Home Straight? Clapped Out Leadership?

Some bright sparks think we ought be clapping for our ailing leader. A man who publicly said it was OK to behave irresponsibly. He did so himself, bragging on the tellybox about it, and now is paying the price. That he's sick is unfortunate; I'd rather no one was sick and this virus didn't exist. But it does and it's through his arrogance and bravado that it is. He doesn't care about us and I certainly won't be clapping for him - as if the mashing of my palms into percussive praise will effect any healing. Thoughts and prayers anyone?

Still, I don't want to write his epitaph too soon. I just think it's tragic that so many others are paying, and have paid, the price for incompetence at his and his party's hands. He didn't care about the deaths of the working class when voting to strip them of healthcare and welfare. None of them did. So you'll forgive me for refusing to join in a pity party for a member of the elite who, by deign of privilege, won't want for a ventilator or ICU bed the way others will. He'll get the best of care, probably privately, no question. After all he's the PM, right? We need the PM?

Even if I grant that, and I don't, we don't need him - or any single individual - to be it.

So who gets to lead if Boris heads off to the great clown car in the sky? I would assume it's the experts' friend: Gove. What a turn up for the books that would be? The last man standing gets to fulfill his ambition. How very Tory!

Perhaps it will be that buffoon Domic Raab; the Brexit secretary who didn't know what ports were. Probably overqualified then. What about his co-author (Britannia Unchained; a handbook for the truly demented), lung cancer's best friend, Priti Patel? She's probably too busy shouting and throwing things at her civil servants. She's been conspicuously (and thankfully) absent during all this - as if being home secretary during a national crisis is not a big deal. Probably flogging Johnson's medical secrets to the Israelis.

There really isn't much hope with any of them. Each will stand like a haunted painting behind a lectern which itself conveys more leadership. We know things will really get serious when the guys stop wearing ties and just opt for a shirt and jacket. A cross between Nigel Havers and the Andromeda Strain.

The Knightsbridge Strain (stain?). Get your COVID19 Harrods hamper. Blue veined cheese, Bollinger, and face mask that could have gone to a front line doctor. He could at least have had the decency to pay (WE pay) for private healthcare and not take up a slot needed by one of the proles his intransigent response has condemned.

Like I said; I don't want anyone to die. I wouldn't pull the "murder the PM" lever, but I certainly won't be (and didn't) clapping for him. Not until he stands down or leaves office. If he does survive the working class lose further since he will become a hero in the media: the Christ Johnson who saved (note the presumptive past tense). The Corona Churchill who fought the socialist virus and won from his sick bed. He fought the poor but the poor didn't win.

But the spectacle of Tories clapping - appropriating a heartfelt grassroots sentiment of solidarity with those on the frontline of his bio engineered apocalypse - sickens me. How fucking dare they.

That may well be sooner than expected. Won't be in a ditch though; it'll be in an NHS hospital bed as the arogant author of his own misfortune, taking the rest of us down with him.

Home Straight? How Much Longer?

An audacious title. I am presumptuous: the initial plan was fot a 3 week lockdown. Whether that will happen is entirely in the hands of the Germ Gods. However the guy leading the government's virus modelling effort thinks we have snookered ourselves. I say "we", I mean "them": the idiots in charge who may well now, in the case of the Idiot In Chief, be on the way out. Literally! :O

So where we go from here....is anyone's guess!

It rained last night. I heard it of course, waking up a couple of times as sleep is thin in this new atmosphere. I had been checking the forecasts and none was predicted. Perhaps the world needed a cleanse. Perhaps the heavens just got angry and wanted to express themselves. I can't help looking at this in so human a fashion. It is supposed to get warmer over the next few days. We mustn't forget how broken our climate still is, even while we hide ourselves away from it and the outside world. Nothing about the world these days is normal.

I keep mentally likening this period to Christmas. Not because children receive gifts from a strange old man who lies about his mythological helpers, but because it's one time of the year you can be as lazy as you like without having to worry about consequences. Whether that's a good thing is a separate matter; at least for Christmas it's a temporary and usually non life-threatening period.

As I sit at home I find myself living a similarly sanctioned lifestyle. Though I would welcome normality (if only to affirm an end to all this misery). we cannot be sure that calling time on the lockdown will mean the virus is done. I'm sure many will make that fallacious leap. Given that, it makes the lack of exit strategy, on the part of our hapless government, all the more uncertain. If lockdown ends I foresee everyone bursting outdoors and gathering en mass like a mass exhalation. The amount of social contact might well be inadvisable. Are we therefore now committed to a slow path of socioeconomic destruction?

While I welcome an end to capitalism, there is no question a new world will have considerable birthing pains.

And now I read that our PM is in Intensive Care! I'm sure I'm not alone in finding that oddly shocking. It shouldn't be any more shocking than anyone else so afflicted. After all he isn't the first (and probably not the last), but given who he is and perhaps what he is, it is more shocking.

These are the strangest of times. Somehow I don't see lockdown ending after the planned three week period (which would be next, Easter, Monday) if he doesn't make it! Can you?

Weekender: Day vs Night

The days seem oddly laconic. I think it's Sunday. Throughout all my life the experience of each day coalesced uniquely. A bouquet of planetary rotation; sun and moon. Each had its own hue and I could always sense them. I suspect that is the same for everyone. It's not a superpower. It's not even a power.

But that mode has been thrown out of whack as never before. A global shift. Now it's all the same. Perhaps it is fortunate we are passing into warmer weather and longer, hopefully better, days. Whether that experience will coalesce again is likely, but it will take time to build the scar tissue. It will also not be the same I imagine.

Maybe that's why my sleep is disrupted. While the days are a comfortable if idle liquid, the nights are strange perturbed. Dreaming is intense. I wake more than usual. Somewhere the stress is being quietly stored during the day. Taken around the back, when its quiet or when I'm distracted with a book or typing some pretentious waffle online, and given a good kicking my sense of the every day is then crow-barred into my subconsciousness. I pay the price at night. The Covid succubus straddles my chest like Morpheus' own parking inspector. My mind is parked on double yellow, but there are no other spots and Boris Johnson is ahead painting those lines everywhere else.

Ok, that's perhaps a bit too phantasmagorical :D

Then I read that Matt Hancock, presumably now recovered, is threatening to take veryone's suntan lotion away by locking up all the parks and fields. People are flouting the government's lockdown in entirely predictable fashion. That is why I say this is not sustainable - that and the fact they have so completely mishandled all this that lockdown shouldn't have been necessary. But I guess it's a little late for that. I read the other day that people are still able to fly in from New York without being quarantined (one hopes they are choosing to do so, if true). Breathtaking; on one hand they threaten banning people from taking exercise (as if that will work) on the other....

While I would urge people to show some self responsibility and not make it easy for the authoritarian Tories to do what they do best (as opposed to looking after us), I did go for a second walk this afternoon. A brief half hour sojourn into the fields. It's the nicest day of the year so far, and the days are only going to improve. Get a grip Johnson and stop blaming people for doing what they would normally do while you yourself got the fucking disease from ignoring all safety protocols!

Still that's no excuse. Fortunately there lanes were clear (had they been full of people I'd have avoided it). The odd cyclist or walker and that's it. I have no excuse. But I wonder are people going to be banned from gardening? Exercising in their yard? Mowing the lawn? I heard plenty of that going on. This is unnatural, whether or not it's the correct course of action. I want to believe otherwise, not because I'm an arsehole (though evidence may suggest otherwise) but because I simply want this nightmare to end. Preferably with less or, if possible, no more covid deaths.

And now the PM is in hospital because he hasn't recovered. What a time to be alive, with the Queen rousing the nation (according to twitterphantic lickspittles). Who doesn't feel inspired to here a privileged elite appeal to cliches from the rarefied battlements of stolen land and a castle ensconced in safety and plenty.

Weekender 3: New Balls Please

Drowning in irrelevance, in the midst of a pandemic, the Labour party crown another centrist to the position of leader. Big woop.

They are walking the path toward oblivion. The centrist Blairite rump will be pleased, a chance to sweep away the Corbyn anomaly. This was inevitable. In truth Labour are a capitalist party. All they have to offer is to soft soap the capitalist mode of production with all its ills. Even Corbyn, as a Labour politician, was no different. A nice guy for sure, and with good ideas. But as a politician he was happy appeasing big business. That was his job as leader. There is no escaping that.

Now that job will be done with someone who, while they may proffer the hand of compromise and reconciliation, won't really mean it. Backed up by those whose disdain for left wing politics is naked and bare toothed. This will cost them the membership that enjoyed a honeymoon surge under the Corbyn anomaly. Ultimately they will align softly, once again, with capital. They will offer nothing more than a slightly less acidic alternative, but in reality it will be no alternative at all.

We don't need a government of national unity. We don't need platitudes. We don't need piss poor apologetics for austerity. We need to end capitalism. Nothing more nothing less. That may be a big ask, but in reality it's the only ask. Look at the world right now. Don't forget that, while nature hides a resurgent flourishing (perhaps all too briefly) under the human crisis, the climate is still aching. Capitalism cannot fix that problem; it can only create it.

Perhaps Labour will try for that government of national unity foolishly believing this will play well. That we must put aside politics, ignoring that politics is at the heart of this crisis. It was deliberate decisions made over ten years, austerity not least of all, all based on long standing ideology. These are the choices the Tories must be left to own - unless sir Keir Starmer personally knows how to provide medical equipment.

I don't say do nothing. I'm not even saying let the Tories dig their own grave (as well as those of the working class right now). But do not make yourself a willing partner in the crimes of the ruling class. But then he's got his knighthood, that makes him fully a part of that class. He is not our friend and never will be. Knights don't exist anymore; gone are the days of Lancelot and King Arthur. Knighthoods are just offered for services rendered.

The only ones that can help us survive this and any crisis are the working class. Us. The lie that politicians spread most perniciously of all is that we need them. In truth it is the reverse.

Weekender 3: The Chance We Must Take

Looks like it's going to be nice for the weekend.

I broke the rules though. I went for an 'extra' walk today (and yesterday, although that was for provisions). Living in the countryside has its pros and cons: one benefit is it's easier to get fresh air and keep social distance. There's a lot of distance, just no much social! When you do see people, you can tell they think the same. People hunger for freedom and oxygen.

It's peculiar. A slight on the ordinary as though being outside is false. Normally I walk early in the morning; right after getting up because I know how quiet that period is. You get the odd early bird of course. Popping out for fifteen-twenty minutes after lunch, however, feels like absconding. Doing something normally familiar has a breathless touch of the forbidden. Like skipping school to come home early: being in a familiar place at the 'wrong' time,

Until the school rings up and asks why you skipped PE. I got more exercise riding home on my bike, and besides PE is (or certainly was) a giant waste of time!

I think the sunlight is going to provide the defining factor for this lockdown (that and the virus!). It's going to compel people into the outdoors. Certainly locally where we have the blessing of open countryside. I feel for people stuck in towns or tower blocks that don't have this luxury.

This situation is a mixture of things, making it a very alien time. On one hand there is the terror of an incurable plague over which our inept leaders have no control. But on the other there is an opportunity to take stock (where possible). Where behaviours can change. I hope that's an attitude I can carry forward, along with my newfound appreciation for taking a bath (instead of a shower). Suddenly old habits are thrown into sharp relief; somethings just aren't so important anymore.

Coming out of this, eventually (and hopefully properly), I sense the potential for a new outlook. Maybe others will feel the same. Beyond the deadly importance of politics and right through society. A shot in the arm of the social body We're forced to witness a brief renewal of the outside world; a taste of victory in the coming climate crisis - perhaps the next big struggle.

Where once planet earth shrank at our touch, now its the reverse. As we recoil, locking ourselves away from the microbial rampage, nature has the chance to out itself. The virus is nature, and it's a fight we can't win on its terms. We must find better measures, in the process learn a little humility. We cannot return to coughing up our lungs and spewing dirt and misery over sky and sea. Precious, this world is. A jewel in mute self renewal.

This could be, when all is said and done, the best chance in our lifetimes for real change. It won't be easy of course. There is no doubt the economic shock to the capitalist system will affect many, quite deeply. The capitalists will revert to type; they will impose heavy asuerity and cuts but we must resist. They will demand a heavy toll; but there must be no levy on our right to survive. The puppet master has been exposed. We see how the trick is done and you've been found wanting.

Our time will come soon. It may never come again.

Lockdown Tales: Toilet Rolls Will Be Our Epitaph

Praise the clockwork precision of an impersonal universe, Tesco seems to be restocked!

Or maybe I just got lucky this morning, before the crazy people arrived. Still the toilet roll supply is diminished. Will this nonsense never end? What is wrong with people (other than perhaps diarrhea) - there is no reason (other than perhaps diarrhea) for people to do this?

Here lies humanity, death by dearth of bog roll.

Some alien foreman in the Vogon Construction HQ, planning to build that hyperspace bypass through our pale blue dot, will gloss over that in the Galactic Obituaries section of the Interstellar Echo newspaper.

Toilet paper.

Flushed civilisation.

Tesco also doesn't seem to smell of disinfectant, but I may have visited between cleaning cycles. Staff still wear gloves. I still wear gloves, it's still bloody cold in the mornings. Still food appears to be on the shelves. As it should be - as it must be. There is no rationale for panic buying except fear. Sadly people are frightened. It's understandable. It's just not sustainable.

Now them, who's clapping?

I've never seen something so fundamental and so moving that ordinary people do, right on their doorstep. This is a message with real depth expressed so simply and yet so sharply. People care, Mr Johnson. But they don't care about you.

This expression cannot be corrupted or co opted, I feel. Don't dare to try and do so either, Tories, you will not win. This is real. It's not a confection; a manufactured sentiment like a greetings card. Every clap is a real expression of real human sentiment. That cannot be anything other than authentic. It cannot be faked.

The genie is out of the bottle now; the emperor's clothes are a canard. The days for this government must be numbered. They cannot endure this and we must make sure they don't. As was said upon the oh-so tragic demise of Maggie Thatcher (the milk snatcher):

Tramp. The. Dirt. Down.

Clap for support. Clap for life. Life will out.

Lockdown Tales: Workers Charter (c/o the Socialist Party of England and Wales)

Today's entry features the Workers Charter, authored by the Socialist Party of England and Wales. I fully agree with these demands. We must settle for nothing less because if we don't capitalism and its adherents will proliferate like weeds, returning to try and claim what they think is theirs. They will scapegoat whomever they can for this crisis. Unlike the banking crisis they cannot blame Labour. The Tories are alone here, but with the aid of the vile media (complicit in much of their conduct) they will seek to scapegoat the working class: people walking their dogs, people working in 'non essential' services, even doctors (for daring to call out the Tories - you watch).

There is nowhere for them to turn, they are caught in a hall of mirrors now and must be kept there. Facing their own shame and ineptitude, exposing this wretched system for what it has done - and would do again. Already we see business and capitalists seeking to exploit the situation: look at Amazon. While covid ferments (I've no doubt) in the pressure cooker warehouse environments, workers will be exploited as consumer society turns to Amazon to provide for them. They know this and so we must show solidarity with workers. Get what you need if you must, there's no shame in that (I'm going to have to), but be aware of how Amazon wants to benefit from this. Crisis is capitalism and crisis is opportunity in capitalism. That's part of hte shock doctrine of course.

Labour crowns its new leader this weekend, assuming anyone remembers the leadership contest. It's likely that Keir Starmer will win. A dyed in the wool centrist and man of the establishment. His politics offer nothing. Meanwhile his opponent, Rebecca Long Bailey is seen as the Corbyn candidate. But she has very little to offer. Labour are irrelevant now. It's up to us. It doesn't matter which of them wins, they will become marginalised, small, and ultimately inconsequential. More importantly they will become ineffective. Whatever happens, the Corbyn supporters will become increasingly disillusioned and leave. A husk will remain, compliant to the needs of the state, only with a softer glove than the iron fist of the Tories.

What this means for the working class is an ipportunity to meet crisis-riddled capitalism with a vigorous new, or reinvigorated, movement. The chance for the angry exploited working class, currently locked down or struggling (or both) to express that anger en masse. As it should be, on the streets.

National Health Service

• Emergency increase in funding for the NHS and for social care
• Adequate protection for all front-line workers
• NHS to take over private healthcare facilities and staff, and any other private facilities necessary for care, quarantine, and supplies. No compensation to the private fat cats
• Emergency training of NHS staff to deal with the coronavirus crisis
• Resources to be mobilised from government and big-business sources so that anyone with flu or cold-like symptoms has the right to a free coronavirus test with results available within hours, as has been the case in South Korea and some other countries. Requisition private testing and analysis facilities
• Increase production to meet the urgent need for more protective and medical equipment, including ventilators and virus testing. Convert production where necessary, under the democratic control of workers in those industries and in the wider workforce
• Reverse privatisation in the NHS, remove the privateers and cancel all the estimated £50 billion annual PFI payments
• Nationalise the big pharmaceutical companies to guarantee research, production and supply of medicines, vaccines and treatments
• Suspend fees for overseas NHS patients - treat all patients for free without the need to register to control the spread. Scrap prescription charges

Pay and benefits

• Work or full pay. Workers, especially those on low pay, can’t afford to lose 20% of their income. Any worker who has to self-isolate or cannot go to work should receive full pay from day one and not be forced to take annual leave. Pay should be paid directly to the worker not via the employer
• Increase benefits to the level of the national minimum wage. No delay in the payment of benefits
• Increase the minimum wage immediately to at least £12 an hour, £15 in London
• Workers who follow health advice to be absent from work to avoid potential spread should be excluded from any attendance-management procedures
• Open the books of any company threatening redundancies or closure, to inspection by the workforce and trade unions
• To defend workers' jobs and incomes, industries should be nationalised under democratic workers' control and management with compensation only on the basis of proven need

Public services and housing

• Emergency funding to take on more workers in essential services. Resources to protect workers, patients, and service users
• Councils to coordinate a local response. Scrap existing cuts budgets. Councils to use reserves and borrowing powers to fund necessary jobs and services
• 24 hour helpline for vulnerable and elderly people forced to self-isolate. Community and trade union control over local distribution of food, medicines and other supplies
• Workload demands must be reduced and time made available to prioritise protecting the health, safety and welfare of staff and service users. Workers asked to work from home must be supplied with adequate equipment and performance monitoring should be scrapped
• No school to be expected to remain open unless they have staffing levels and sufficient cleaning, testing and hand-washing provision to control the spread of infection. No to any removal of statutory class size limits
• If schools close, all staff must receive full pay. Quality childcare for vulnerable families and children of essential workers must be organised under the democratic control of education and care workers, with adequate protection for all. Emergency local authority provision of meals to children normally in receipt of free school meals under community and trade union control
• Nobody should lose their home because of coronavirus. Mortgage and rent payments should be suspended. Government funds for democratically controlled local authority hardship funds for landlords in genuine need
• Councils to take over empty homes to house the homeless and those in inadequate housing. Hotels to be used to provide emergency accommodation
• Funding for 24 hour helplines and emergency accommodation for victims of domestic violence
• No action to be taken for non-payment of utilities. Free broadband for all

Trade union and workers' action

• Trade unions to establish an all-union health and safety committee in every workplace to agree joint actions required to guarantee safety
• For the Trade Union Congress and the unions, the biggest voluntary national organisation with over six million members across the country, to prepare to lead national coordinated strike action to protect people should necessary health and safety measures not be taken
• Democratic trade union oversight over any government or private sector emergency measures taken to contain the virus, such as restrictions on public assemblies or strikes and supermarket supply rationing
• No profiteering. Prices to be controlled by democratically elected committees of workers and consumers
• No erosion of workers' right to organise, including the democratic functioning of trade unions and parties
• No trust in the Tories and other pro-capitalist politicians who are responsible for the crisis in the NHS and other public services to deal with the coronavirus crisis. For a mass workers' party, drawing together workers, young people, socialists and activists from workplaces and community, environmental, anti-racist and anti-cuts campaigns, to provide a fighting political alternative to the pro-big business parties
• The resources are there to deal with the crisis. Introduce an immediate 50% levy on the hoarded £750 billion lying idle in the bank accounts of big business
• The capitalist market system that prioritises profit and is based on competition cannot keep society safe. We need a democratic socialist plan of production and distribution to meet the needs of the majority in society. Take into public ownership the banks, financial institutions and the top 150 companies that dominate the British economy and run them under the democratic control and management of working-class people so that we can make the decisions about what is needed. Compensation to be paid only on the basis of proven need.
• For international socialist cooperation

(source here)