Stating the obvious we only had to look to China to see how they dealt with what was then an epidemic, the state decreeing a total shut down. South Korea the same brought the illness under control and minimised the death toll by strict self discipline, the people themselves imposing a total curfew. In Europe we experienced the opposite as countries applied their own modification of isolation, a sort of half and half attempt distinguished by a lack of firm government with the result that Italy and Spain are both on their knees with their health service's struggling to cope and the doctors having to make the impossible decision of who gets the spare ventilator and who will die without it.
And whilst all this is going on we in the UK inch forward, making half baked decisions, doing U turns, ignoring the pleas for a more rigorous approach to limit the contact people make with each other.
It was as if Boris Johnson and his advisors only saw the problem in terms of statistics, that people are dispensable and that 50,000 deaths is a price worth paying. It reminds one of the generals in the First World War who's only method of fighting the enemy was to commit more and more men to their deaths in a bloody attrition in the trenches.
Johnson flanked by his trusty advisors the Scientific chap and the Medical man plainly caught in the headlights of a disaster but unable to turn the wheel. Daily they face the same batch of questions from the press, daily they play a straight bat, submitting each question to a well practiced answer, that we in Britain know better than the rest of the world. It's a sort of 'jingoistic empire drum beating refrain' which has led us to fall further down the economic ladder as we 'dither and dather', apparently unable to make the important decisions.
Johnson clearly out of his depth mouthing platitudes about how we will defeat this by our common will as if 'wishing it away' we're an answer. With his eyes on the economic consequences rather than the humanitarian he is lothe to pull the trigger and order a shut down relying, as poor management does on the individual making the decision for him. The bars and pubs remain open whilst he relays an the individual's abstinence to stay away. And it's only through the strong stance by the executive of the various sporting bodies that sporting fixture have been called off. He has belatedly closed schools but the mums and dads are still left with the dilemma whether to go into work or not. The white collar workers have been told to work from home but no word of the fate of the millions of blue collar workers who each day are expected to turn out and continue to work as normal.
The ignorance on the street is appalling as young people flippantly break any sensible self imposed curfew to rather party whilst Rome burns. The indecision leaves many people forced to still make the virus ladened route to work since to stay at home would risk their continued employment and face the sack. The guys who offer their trade skills on the building sites are still expected to turn up for work as if the virus were a fabrication a fiction of the media another fake news story, knowing that any future work depends on their attendance today.
How many will contact the virus and die is in the hands of the statistician, the questions have become mathematical and the human content pushed to one side.
Johnson in his blind avoidance of the scenes all around him has blood on his hands. His apparent indifference to the appalling dilemma being played out across Europe marks him as a person not fit to lead a nation. His CV is litters with gaffs but this is far more serious than his dalliance with women or his ineptitude whilst heading the Foreign Office
The people mesmerised by his laconic blather elected him as their Prime Minister expecting a new style of government, well they have one, it consisted of sitting on ones hands (washed of course) whilst all around him crashes and burns.
No comments:
Post a Comment