A malfunctioning past becomes the present

  

Subject: A malfunctioning past becomes the present.

Those of you who have read my blogs know my opinion of the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. 'Incompetent' would be a mild description of my judgement of his handling of both the Brexit negotiations and the Covid Pandemic. Incompetent and untrustworthy, perhaps the term untrustworthy best sums him up and is the most damning since without trust you have nothing.

His lies prior to the election in 2019 were staggering. We understand that politicians lie but the scale of his lies regarding our leaving the EU and the ramifications in doing so are on record and yet still with his clownish grin he continues to obfuscate and bluff his way around this crucial business of what sort of state our economy will be in if 47% of our market is distorted by tariffs. For a year now we have dithered in the negotiations, I believe setting ourselves up to fail which was his aim all along. In a few weeks we will be out for good with the Brexiteers chortling about how good things will be not having to answer to a bureaucracy which is undoubtably the hallmark of the European Union. What they don't question is, what is the bureaucracy for. It's about standards and the upkeep of standards when unscrupulous nations and malicious businessmen want to cut corners for a financial advantage. The standards on food and hygiene, water pollution, working environments and the protection of workers rights. In a Donald Trump neoliberal environment the banks and multinational conglomerates  run the show, money and and political manipulation directed by trade offs and porkbarrel politics are the norm and the common man or woman in the street comes in to the equation a very distant last. The European Parliament couldn't be more different, made up of widely differing voices but bound in a bureaucracy which try's to be even handed towards every interest.

Coming out of Europe we are going to have to be on top of our game, negotiating deals and revitalising our manufactures to take up the strain when the Europeans walk away but it's this failure of any sort of  competency to meet the needs of the nation that I feel most threatening.

The pandemic has shown how incompetent we are at organising the equipment we need to fight the virus in our hospitals and care homes, in our inability to cope with setting up a test and trace system which seems the answer to coping with the infection. Time and again Boris has been wrong footed and had to do a U turn which invariably has destroyed any sort of trust we might have had in the man and his government.

Testing, analysing the samples and tracing the people who are found contagious isn't rocket science it's a matter of logistics and planning, it's a matter of having the people in place and trained to do a job before you shoot your mouth off during some political sideshow as to how many tests we will do. Each month the last months projection has to be downplayed each month we fail disastrously to get a grip and yet each month the court jester  comes before us with little or no guile to announce a new prospectus.  

The collective wisdom we used to believe in in Whitehall and the civil service, the so called mandarins has disappeared. Maybe it was never there, only the buildings with their colonnades and march-past ceremonies remind us of our malfunctioning past.