Freedom Days 2

It is punishingly hot right here. I have a sofa dangerously close to solar orbit while he fabric tag tells me the wrong sort of information. I may become a statistic of heatwave, a puddle in the age of covid.

Do we really believe our esteemed leaders are self isolating. Only Darth Johnson could be so bold. Or so stupid as to advertise the insanity of his recklessness by risking he disease. His health minister proclaimed lifting restrictions would be good for the nations's health while proceeding to catch the virus, despite being vaccinated. Absolutely the worst possible way to start this period. So everyone else went clubbing. 

The disturbing aspect to all this is that he is enacting the herd immunity policy right wing crank tanks and dark moneymen have been pushing since day one. All in the name of profit. These people have clearly been part of the government thinking process for a long time. Now they have their way and capitalism is actively killing us. hey want an end to the so called pingdemic. Behind that cute piece of propaganda is the truth: out of sight, app of mind. If you can't get pinged then you must be ok for work. It is a terrible metaphor for the Work Capability Assessment: ignore the condition the person claims to have, in the name of highlighting what they apparently can do, and they don't get he benefit and are left to struggle. 

Same people, same ideology. They are not just class enemies, they will see any of us dead in the name of this herd immunity ideology. They claim this is a bitter pill best swallowed sooner rather than later. But they ignore all the mitigation that could be employed between now and later, such as completing the vaccine rollout. Now there is less of an incentive to get jabbed - you can go partying anyway. The truth is this period is really just the pre-lockdown period. We will achieve nothing as a result because, at 100,000 cases a day (a figure no one is now contesting, including the government), they will have to be another lockdown and so backwards we go.

Freedom Days 1

Oh, hello January, is that you again? I just had the weirdest dream. That it was July, six months in the future and in the middle of a heatwave. Our government had decided, against all reason and science, to abandon every restriction and plunge us all into herd immunity. Yes, s nightmares go it was pretty terrifying. What had happened was that a few months from now there was a massive outbreak in crowd urban India which bred aa variant that become known as Delta. This replaced the existing variant which become known as Alpha. 

Hang on, what day is it? 

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Yes.

The fools went and did the thing. It is now July the 19th, otherwise known as Freedom Day, because everyone likes to be freed from critical thinking and evidence. The date historians will come to remember as Fuck Up Day. It began well enough: midnight Monday morning and everyone piled into the nightclubs freshly able to open at the earliest possible opportunity.

Reason lost, folks. This isn't a triumph for anyone except the crank contingent of the Tory party. The ERG Brexit headbangers who drove Johnson, willingly of course, to kick the moderate voices out, whom we might well have needed (assuming they have any spine). This awful trajectory, beginning in 2016, has driven out common sense, maginalised the countryin the name oof xenophobia, and led to the repealing of essential restrictions at a time when ar re needed most. Now we have to hope people engage in what is risibly an patronisingly called personal responsibility.

The problem is that those making this argument are using personal responsibility as a stalking horse. There is no choice to be made in the wake of a pandemic any more than there is at a crossroads with traffic lights. Sure you could choose to ignore the lights and risk a major collision, but that's a fool's choice. If you need to choose to do the right thing then you are making the case for the oversight needed to keep society going. 

Really that is a childish argument. It is made by emotionally incompetent people who cry because their privilege is being threatened by circumstances. Welcome to the world, you aren't as special as you believed. You're just like the rest of us: vulnerable to the plague. Now these clowns are arguing to switch off their test and trace apps because the pinging is disruptive. Can't think why, as cases rage, it might be triggering so much. 

This is where we are. Six months from a somewhat recalcitrant PM contritely telling us that this time things will be different. That he'll listen tot he data and not be driven by dates. That there willbe only one direction of travel out of the pandemic. That lasted long. Now, as them, people's efforts and sacrifices are squandered, all to appease the most virulent element of the Tory party. The adult children who demand staff wear masks but scoff at the need (they voted for) to do likewise themselves. They are driving us all off a cliff because they are immature spoilt children.

Welcome to Freedom Day.

Our Government Is Trying To Kill Us! Send Help! Lawyers Guns and Money!

It's a thing!

They know what's happening. They just don't believe what's happening. Johnson isn't making the decisions because he doesn't do details. Let the bodies pile high isn't the claim - and I well believe he said it, that's his pathology - of someone who cares. He is an arrogant oaf; a deadly product of our class system. Born to privilege with the arrogance of exceptionalism. Ironically informed by his surviving infection. He wants power, he doesn't care how nor for any responsibility that comes with it.

Enter Sunak. Last year he invited covid cranks into the heart of government. Now Javid is on board as the new health secretary. Both neoliberals happy to push a failed economic notion at the expense of our lives. Javid is happy to tell us we might summer temperatures of 100,000 daily infections. He doesn't care because he believes the vaccine has done the job, now let time mop up the rest. This is false; the connection between infection and death has been weakened, yes. It has not been cut. Nadim Zahawi was forced to, crushingly, admit this on Sky News. Did it make a difference? Nope.

Yesterday's press conference was a dismal failure of covid capitulation and confusion. We now have the ridiculous spectacle of government ministers themselves saying they won't wear masks (Jenrick) while advising the rest of us do. This is criminally reckless and it's designed to let them wash their hands of it when it all goes wrong. They know people won't obey good sense. Along with the ending of restrictions, such as opening up nightclubs, it will be a free for all. That's all it takes. It doesn't matter if the majority do the right thing because covid is a phenomenon of super spreaders; individual instances that birth clusters of spreading infection. Delta is transmissible enough to make that a serious problem.

A fact that has left scientists incredulous, to the point where impromtu public meetings (via the interweb) have been called. Throughout the speakers have been scathing, Richard Horton (editor of the Lancet) in particular. Hundreds have signed a letter, one that will no doubt be filed under B for Bin. They try, it falls on deaf ears. We are in for what even the government recognises will be a difficult Summer. It could see the return of lockdown measures, almost certain if cases do indeed skyrocket as high as even the Tories predict. They just don't care to do anything about it. 

If nothing else there is a perfect storm brewing. With Covid at the heart there is still the madness of Brexit. Food shortages are a reality, supply chains are threatened. Sure I can do without Broccoli one week or Cauliflower the next. But I am regularly seeing empty stocks where there weren't any before. This is a problem without solution because, again, the Tories don't want one. 

On top of that the football has exposed the hypocrisy of the Tories. People now see their grandstanding as exacerbating bullshit. Performative nonsense by a home secretary happy to condemn racism after being happy to tolerate the conditions within which it grew. The bastard child of Tory ideology is coming home to roost. Reap the whirlwind and get gone Boris.

So Matt Happened

So that happened, Matt happened. An image forever seared into our minds, scan lines scarring our collective cortices like a video nasty. The arse grab that cost a career. Only it's not really a career; as it stands he remains an MP. That's his real job. The cabinet position is just that: a position. Sure they all aspire to it given the prestige power and pay packet, but the real decisions are made by the civil service. Sometimes they get made by the minister, but only if his ego demands that experts kowtow. Oh dear.

So where's the failure? Where's the ownership of responsibility? He done a wrong thing and, all the Tories interviewed thus far say, "Matt's apologised for it". They try and brush it off by making him look almost like the victim (not two, now broken, families). That's what this government does; it wrecks lives without consequence. He's notched up 128 thousand others so what's one more eh?

All we have to show for it is the putty faced visage of an arse grabbing sleazebag. Thanks to our friend, Rupert Murdoch. Who knows if there was some secret agenda, maybe the government distancing itself from an increasingly toxic health secretary wanting to purify its reputation in the font of vaccine success. 

To be replaced by a banker. A money man. That position was no accident. He will know the value of the NHS, in it's brightest hour, to sell to the private secretary as the Tories have always intended, and have spent the last decade accomplishing. Make no mistake, once the crisis is over there will be only crocodile tears. Why give people you intend to sacrifice a pay rise? If the Tories relent to a better deal ift will only be vanity. It's our fight to lose.

No News Is GB News

I thought better of Andrew Neil. Not in the sense that I think he's a decent human being with good politics. But denuded of the mantle of the BBC and the prestige attached with being its flagship political journalist we see him for what he really is. Another reactionary in a shaky studio desperate for relevance engaging in an inverse relationship with the truth. Happy to peddle cancel culture bullshit and use the term 'woke' to hide an increasingly unhinged agenda as the world sails on by. Society evolves and the reactionaries need this as their war totem, afraid of losing every piece of privilege. They call the need to justify that privilege the 'woke' culture they are increasingly fighting. Real issues are abandoned.

So now, hiding behind investment from questionable non domicile sources, Andrew Neil is flanked by a cohort of tired old boys from the BBC, a Sun hack with a shtick that's part Milo Yanoupolis and part Tucker Carlson, and a winner/loser (possibly both simultaneously) from the Apprentice. Their inaugural event was patronised by a bizarre call in from Alan Sugar himself, from what looked like a curry house. He didn't know what to make of it either (GBN, not the curry house).

Neil, for his part, sits at a tiny desk in a studio that looks like a home furnishings catalogue set. It is both drab and hilariously kitsch, like ash kitchenware from the eighties, or your first microwave. He's reduced himself to moaning about the latest in the never ending flow of 'woke' stories. The latest involve a teacher who said the N word while trying to discuss the difference between it, as a term of abuse, and the country Niger. Apparently he did so clumsily and a pupil got upset.

So what? People make mistakes all the time. Should they not have to explain themselves? That doesn't mean he has to or will lose his job. It means that, in a mature society (the kind these reactionaries don't want), an understanding will be found after looking into the matter, and an accord reached. Maybe he behaved badly, maybe he's actually a racist, or maybe some poor kid just misunderstood. It's not a story except for those desperate enough to consult the tarot of political correctness gone maaad, and divine some extra insight into our degrading culture. These people don't care about kids, if they did the likes of Neill wouldn't be supporting politics that starves them. Twice. During a plague.

This station will fail because its own ideology cannot stand. They've already had a discussion in which some insane aristocrat made excuses for - inexplicably - Jeffrey Epstein. This sort of thing will happen more often and the minute they challenge it their values will be exposed. Free speech absolutism is childish nonsense. Defending scumbags makes you a scumbag. But of course anyone that points this out just gets smeared with the word 'woke'. It's the new bogeyman, a term that's malleable enough to apply to anyone or anything inconvenient. Actual news be damned.

Delta Farce

Here we are again. In the endless misery go round that is pandemic Britain.

Boris was warned about the Delta variant but imported it anyway. This in turn, with our lax attitude to border biosecurity, means we could also be exporting it. This should be a resignation matter. It won't be because he's a pathological self serving liar who will say whatever is needed, greased up through the compliant media, to abrogate all responsibility. His health secretary, the same.

The Delta variant is ripping through the population. Cases were plateauing throughout late spring precisely because of its mitigating effect on falling cases. Growth is such that it has now outstripped that and we have seen cases virtually double (at least) within a week. All of this happening under current restrictions. I say restrictions, truth is there are few left. As those restrictions ease the inertial builds. Coupled with the clement weather it means people are more likely to push those restrictions. Venues less likely to be strict. How widespread that is, I have no way of knowing.

We do know that schools have been a major driver for the spread of the variant. Public Health England has not been as forthcoming with the facts as it should. This after a year of schools in shellshock. No support for staff, and, crucially, kids. The government's own advisors walk out when protects, which will no doubt start from a position of insufficiency, are short changed. Gavin Williamson doesn't care about your children unless they elect democratically, through debate, to remove posters of the Queen from their spaces. The Tories would rather stoke the culture war, the only means of real support they can count on given their dismal policy failings.

So it would appear a fait accompli that the vaunted, and facile, freedom day is going to be postponed. A measly four weeks. A drop in the ocean; as if that will negatively impact anything when they've already removed the requirement for children to universally mask up in schools, for example. But the problem is that the variant has spread in the context of where we are now, never mind where we'l be in four weeks. 

How many people do they think they can vaccinate in four weeks? I calculate we've managed 2% a week. About 45% have been vaccinated (two doses) thus far. That's taken six months. As such it could mean the initial cohort may well be coming to the end of their protection. We won't know, I guess, until such people start showing up sick, despite being vaccinated. The NHS has done their best, despite the government pelting them with rocks simultaneously, but this is a huge undertaking. Half the country in six months would have been fine if it weren't for the Tories ignoring sensible bio security border controls during a pandemic. That people are still going abroad for their holidays blows my mind.

All this means that we will need to see a roll back in restrictions. The one thing Boris assured us wouldn't happen. But then we all know what his promises are worth (except perhaps his wives). I can't see how this can be avoided. It's in the community now. That has always been the danger. Once it slips containment, thanks to our dreadful test and trace and quarantining policies of which Hancock says improvement = gaming the system (go figure), we risk further lockdowns. That's the only way to contain it. Current restrictions clearly won't, because they aren't, stop it.

July is also closer to the Autumn, and thus the time of year when people are less inclined to be outdoors. This is the worst time for the virus. Even if we contain Delta by then (it took 3 months over Winter during a strict lockdown to contain the Kent variant) what's to stop the next variant? Certainly not the Tories.

Modern Britain

I suppose we should talk about the imminent third wave. It is already building. In the last week or so cases have risen considerably. Despite this, Public Health England are lying about the state of schools were, despite their misrepresentation, it is spreading. Once again schools are a vector of transmission. It is clear that we have opened up much too soon and, despite the inevitable, we ought postpone the full easing of restrictions in two weeks.

But again it is dither and delay. At this point, it is negligence bordering on murder. Every day of inaction is a day the virus spreads. The government are encouraging that. I don't see anything changing. We should have acted at the outset of the pandemic. We should have had systems in place; an infrastructure. We still don't. Instead half our parliament are infected with the disease of ignorance masquerading as freedom. Sweaty lunatics pour forth from the Tory benches, feverishly railing against restrictions they aren't remotely inhibited by. Yet offering nothing for people that have to isolate. Still.

Now, fifteen months in, it is too late. We are stuck in permanent reaction. The virus will come and go in waves, the intensity of which we cannot know. That then is used as an excuse to dither, creating a terrible feedback loop. Nothing will change. Our government will never understand or adapt to this. It is correct to say we have to learn to live with this, but they only know to impose lockdowns. If that becomes necessary once again then it will be their fault for leaving us with no alternative. It is an ongoing disaster because the pandemic won't end in Britain alone.

Variants will come and go because we will have imported strains into the Union Jack petri dish. Maybe they will evolve to become less dangerous, maybe they will become vaccine resistant. At which point what a huge waste of time it's all been so far. How will they manage boosters every year or so? We are still only 40%, roughly, fully vaccinated. Still a lot of people vulnerable to Delta.

I don't see much of a future on plague island. Still, if the virus doesn't finish us, the food shortages caused by Brexit will