Link here

Last night Jess Phillips, Labour’s shadow minister for domestic abuse and safeguarding, said that it appeared that Parish “of his own admission” had committed a criminal offence under the Indecent Displays (Control) Act of 1981.

 Extract from www.theguardian.com

The act states that: “If any indecent matter is publicly displayed the person making the display and any person causing or permitting the display to be made shall be guilty of an offence.”

It adds that: “Any matter which is displayed in or so as to be visible from any public place shall, for the purposes of this section, be deemed to be publicly displayed.”

Sentences range from a fine to up to two years in prison.

Phillips, who said the law was not widely known about and therefore not often enforced, told the Observer: “If this law was to be applied it appears he has committed an offence by his own admission.”

Phillips said Labour would now call for a full review into the law’s application and how many charges had been brought under it. She said a public information campaign should also be launched as a matter of urgency to enable people to know that watching porn where others could see it was already illegal, including on public transport.

Phillips said: “There are plenty of laws on the statute books that are meant to protect women and girls in society, however they are not enacted. They are very rarely enacted appropriately.

“People don’t know they can complain about it. What we will do now is look into where charging has and hasn’t happened [under this law], such as on transport networks where people watch it on the bus next you.”

She added that greater awareness of the act would not be enough, but charges needed to be brought under it to demonstrate to people that watching pornography in public was completely unacceptable and would lead to prosecutions.

On Friday Parish had referred himself to the parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone, for investigation, but had said he would only stand down if found guilty. He said yesterday he changed his mind after realising the pressure he was putting his family under and the damage he was doing to his party.

Parish was identified and stripped of the whip on Friday afternoon after two female colleagues had claimed last week they had seen him looking at adult content on his phone while sitting near them in the chamber.

Boris Johnson’s claim that a lack of knowledge about the asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 put care homes at risk has been further undermined after it emerged he openly discussed the potential scale of symptom-free transmission.

Michael Savage www.theguardian.com 

The prime minister has already been accused of misleading parliament over the claim. He made it last week after the high court ruled that the government had acted unlawfully in ordering the discharge of patients to care homes without testing in the spring of 2020. Johnson told the House of Commons: “What we didn’t know in particular was that Covid could be transmitted asymptomatically.”

However, the prime minister commented on papers examining the issue at a Covid press conference on 25 March – several weeks before rules were altered to ensure that all patients were tested before they were admitted to a care home.

At the press conference, he asked chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance about reports that many people could have the disease without symptoms. “Patrick, on the numbers of people who have the disease asymptomatically, there was a study I saw quoted from some Oxford academics saying that as many as 50% may have had it asymptomatically,” he said. “How do you evaluate that at this stage?”

Vallance said studies in China and Italy had pointed to asymptomatic cases but the role of those cases at a population-wide level was unknown. He also said that new antibody tests would “be able to work out how many people have had the disease asymptomatically, and that’s going to be important to understand what to do next”. He added: “These tests are crucially important. We need more of them.”

Care homes emerged as a major casualty in the first Covid wave. In mid-March 2020, NHS England had told hospitals to “urgently discharge” patients to help free 15,000 beds. Compulsory tests were not introduced for discharged patients until 15 April. About 25,000 patients were discharged to care homes in the intervening period.

Last week’s high court judgement listed several occasions in early 2020 when the risk of asymptomatic transmission was raised by scientists and ministers. A submission from the government’s own lawyers stated that “there can be no doubt that [the government] understood that it was possible that asymptomatic people could bring the virus into care homes”. A government spokesman responded to the findings by stating the court “recognised this was a very difficult decision at the start of the pandemic, evidence on asymptomatic transmission was uncertain”.

Martin Green, chief executive of Care England, said that even if there was not proof of asymptomatic transmission, ministers should have erred on the side of caution, as the risks were known. “The Sage government advisory committee had identified the issue of asymptomatic transmissions in early 2020, but if there was any doubt about issues relating to transmission pathways then this should have led to a clear directive that no one should be transferred between any health and care settings without a Covid test.”

Johnson also acknowledged, in a press conference on 18 March, the problems the virus posed. “The thing about this disease, it’s an invisible enemy and we don’t know who’s transmitting it, but the great thing about having a test to see whether you’ve had it or not is suddenly a green light goes on above your head.”

If he did not understand that meant people without obvious symptoms might be among those transmitting the virus, other people were on hand to point it out. Lord Bethell, then a junior health minister, was explicit about this during a Lords debate on 9 March 2020 about the government’s first Covid regulations, which created the power to keep people in isolation if they posed a risk. He told members: “Large numbers of people are infected and infectious but completely asymptomatic and never go near a test kit.”

At that point, the public was told that the incubation period for Covid could be as long as 14 days, and most people did not develop symptoms until about three to five days after . There was no proof at that stage how Covid was transmitted, – prompting advice about handwashing rather than mask-wearing – but the high level of infectiousness and the possibility of asymptomatic transmission were being actively discussed by scientists and commentators.

The Imperial College report that was so influential to the government’s initial response to the virus – and which led to the widespread antipathy among lockdown sceptics towards its chief author, Professor Neil Ferguson – stated that they assumed “symptomatic individuals are 50% more infectious than asymptomatic individuals”.

A government spokesperson said was “being clear about the understanding of the virus changing over time and that it changed significantly day by day, particularly at the start of the pandemic”. They said the “vast majority” of last week’s court judgment found in the government’s favour and that evidence on asymptomatic transmission was “extremely uncertain”.

They added: “Our thoughts are with all those who lost loved ones during the pandemic. Throughout the pandemic,our aim has been to protect the public from the threat to life and health posed by Covid-19 and we specifically sought to safeguard care home residents based on the best information at the time.”

What a preposterous argument – Owl

“It’s like putting up a speed camera”

Joe Ives, local democracy reporter www.radioexe.co.uk 

Increased monitoring of sewage being dumped into rivers and the sea is part of the reason why public pressure on water companies is on the rise, according to a senior member of the Environment Agency.

Speaking at a joint meeting of Torridge District Council (TDC) and North Devon Council (NDC), Dave Trewolla, team leader for integrated environmental planning for Devon and Cornwall at the agency said: “It’s the same as vehicles speeding. You don’t know they’re speeding unless you put a camera up and catch them.”  

As a result, says Mr Trewolla, “part of the increase in notifications, awareness, and social-political pressure reflects the increased monitoring and therefore increased awareness, rather than increased spills necessarily.”

South West Water (SWW), which oversees sewage in Devon, is one of several water companies facing increasimg criticism for dumping raw sewage into rivers and the sea. It carried out 42,000 such discharges in 2020.

Research by The River’s Trust, a conservation group, shows that many of those discharges were in North Devon.

One storm overflow in Illfracombe spilt out raw sewage 123 times or 2,260 hours, the equivalent of 94 days. Another in Bideford In 2020 spilt 326 times for a total of 1,832 hours or 76 days. Two in Barnstaple spilt for a combined total of 155 times for 4,466 hours, or 186 days.

Mr Trewolla said that in recent years the Environment Agency’s ability to monitor waterways has been hamstrung by cuts by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). “You get the environment you pay for” he added.

“If we don’t get resourced to do our full duties, we cannot do our full duties.”

Also speaking at the meeting was Alan Burrows, director of environmental liaison and culture at South West Water. He said the company has a target of zero harm from combined sewage overflows by 2030 and aims to reduce harm on rivers by a third by 2025 and to zero by 2030.

Since 2016, SWW has increased the number of its sewage overflows it monitors and keeps tabs on around 80 per cent of its network. The company plans to monitor them al by the end of 2023.

The East Devon Alliance has issued this press release:

Like most people in the Tiverton and Honiton constituency, the Independent East Devon Alliance is shocked by Neil Parish’s actions and believes that he has done the right thing by resigning. The forthcoming by-election is an opportunity to choose an independent-minded, local MP who will stand up for the people of the area and oppose the debasement of public life by the present Conservative government. We will be consulting our members about the best way to achieve this.

About the Independent East Devon Alliance: We have 13 councillors on East Devon District Council and are the largest party within its ruling Democratic Alliance Group which also includes the Liberal Democrats and Greens. In the 2019 elections, IEDA candidates topped the polls in the Seaton, Axminster, Coly Valley and Yarty wards of the Tiverton and Honiton constituency.

Martin Shaw

Chair

Independent East Devon Alliance

Neil Parish, himself, with this caption:

“I was trying to watch tractors”

‘Did he watch the full tractor porn…or just the trailer?’ Social media is flooded with hilarious memes as Tory MP Neil Parish quits after watching pornography in the Commons

You might have expected this but not the Daily Mail to be the front runner!