The government deliberately mismanaged the handling of the coronavirus to create a crisis ripe for exploitation. Having asset-stripped and privatised much of the NHS already, the government (guided by the Home Counties Rasputin, Dominic Cummings) dished out multi-million pound contracts to friends and families to make the PPE necessary to help halt the spread of the disease. Friends and families who had neither the experience nor expertise in manufacturing such equipment. The government refused help in sourcing PPE from around the world.
Despite the advantages of watching the disease come slowly towards them, they failed to do what was blindly obvious to the rest of the world. Shut the borders. Go for lockdown. Two weeks and the virus would be gone. Terrified of the cost to the economy, the Government dithered fatally. Not for them, of course. For 65,000 people.
Hurrying elderly people out of hospitals into care homes, where the disease spread like wildfire, hastened the deaths of many thousands of elderly people. The lockdown wasn’t a lockdown, just a set of vague instructions that continually changed. Dominic Cummings broke the rules his puppet government had announced and then apologised to the nation by lying to them.
The daily press conferences that were supposed to give the country a sense of how the fight against the disease was going were abandoned because the Prime Minister was bored. People were told to work from home, then labelled as lazy for doing so. The virus disproportionately affected overweight people – the government funded a half price eating scheme for pubs and restaurants. The biggest chain of which, JD Wetherspoon, is owned by a man who sacked all his staff once lockdown began and claimed expenses from the government for doing so. The same man who was the biggest cheerleader for the most calamitous decision a government has made in the last hundred years.
As the world economy contracted, the decision to go ahead with Brexit was never once under threat. Despite all economic forecasts indicating that this would further impoverish an already stricken nation, we are told that Brexit must happen. Her Majesty’s Opposition do nothing, the protest is minimal and dignified, playing the ball and not the man. Realising now that The Racist Vote is the only vote in town, they sit content to watch the suffering of their traditional voter base. An avoidable massacre, blatant corruption and cronyism, these make no differences to the opinion polls. Boris is the perfect symbol for the national decline, an inexplicably popular slice of fuck all. A rambling, incoherent mess of incompetence and privilege.
BBC News is now a propaganda arm for the government. It offers no challenge to the government’s dishonest narrative. Meanwhile the R rate (the rate of infection) is climbing again. It doesn’t register with the public, content as they are to fill the beaches and top up their tans. In the distance, if you squint, perhaps you’ll catch sight of a camera crew on a boat in the English Channel watching as feet away, desperate people try to stop their makeshift boat from capsizing. The language is of invasion, of viruses. Handfuls of people fleeing countries that we have either bombed, invaded or paid for the bombing and invasion of. The human instinct is to pity them, to want to give comfort, shelter, help to. But forty years of Thatcherism has blunted those instincts. We only hate people now. We only care about our house price, our cars and holidays. And when people speak out, they are silenced. Called traitors, scum, idiots.
For the umpteenth summer in a row, the record temperature in this country has been broken. Temperatures in the Arctic soar and the ice caps shrink. The waters rise. Disaster beckons. Perhaps even extinction. There will be nothing we can do, only look back and rue the opportunities squandered. The coronavirus will be remembered as a footnote and finally forgotten. The human virus will not be remembered at all.
