It's all about China

Let's not forget where the Wuhan virus originated. Despite a highly co-ordinated campaign that in the UK has roped in the usual suspects including Sadiq Khan and David Lammy, the public are stubborn in continuing to say and post that this virus comes from China. Even parts of the UN (no surprise) have launched a campaign to tell us that the Wuhan virus is the result of deforestation and global warming, and it's nothing to do with eating bats or wet markets at all.

But sometimes there are no heroes and no villains. I wrote a post recently that regarded China favourably in airfreighting vital medical kit to Italy at a time when France and Germany had banned sending such stuff and the EU was deaf to Italian appeals. As usual, one well-informed commentator added the necessary perspective to the piece. No, neither China nor the EU deserve congratulation. Neither are heroes, both have damaged Italy. I read it wrong.

Where I stand absolutely shoulder to shoulder with Sadiq Khan and David Lammy is that this is not the fault of people from China who are working and raising families in our communities. Perhaps if they'd had the balls or the sense to say so instead of excusing the People's Dictatorship of China then their message might have been more widely heard. Any attacks on or discrimination or harassment against Chinese people is inexcusable and unacceptable. The irony is that many, at least in London, will be those and the descendants of those who have fled the PRC.

The Chinese government, bless 'em, having precipitated a global pandemic and millions of (coming) deaths by first trying to hide then lying about the Wuhan virus are taking a lesson from the EU in using this as a 'beneficial crisis' to tighten the Belt and Road bonds with Italy and drive a wedge between the country and the rest of Europe. The 'Chinese School' cartoon below has recently surfaced on social media. Well, sorry, guys - this sort of crude propaganda may play well amongst the third world, but Europeans remain amongst the most politically sophisticated voters in the world, and this just makes China look crude and silly.

Shooting the first rioter - a London timeline

If one thing is clear from the chaotic scenes on TV and social media of the undisciplined selfishness at our supermarkets, it is clear that the UK is not the place that many liked to think it was. And London, filthy, crowded, raw London with the highest multi-drug resistant TB rates outside Iraq, Ethiopia and Afghanistan, is worst of all. When Quentin Reynolds described the resilience of Londoners on Humphrey Jennings's 'London Can Take It' he was documenting a very different London to today's city.

Watching the fights break out over toilet roll at a time when there was no food shortage and the chip shops were open, one has to wonder what it will be like when food shortages start to bite, as they surely will. People who have never used their kitchens in London will be lost. Me? I love to cook. So my shelves are already full with dried ingredients and the staples - polpa, coconut milk, onions, dried onions, garlic, garlic paste, tomato paste, and herbs and spices in ranks of big Kilner jars (tip: never again buy those sully little supermarket bottles. Order your Turmeric, smoked Paprika, peppercorns, Garam Masala, mustard powder etc in 200g packets - 200g of Turmeric is the same price as one of those little curvy 28g jars.

When the pizza and cocaine run short - and you can bet the crisis is affecting the supply chains for illegal drugs as well as everything else - then tempers will also run short. Someone will pull out a zombie knife in Tesco. A shop worker will die in a pool of blood, and armed troops will be posted to London's supermarkets. A wilding gang will run at a guarded supermarket entrance, and a young soldier will open fire.

It hasn't even started yet.

Looking on the bright side ...

I must admit, against all the odds, that there are glimmers of pleasure in this global crisis. Rather than the free-market approach of letting 520,000 of us die, the government have opted for a national lockdown, which will see the UK's deaths this year rise only from the usual 600,000 to 620,000. Call it the People's Covid Strategy if you like - and it certainly depends on co-operation from everyone. And as in WWII, when the population had to make most of the sacrifices, there will be a reckoning to be paid. First, an evening-out of social inequality; back then it took the effects of a universal ration, in which even the King had the Buckingham Palace baths marked with the max 5" water level and the princesses had ration books, to persuade the masses to comply. Second, a universal service obligation. And finally, deep and permanent changes to society to enshrine fairness, equity and limits to the pre-war inequalities.

Jeremy Warner in the 'graph has somewhat stolen my thunder with this observation

Once the pinup boy for sailing close to the wind entrepreneurialism, and as such a mentor to many, Richard Branson is now widely demonised; the gist of it is how dare a tax exile with estimated wealth of £4bn ask for a bailout by UK taxpayers. Nevermind that thousands of jobs are at risk, he can, as one well-known Dragon’s Den celebrity investor put it, “b***** off”.

Anyone on Twitter yesterday cannot have failed to notice the universal hostility toward Richard Branson - and particularly to the thought that a taxpayer funded bailout should help his airline whilst he retained his £4bn personal fortune. It was revelatory. Thatcher's poster boy is now a figure of mass hatred. It must have sent a shudder through the 0.1% of the mega-wealthy, and be causing a little anxiety amongst the 1% who have so benefited from Globalism. That's going to be part of the price of this war - demands for an end to obscene rewards. And yes, I'd go along with that.

Another pleasure has been the utter helplessness of Labour. They so want to protest and be angry about something, but they can't find it. The nadir must be yesterday's demand for Covid victims to be classified according to self-identified gender as well as ethnicity and sexuality. Sweeties, men die more because we express greater levels of ACE2, to which the SARS-CoV-2 virus binds in cell-invasion. It doesn't help being a trannie. As far as Covid-19 is concerned, you're still a bloke.

A downside, as I posted a few days ago, is that Whitehall reform is on hold - we actually need a central command and control structure during the crisis. But this is not a reason, or an excuse, for maintaining a Big Central State once we have beaten this thing. Much more on this as time goes on.

And finally, the world's nation states have just amply demonstrated that supranational government is a pointless chimera, and that the people are best served by less Europe, not more, and by less UN. In concert yesterday, the leaders of the US, UK, Germany, France and Japanese, the G7, all announced co-ordinated bailouts of hundreds of billions. If everyone prints money, it doesn't count. And not a peep from the irrelevant EU or UN. The nation state is back.

And even though there's yet no hint of a vaccine, minds in the UK are already turning to a post-Globalist world; AI, computer printing, strategic national capacity. And our effects on our environment are quickly becoming manifest; clear water and visible fish in Venice's canals, and here blue skies free of contrails, and the deafening loudness of spring birdsong. We may not want to give up this green-ness, not want to go back to the filth and degradation. Universal basic incomes are also being mentioned without hoots of derision.

If you look, there's a silver lining to most clouds.

Actors

Actors age like fine wine and most are better with age. I've drunk and laughed with many, including an ex, and I like them as a breed - but they're definitely more fun when they've reached a stage at which they can laugh at their own profession. I've got a deep fund of actor jokes they've shared with me over the years, but a few are favourites. The late Billy Jay, an old time Rep actor, reminded me of the precarious life of an actor when we caught sight through the window of the French of someone carrying a box of Romeo y Julietas. Old-school actors, he explained, used to carry their make-up in cigar boxes. On spotting his thespian friend on the other side of Shaftesbury Avenue carrying such a cigar box one blade waved across the traffic and with stage-face asked optimistically 'Working?' the response was a shake of the head. "Moving" came the reply.

London's theatres are going dark. We are losing a large part of the magic that lives amongst us, for the live stage is a potent conjuration, an experience that leaves even the jaded and unimpressed changed, and mostly improved. Not just the actors on stage, but the whole backstage armies so skilled in lights, paint, ropes and canvas and mixing boards who form little animated clumps in pubs from the Welsh Harp to the Coach and beyond and whose presence amongst us adds immeasurably to the joy and quality of West End life.

I've just read Philip Ziegler's 'London at War 1939 - 1945' in which the capability of theatreland to survive and even flourish during the blitz and the following attritional bombing campaigns is well-described. This time that won't even be a possibility - this nasty little virus will succeed where Herr Goering failed (and we without a Murial let alone a 'Miss Hitler' to curse).

So here's a plea. In all the measures to mitigate the effects of this thing, let's not forget the theatres, and the people that make them work, and not just the West End but every Rep in the land that brings the magic of the stage to our lives. It will cost a lot less than maintaining the billionaire Richard Branson in his offshore lifestyle, and bring a lot more benefit to many more lives.

Capitalism good, Globalism bad

Take a look at this graph of UK GDP growth from 1955 to just about now. Clearly, it's in two halves, as they say - but what marked the change of the roller coasters of the economy in the sixties, seventies and early eighties and the dull, mediocre, flat performance since then? The 2008 shock is the only visible bit of excitement (though the virus will do something interesting)

I've been reading David Graeber, lefty LSE academic and Corbyn supporter, but a man with half a brain. His observations are good, his conclusions dire. Here are a couple of good bits, the first on Neoliberalism -

.. global economic performance over the last thirty years has been decidedly mediocre. With one or two spectacular exceptions (notably China, which significantly ignored most neoliberal prescriptions), growth rates have been far below what they were in the days of the old-fashioned, state-directed, welfare-state-oriented capitalism of the fifties, sixties, and even seventies. By its own standards, then, the project was already a colossal failure even before the 2008 collapse.

He manages to miss the real reason for this dire economic performance despite describing its manifestation .

While the new free market ideology has framed itself above all as a rejection of bureaucracy, it has, in fact, been responsible for the first administrative system that has operated on a planetary scale, with its endless layering of public and private bureaucracies: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, trade organizations, financial institutions, transnational corporations, NGOs.

Yes, Globalism. What Globalism has managed to achieve is to destroy the benefits of the version of capitalism that made us rich up until about 1990. Oh not rich in terms of disposable incomes, consumer toys, cars that we don't own but in the important things.

You may also note that the falling of the Wall and the start of NATO's decline also coincides with this Globalism - indeed, helped to enable it. All economics is human behaviour, so here's an anecdote.

Back in the 1970s I had a gap year before going to university. At the end of the year, I had enough saved as a deposit on a little flint-rubble cottage, which cost the princely sum of £5,250. The attraction was the rear garden, which was huge, with a little orchard of six trees and enough room to run a gaggle of hens and grow a crop of tobacco - but that was for later years. I was going away, and my student grant wouldn't pay the mortgage - no problem. A quick call to the USAF produced the first of my Master Sergeants, superlative tenants whose rent payments were generous and warranted by the US government. That sort of thing was possible back in those spiky, variable years.

If you measure wealth not in the volume of cheap £10 electric drills and £5 jeans one can buy but in having a stake in the country, a country with a standing army of over 100,000, a navy of a least 50 warships and an air force with more than a handful of squadrons, in which there was the freedom to take the sort of financial risks that we did, and enjoy the rewards that we did, then we were rich. Pre-Globalism we also had personal freedom and independence to a far greater degree than subsists now, and even though the State owned a lot more business and industry than it does now, it was also somehow a much smaller State. The Big State that supports Globalism is also supported by what Graeber calls Bullshit Jobs -

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs’.

The paradox, as Graeber points out, is that the new de-nationalised capitalist Neoliberal West shouldn't allow such massive economic inefficiencies, such a huge waste of resources. Yet it does. That's an answer in itself. What's the point of having a Big State, a regulatory state, if you don't have a society replete with willing, conformist drones to enforce all the regulations?

I'm sorry, but all the cheap Chinese electric drills in the world and the availability of flash new cars I don't own don't come close in compensating for the real wealth of those pre-Globalist days.

Update
=====
The costs to the UK economy of over regulation, from the IEA

The report concludes regulation has become a political tool, used to drive social or distributive objectives, rather than to correct market failures. Failure of regulation, including over-regulation, has led to increasing barriers to entry for new businesses, stagnating competition between incumbents, and in many cases no evidence of beneficial outcomes for consumers.

Regulations are being judged on their intentions – not their outcomes – and increasingly weak mechanisms for accountability of state regulators risk undermining the rule of law, the report warns.

Dan Hannan is confused

Dan Hannan is an odd cove. His habit of buttoning up all three buttons on his suit earned him the nickname 'cockvirgin' on Twitter, and indeed there is something of the prissy schoolboy about him that limits the human warmth necessary for political success. Still, he was on the right side over Brexit and has been loyal to the party. It's just a shame his piece in the Telegraph today is so confused between globalism and globalisation. I suspect he knows. I suspect his piece is the first of many we will see in the coming months defending the interests of the global corporates as Covid-19 casts them as villains. It's not a good time for the CBI.

For any newcomers, globalisation is the neutral and unmanaged process through which trade, travel and technology makes the world a smaller place. Cheap airline travel, capitalism, electricity and the internet have brought 4G phones to the favelas of Rio and South African townships, primary health care and the polio vaccine to equatorial Africa and the Hindu Kush. Even the floods of young male migrants from Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Bangladesh heading for the Greek border are followed by mobile phone charging vans equipped with adaptors for everything from a Nokia to an iPhone, selling juice for a few Turkish lire.

Globalism is the process under which capital seeks those places with the lowest factor costs - labour, power, land, raw materials, transport, regulation, penalties for environmental degradation and pollution - in which to invest. Globalists love supranational government, the globalisation of commercial law and standards, open borders, free movement of people, capital and goods and everything else that facilitates friction-free profitability across the globe. Internationalists, in contrast to globalists, want wealth-making trade between sovereign nations, not for the world to become a single technocracy.

Globalism has lifted billions of the world's people out of absolute poverty. It has also hollowed-out the middle and working classes in the UK, Europe and North America. Median incomes have remained completely flat from 2008 until this year, whilst the 1% have grown hugely more wealthy. Globalism has destroyed our post war social mobility, globalism means our children will never be as wealthy as their parents and it has created a bitterly divided and unequal society. When Hannan's Telegraph piece claims 'Globalisation brought us unprecedented riches' it is false on two counts. First, it was not globalisation but globalism that so altered the world's economies. Secondly, it was not us to whom globalism brought unprecedented riches but 'them'.

The fact is that globalism has left the UK in a position in which we have not a single manufacturer of the type of ventilator we will need in the tens of thousands. The PM has mobilised British industry and we will put our taxes into British businesses to remedy this; sorry, Dyson, you get nothing. You've gone to Singapore. The irony is that the 1% here who have so enjoyed the material benefits of globalism will be no more exempt from ending their lives with their lungs flooded with Covid-19 than will the elderly working classes whose families they have robbed of futures.

14/03/20
EU/EEA and the UK	Cases	Deaths
Italy	17660	1268
Spain	4231	121
France	3661	79
Germany	3062	5
Denmark	804	0
Netherlands	804	5
Sweden	775	1
United Kingdom	707	10
Norway	621	1
Belgium	559	3
Austria	504	1
Greece	190	1
Finland	155	0
Czech Republic	150	0
Slovenia	141	0
Iceland	117	0
Portugal	112	0
Ireland	91	1
Romania	89	0
Estonia	79	0
Poland	68	2
Luxembourg	38	1
Bulgaria	31	1
Croatia	31	0
Slovakia	30	0
Hungary	25	0
Latvia	19	0
Cyprus	14	0
Malta	12	0
Lithuania	6	0
Liechtenstein	4	0
Total	34790	1500

Noisome stench of Met corruption - Cressida Dick must go

One phenomenon that we will find increasingly frequent is the drowning-out of important news stories by the overwhelming effects of Covid-19. Soon, every day will be a good day for revealing bad news. One such that has gone almost completely unnoticed was the report by Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary into the Noncefinder-General / Met police celebrity sex abuse mess. 

The Met wasted £5m of our taxes and a cost of scores of real crimes going uninvestigated as detectives as credulous as old maids chased phantom high-end personalities, egged on by Labour's deputy leader, Noncefinder-General Tom Watson and the kiddie-fiddler they had especially befriended.

Cressida Dick, the police officer with command responsibility for the shooting of innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, was Met chief from 2017 to 2019, during which time she had on her desk the report by Sir Richard Henriques and did exactly nothing to tackle the institutional incompetence and malfeasance in the Met. In fact, she seems to have spent all her efforts into hiding the Henriques report from the public - fully assisted, no doubt, by the failed mandarins at the Home Office who flourished under Theresa May.

It stinks. Cressida Dick must go. As Harvey Proctor told the Telegraph

"Police officers who mess up and get things so seriously wrong including the present Commissioner should bear a personal responsibility for their wrong doing. They should not be promoted, pensioned off. Ennobled and enriched. That is not the correct lesson that should be learnt from this dreadful scandal - the worst in living memory of the police."

13/03/20
EU/EEA and the UK	Cases	Deaths
Italy	15113	1016
Spain	3004	84
France	2876	61
Germany	2369	5
Denmark	676	0
Norway	621	1
Sweden	620	1
Netherlands	614	5
United Kingdom	590	10
Belgium	399	3
Austria	361	1
Finland	155	0
Greece	133	1
Iceland	117	0
Czech Republic	116	0
Slovenia	96	0
Portugal	78	0
Ireland	70	1
Romania	64	0
Poland	49	1
Estonia	27	0
Luxembourg	26	0
Croatia	25	0
Bulgaria	23	1
Slovakia	21	0
Hungary	16	0
Latvia	16	0
Malta	9	0
Cyprus	6	0
Liechtenstein	4	0
Lithuania	3	0
Total	28297	1191

EU shamefaced over Italy as China rides to the rescue

Back in 2019, lost in the Brexit noise, Italy became the first big EU nation and the first member of the G7 to sign up to China's Belt and Road initiative. China had infuriated Brussels by introducing a strategic development plan to Europe in which they had no hand; China targeted the Mediterranean states, the closest parts of the EU to ships low in the water with Chinese goods. The EU was still squabbling over the interests of the northern EU, Rotterdam and Hamburg, which had the lion's share of Chinese imports. As The Diplomat reported, the China - Italy MoU was comprehensive

... aiming at a strategic partnership covering a broad range of areas such as trade, investment, finance, transportation, logistics, infrastructure, connectivity, sustainable development, mobility and cooperation, also involving third countries. Notably, the area of telecommunications was left out of the agreement.

Well, this week Europe was sharply reminded of that agreement. At a time when France and Germany banned the export of medical equipment to Italy, China rapidly arranged to airfreight millions of masks, gowns, eyeshields, hectolitres of alcohol gel and even respirators, thanking Italy for the care provided to the 300,000 Chinese expats working in northern Italy, and re-committing to the friendship between the two nations. The South China Morning Post reported on a telephone call between the nations' foreign ministers

During the phone call on Tuesday, Wang told Di Maio that China would not forget “the precious support” from Italy when “we were at the hardest moment fighting the epidemic”. “Now, we are willing to stand firmly by the side of the Italian people,” the Chinese foreign minister said.

“Although currently China itself still has great demand for medical materials, we will overcome the difficulties and offer material aid, including face masks, to Italy, and increase exports of materials and equipment to meet Italy’s urgent need,” Wang said. “If the Italian side requires it, China would also like to send medical teams to assist in combating the virus,” he said.

The response of the EU to the challenge has been, at the least, confused. Whilst Richi Sunak yesterday committed £30bn to counter the effects of the virus in the UK, the EU's response has been to protect the banks and the interests of the ECB. A measly €7.5bn has been committed for all 27 EU nations, and Brussels has announced plans to co-ordinate the distribution of medical protective supplies. When it whined to EU nations that health was a national competence, it raised only anger. The EU has been for years acting, setting up organisations, sitting on committees as though it were the European Health Authority - now it's proven to be a hollow pretence.

As AE-P writes in the 'graph, Sunak and Carney have shamed the EU.

The EU’s legalistic spending machinery will limit any fiscal punch and slow the roll out of crisis measures. There are still no eurobonds, no shared budget, and no mutualised pan-eurozone deposit insurance for banks, which leaves vulnerable Italy in the worst of all worlds: deprived of sovereign economic instruments yet without EU fiscal support to compensate.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned that 70pc of Germans could be infected but failed to draw the economic conclusions. She spoke of a €25bn EU crisis package - less than 0.2pc of GDP - and but proffered no fiscal emergency spending for Germany itself beyond a trivial €275m for health care. Fiscal stabilisers will have to carry the load.

Italian voters will not easily forget either the actions of France and Germany, or the inaction of the EU. Nor will they forget the assistance given by China at a time when her own people are not past the crisis. I've no doubt that there will be those in Brussels who see Covid-19 as just another 'beneficial crisis' that will allow the Federasts to ratchet up control. This time it may just be a crisis too far.

11/03/20
EU/EEA and the UK	Cases	Deaths
Italy	10149	631
France	1784	33
Spain	1639	35
Germany	1296	2
Netherlands	382	4
United Kingdom	373	6
Sweden	326	0
Norway	277	0
Belgium	267	0
Denmark	264	0
Austria	182	0
Greece	90	0
Iceland	70	0
Czech Republic	63	0
Portugal	41	0
Finland	40	0
Ireland	35	0
Slovenia	31	0
Romania	25	0
Poland	22	0
Croatia	13	0
Estonia	13	0
Hungary	12	0
Latvia	8	0
Luxembourg	7	0
Slovakia	7	0
Bulgaria	4	0
Malta	4	0
Lithuania	3	0
Cyprus	2	0
Liechtenstein	1	0
Total	17430	711

The future is Local

You'd be hard put to invent anything as singularly stupid as Corbyn's spiteful and vindictive scorched earth policy as his grip is forced from the Labour Party. He, Milne and McDonnell have spent their term getting as many as possible of their own people into Labour's key positions, and no doubt a new leader will find employment contracts impossible or hugely expensive to break. However, the absolute moronic icing on the stupidity cake is the suspension of Trevor Phillips on the grounds of preventing reputational damage to the party.

The May elections will be a test of how far Corbyn's party have evicted the Trad Lab local government nexus in the heartlands. I've written before how I once knew well, liked and respected the old Labour culture in south Yorkshire. We share many values; a passion for fairness, equity, probity, transparency, stewardship, trust and democracy. Our beliefs are grounded in a moral absolutism that is Christian in character. We believe in merit, in the rewards of ability and application, and deprecate everything that Corbyn's Labour stands for - privilege, nepotism, moral relativity, racism and discrimination, avarice, partiality, dishonesty, twisted political manipulation, bullying, stitch-ups and corruption. 

Where the trad Lab people and structures are still in place, the Labour vote will hold up. Where the Corbynites have taken over, openings will be created - and we are starting to see the rise of new, Labour-replacement parties, locally focused, with no London blow-ins, party functionaries, remote from the Corbynista nomenklatura. Ieuan Joy in the 'graph describes them as 'microparties'. Of course my own party will hope to make inroads here in May - but trad Lab voters I know will be reluctant to vote for the local businessmen who will stand as Tory councillors in red wall country. Boris was different. These places are not Tory, though the voters are conservative. The mill owner and the landlord are still the enemies.

The hate parties and personalities will also seek to make inroads here in May, looking to exploit local tensions. Social media users will know that they have started their campaigns already. I have great confidence in the ability of local voters to dismiss them. They are rightly loathed every bit as much as Corbyn's NKVD.

I used the meme below as part of a jokey dig at Labour in the December election, but after the voices in the media questioning, following the suspension of Phillips, just how nasty and authoritarian the metropolitan party can get, it will raise just a scintilla of real caution. It's what parties such as the one Corbyn, Milne and McDonnell want to create can become.

 

09/03/20
EU/EEA and the UK	Cases	Deaths
Italy	7375	366
France	1126	19
Germany	902	0
Spain	589	5
United Kingdom	273	3
Netherlands	265	3
Sweden	203	0
Belgium	200	0
Norway	169	0
Austria	102	0
Greece	73	0
Iceland	55	0
Denmark	38	0
Czech Republic	32	0
Portugal	30	0
Finland	30	0
Ireland	21	0
Slovenia	16	0
Romania	15	0
Croatia	12	0
Poland	11	0
Estonia	10	0
Hungary	8	0
Slovakia	5	0
Luxembourg	5	0
Bulgaria	4	0
Malta	3	0
Latvia	3	0
Lithuania	1	0
Liechtenstein	1	0
Total	11577	396

It's time to replace the ECHR

When the monochrome horrors of the camps shocked cinema audiences in Britain, when stories of brutality, atrocities and the iron boot of authoritarianism trampling democracy became current, the UK was foremost in imposing on the wayward peoples of the world a new reminder of the duties that governments and societies owe to their people. Following the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations (the name originally of the alliance fighting the Axis powers), the Council of Europe adopted the European Convention, together with a court to enforce it.

The ECHR and the ECtHR are not EU institutions but those of the Council of Europe. The Council of Europe includes 47 nations and 820 million people; the EU only includes 27 of those nations and 426m of those citizens. However, the ECtHR has fallen into the same pernicious power-grab using the same pernicious method as the EU - the notion of 'dynamic' law and regulation. You sign up to potatoes, and within a few years they have changed it to include tomatoes, oranges, bananas and plums. The 'they' is of course unelected judges - and Ld Sumption featured the 'mission creep' effect in his Reith lectures last year;

Article 8 protects the human right to private and family life, the privacy of the home and personal correspondence. It was designed as a protection against the surveillance state in totalitarian regimes. But the Strasbourg Court has developed it into what it calls a principle of personal autonomy. Acting on this principle, it has extended Article 8 so that it potentially covers anything that intrudes upon a person’s autonomy unless the Court considers it to be justified.

Now, it will be obvious that most laws seek, to some degree, to intrude on personal autonomy. They impose standards of behaviour which would not necessarily be accepted voluntarily. This may be illustrated by the vast range of issues which the Strasbourg Court has held to be covered by Article 8. They include the legal status of illegitimate children, immigration and deportation, extradition, criminal sentencing, the recording of crime, abortion, artificial insemination, homosexuality and same sex unions, child abduction, the policing of public demonstrations, employment and social security rights, environmental and planning law, noise abatement, eviction for non-payment of rent and a great deal else besides. All of these things have been held to be encompassed in the protection of private and family life.

None of them is to be found in the language of the convention. None of them is a natural implication from its terms. None of them has been agreed by the signatory states. They are all extensions of the text which rest on the sole authority of the Judges of the Strasbourg Court. This is, in reality, a form of non-consensual legislation.

It is not that we have abandoned any of the fundamental rights for which our fathers fought and died, any of the rights laid out in the convention of 1950, but that the ECtHR has assumed an authority that usurps democracy. These are not decisions for judges - they are decisions for voters, and for the ballot box. Only ending this slow-motion power grab will restore democracy.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus (the disease it causes is called Covid-19) has already caused nations to look to themselves. France and Germany have banned the export of masks, gloves, alcohol sanitiser and other preventative materials - banned export to other EU nations. Shengen is about to be suspended and national borders manned again - this time with (pointless) temperature probes replacing the Tommy guns. At times of war and plague, nations reassert themselves, and people demand that their own governments look to their interests, not to those of a remote federation of unelected apparatchiks.

Update - GBP - EUR pair
===================
For anyone looking for an explanation of why the €/£ rate has gone from 1.204 last week to 1.146 today - it's the carry trade, not us, and it will work itself out - as Zerohedge has it 

If a carry trade unwind does cause the euro to surge uncontrollably against the dollar towards the $1.2-1.3 zone, the impact on the fragile eurozone economy could be devastating. For despite the euro’s weakness against the dollar, other countries have also been pursuing weak currency polices. As a result, the euro effective exchange rate (ie measuring the euro against a basket of currencies) is much stronger than the headline euro/$ exchange rate suggests. A surge in the euro from current levels as the carry trade unwinds could crush the eurozone economy. Indeed it could threaten the euro’s very existence. 

08/03/20
EU/EEA and the UK	Cases	Deaths
Italy	5883	233
Germany	847	0
France	716	10
Spain	430	5
United Kingdom	206	2
Netherlands	188	1
Belgium	169	0
Sweden	161	0
Norway	147	0
Austria	104	0
Greece	66	0
Iceland	53	0
Denmark	31	0
Czech Republic	26	0
Portugal	21	0
Ireland	19	0
Finland	19	0
Romania	13	0
Croatia	12	0
Slovenia	12	0
Estonia	10	0
Hungary	7	0
Poland	6	0
Luxembourg	3	0
Slovakia	3	0
Malta	3	0
Bulgaria	2	0
Latvia	2	0
Lithuania	1	0
Liechtenstein	1	0
Total	9161	251