house. It's a shocking indictment of the NHS and their... 

Oh.

Today, I am just so angry at Boris saying he couldn’t have done any more.

Now, I think Boris is a buffoon whose lockdowns are going to eventually kill more people than covid, but unless he was moonlighting as a carer, I fail to see how he's somehow personally responsible for your father's death. 

It seems to me that there's a lot more people to blame. And they all work in the 'caring' NHS. The one that idiots clap like seals. 

He hadn’t closed the borders. Only now, almost a year on, he’s talking of closing them. There was no PPE for carers or doctors, exposing frontline staff to enormous viral load like cannon fodder. There was no testing until it was way way too late. There was “eat out to help out”. There was changing the rules constantly. There was backing that amateur, Dominic Cummings. I see Johnson’s father has had two vaccines. My dad never even got his letter. He still hasn’t.

You live in Wales, where your government has slapped draconian restrictions on people buying children's books and clothes, and had their police stopping people at the border. Yet the virus got through anyway. Brought in by the failing NHS and caring staff.

Not by Rishi. Not by Dominic. 

My father’s death was avoidable. We’d kept him safe for a year. He wasn’t a bloody number.

He was to the NHS though...