Good morning, it's Paul here with Monday's SCVR.
Estimated timing - there's very little news today in my area, so I should be finished before 1pm.
Update at 13:07 - today's report is now finished.
Here are my Sunday afternoon thoughts, to get the week off to an early start;
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Pubs re-opening
Hot weather seems to make some Brits go round the bend, and decide to get drunk and sometimes do a bit of rioting. The pressure of lockdown this year seems to have exacerbated this long-standing tendency. There have been various incidents recently, with open air parties turning nasty. Of course in my own locality, Bournemouth beach has achieved international notoriety when half a million people turned up on the beach, made a lot of noise & got too close to each other, left behind c.40 tons of litter (much of it on the beach itself, rather than in the overflowing bins). Throw in a few fights & stabbings for good measure. There was even a picture of Bournemouth beach on my daily email from CNBC (within the article itself, not just an advert), showing a very busy beach.
Although I would say that the media exaggerates the lack of social distancing, by using camera angles which make everybody look as if they’re packed in like sardines. When on the ground, or from the air, you can actually see that most small groups of people are sitting well apart from other small groups. Outdoors. So not likely to be spreading the virus. Bournemouth Council’s outrage at people descending on the beach when the weather was glorious, strikes me as a fig leaf for their own lack of preparation, in failing to provide adequate facilities (which I’ve lamented here before, but let’s not go there, as it upset a few people apparently, and we can't have that).
Against this backdrop, what on earth were the Govt/civil service thinking, to re-open the pubs on 4 July, a Saturday night? What could possibly go wrong?! They weren’t thinking, obviously, as seems to be so often the case at the moment. It’s going to be absolute carnage, isn’t it? Wetherspoons is apparently going to open all its sites - there was an update last week from it here. No ranting about Brexit this time from Tim Martin. Its staff survey results published here were interesting. I'll be popping into my…
