The Road To Spring 28: Change We Must

Two months down. Spring is knocking at the door. Can I afford to open it? Everyone else has, if the streets are anything to go by. People seem to have, perhaps unknowingly, decided that lockdown is over. The weather has been quite pleasant in recent days and, with a few blips, appears set to continue. Combined with the pace of rollout for the vaccine, the end is inevitably in sight. The end of something anyway. 

The tragedy of the vaccine is that the government will take, and are taking, credit for the success. Labour compound their endless failure by failing to oppose this narrative. They have failed to oppose anything so far, which renders them pointless in the eyes of the electorate; never mind a socialist alternative. The real success is the hard work of the frontline staff and the people on the ground delivering it, in all aspects (including the car park attendants shepherding thousands to each site daily, a thankless and necessary task undertaken by not the ruling class). It is imperative that the government are not allowed to take credit for this apparent success, they do not deserve it. Success that has come in spite of the best efforts of the Tories to mismanage and kill. They have done both.

It is the end of Winter, more or less. More, as it happens; this weather is a welcome shift. Hopefully it will not change. Something has shifted, thanks in part to our dying climate. We cannot go back. In 23 days it will be a year for this wayward blog, and, more importantly, for that which it chronicled; a year of unparalleled travail and change. Not sure what I do after that milestone. 

People are clamouring for a return to normal, but is that what we want or even what we need? What was so great about the beforetimes. Normality in those terms simply means once more acquiescing to the inevitable turn, backward, of Capitalism's great wheel. Conspiracy theorists have spent the last year talking up their interpretation of the pandemic as 'the Great Reset'. All bollocks of course; the only reset that will happen will be to restore the wealth of the ruling class. Austerity for us.

There will never be, until the next crisis, another opportunity. We owe to the tens of thousands dead to change things and stop the Tories.