Winter lingers. Cold is more than a memory at this point. It's fingers are wrapped tightly around my psyche. I have become especially vulnerable to the cold. Most likely because of lockdown. It traps you and the conditions of lockdown make a bad situation worse. Getting out would be just the tonic on any other day, but getting out is the problem, because it's still so damn cold. It's ridiculous to complain about it, I still have no control over the weather, but this is how the stress of our situation is manifesting for me. An inability to cope with the cold. Hopefully I won't have to for much longer. Spring surely must be coming.
Schools open next week. It is hard to believe that won't have a negative impact. It would be foolish to believe everything will be okay. But the problem isn't so much a rise in cases, it's that it will be obfuscated. The government will say, if such a rise happens, that we should "wait and see". That of course would be disastrous. They could have waited until after the Easter holidays, which start a mere fortnight after the opening. Why is the 8th so important? Take an extra couple of weeks, make sure schools really are safe and make proper arrangements for the kind of testing that's needed. Of course none of that has happened. Instead of making it mandatory, the government can place the blame for any outbreaks on the schools (and their no doubt lefty Marxist teachers) themselves. "We did our part" they will say, and in so doing shore up support for themselves against a traditional ideological enemy. It's all about image, just as the egomaniac in number 11. It's hard to believe there won't be a rise though, our numbers, impressively reduced, are still way higher than when schools opened at the start of the academic year.
To get to the point: the government are shit.
A 1% pay rise to people working to keep us alive is risible. Obviously. I'm sure there is some byzantine explanation, enslaved to numbers, attempting the justify this. Don't be fooled. This is political. It could be a long game: maybe the Tories plan to relent all along, hoping to somehow land Labour into a trap if they make some bold spending claims. Either way the Tories have an 80 seat majority. They can, literally, get away with murder. People will excuse them. There is no media scrutiny; the journalists just want a seat with the ruling class. That means not holding them to account. It's a club, and you aren't in it (to paraphrase George Carlin).
Somehow we are through the looking glass in this society. Nothing makes any sense. Just a permanent sense of gaslighting. People are so unwilling to question capitalism that they will rationalise this abuse. They argue that because others have no income at all, having lost their jobs, nurses shoudl be grateful for this laughable pay rise (never mind how much MP's receive each year, including last year iirc, and this, no doubt). This is stunningly bad thinking. This shouldn't be a race to the bottom; a rising tide lifts all boats. A dying health service ensures that things like lockdowns last for as little time as possible.
But then we live in LBC Britain.
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