Weekender 10: Is it Still The Weekend?

How can people ignore the presence of a virus in the ideological environment, if not the actual environment?

Antiloxxers want to argue that the curve has been sufficiently flattened (an assumption) and thus we can open up again. The room's clean, open the doors. But this fundamentally, and perhaps (likely) deliberately, ignores the reality. The virus is still here; it's in the community at large. We've already had damn near 60,000 deaths from it. That was when we, and during, the lockdown.

What is the most reasonable outcome that can occur following a cessation of lockdown given that reality? Obviously, a second wave.

Furthermore, the idea that flattening the curve was simply to protect the NHS is false. The only say this, by the way, as a sop. They don't really care about the NHS. Regardless, protection of the NHS was a consequence, not the goal. It is a (vital) consequence of a policy intended to stem the spread. That benefits everyone, not just the health workers. But again the denial brigade want to ignore that.

Their reality is a fiction.

The price of freedom, apparently, is the death of thousands. If this isn't an ideology that sounds like it belongs in the most lurid misrepresentations of Stalin and Mao then what does?. McCarthy-like fever dreams invoked by rampant capitalists. And yet it is the consequence of people who want to take your power away from you.

Like our bad friend Dominic Cummings. Now under the aegis of Eton's finest. Protected because of...? Does he know where the bodies are buried? Almost certainly. This is a terrifying gamble, keeping this creature on parliamentary life support. It sends a terrible message, reinforcing what I have just said:

It's ok to break lockdown.

That's the tacit message thousands will hear and take up. They will do the Tories' dirty work for them and undermine their own safety just so the Tories can argue there is no way lockdown can continue. They don't want it to. They want you back to work. Schools will reopen to give working class parents no choice through dangerous child care, never mind the risk to teachers.

We must hold our nerve. They will divide us.