Where
does one start?
It almost takes me back to what I realize
now, were the morally halcyon days of the end of Thirteen Years of Tory Misrule
when scandal followed scandal culminating in the heady sexuality (which I must
admit I hardly appreciated at my age then) of the Profumo Scandal. I can still recite the names of the main
characters in that sordid grande affaire with salacious relish! Of course the most notable thing about that
particular scandal was that Profumo actually resigned. A politician resigning! Ah, those were the days.
So
we come to the present regime in the UK, another Tory regime with a decade of
misrule behind it and a bewildering array of ‘resignable’ mistakes connected to
the Covid crisis.
The papers of SAGE have been released to
the press but with redacted sections to protect the government’s narrative of
‘following the science’ as if there was a concept of Science that was absolute
and beyond political mediation. Were I a
scientist advising the government, this government, I would be very, very
concerned because it is fairly obvious that the Tory party is lining up the
Science (with a capital ‘S’) to be the fall guy in the inevitable public
inquiry.
Let us continue with the catalogue of
contempt. The care homes situation does
not seem to be getting any better. On
the anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen, it is a cruel irony that the
care homes in Europe now appear to have distressing overtones of extermination
camps, in spite of the sterling service of care staff who are woefully and
disgustingly underpaid, understaffed and under equipped. How many elderly people have to die before
this discredited government accepts its blame and works to ameliorate the
situation?
The continuing numerical farce of the
testing seems to be unending and the increasingly discredited Beckett has not,
again, accepted that he has failed. And
Beckett is one of the less noxious members of this government, especially when
you consider that the organizing brain is the loathsome Cummings, the Marie Antoinette/L’eminence
gris de nos jours but with a more
vicious take on Marie’s airy dismissal, more of a “Let them die” sort of vibe rather
than an invitation to appreciate brioche!
The
numbers of those infected continues to grow and the daily death count is a
constant accusation. One that cannot be
avoided by using the amours of a randy professor to try and subvert the news on
the day that the death rate became the largest in Europe.
The comedy of errors that is the ordering
and non-delivery and eventual delivery and delay and quality check and rejection
and farce and death is something that is so absurd that it couldn’t be made up!
The latest idiocy can be placed fairly
firmly at the feet of the Blond Buffoon who ignoring parliament, decided to
announce the easing of some of the lockdown measures. Unfortunately the right-wing press has hailed
the announcement as something of liberation from the tyranny of lockdown
deprivation and has geared up the population to expect dramatic ‘freedom’ when
the numbers of deaths and infections does not justify anything other than the
mildest of loosening. This weekend is
going to be fine and it has a Bank Holiday, so people are going to expect
sunbathing, beach visiting and lazing about in parks. The expectation of more than is likely to be
on offer is going to produce tensions that can have fatal consequences.
Here in Catalonia and Castelldefels, the
mere suggestion that there are going to be phases of loosening of lockdown has
been enough to inflate expectations and suggest that it might be time to bring
on the new normality.
From my observation the young have
comprehensively decided that they are immune to the virus and they are
certainly acting as if the virus is only for the old. I think that the transition from lockdown to
anything that is not lockdown is going to be very difficult to bring off, when
the younger part of the population thinks it is immune and the other feel that
they have done more than enough already and are ready for a little (or a lot)
of relaxation.
It is going to be a rough few days - with worse to follow.
