You may not realise it. You may not want to accept it. You may not understand why. But the UK is sleepwalking into disaster right now as you read. And the most likely outcome(s) from this for us all could probably not be any worse.
No. I’m not referring to the Coronavirus or COVID-19, or whatever you want to call the Viral Pandemic we are experiencing in this Country along with the illness and yes, the deaths that it already has and it is going to cause.
What I’m referring to is the massive hash of our lives and our future that the Government is in the process of making and has been doing so since the Lockdown across the UK began.
So good has the public manipulation and the misuse of behavioural insights been, the Government has terrified a significant proportion of our population – that will include great people that you and I know – into thinking that they are safest and least likely to come to harm if they stay at home.
Mantras such as ‘stay at home, save the NHS’ and ‘Protect the NHS’ have been so effective, we now know that many people have no intention of going back to work, even if the Lockdown were to be ended right now.
This is all VERY wrong.
The first part of a very difficult pill to swallow where the COVID-19 Pandemic is concerned, is that we all must catch this virus or be vaccinated against it BEFORE the problem that is about to unnecessarily destroy the UK economy will go away.
Whilst this is term you might not feel comfortable, this is what ‘Herd Immunity’ actually means.
No matter what anyone says, what stories the media tells us, or what speeches the Government gives, the tests, the social distancing, the ‘Protect the NHS’, – all of this means nothing until we have ALL been exposed to this horrid virus and our fate has been decided.
On reading this, you might well be one of those who will reflect and say to yourself ‘That;s ok, we will just wait until we have been vaccinated and then get on with everything just like we did before’.
Yes, it sounds great. We all sit still in our homes, experience the police state each and every time we visit Tesco or another shop, don’t do anything else apart from work and then maybe in January or at worst a few months after that, we will get called to the doctors, have a sharp pain in our arm, and then everything will go back to being normal as it was just before the Lockdown began.
But it won’t. And anybody who tells you this – and that includes the Government as the worst offenders of all – is telling you a big fat lie.
The COVID-19 Pandemic stopped being about catching a virus the moment that the Government created the Lockdown that it never needed and never should have imposed.
From the moment businesses started closing and employees were laid off or ‘furloughed’ as has become the common term, the creation of a much bigger, much deeper and much broader was underway. It was avoidable the whole time.
Because the Government shut down the workings of the economy in the way that it did, it failed to make allowances or to mitigate against the effects of what it actually did. Whilst businesses that were unable to operate as a result of their diktat should have been mothballed and kept ready to begin operating again as if they’d never stopped doing so on a future date to be decided, the Chancellor embarked upon a mass cash handout that was selective about who it reached at best and has set the whole Country up for a massive fall as it has done so.
In between the two, businesses have closed and will soon close never to reopen. People have already or soon will begin losing their jobs. People have had to borrow to make up the shortfalls from what they should have earned and what they actually get, with the remainder being made up by debt that they cannot afford. Evictions are going to rise. Domestic Abuse is on an exponential up. Suicides are rising and there’s a list too long to reprint here about the damage and disaster that is beginning already but is going to be out of all proportion when we all see that it has come.
The second part of that very difficult pill to wash down your throat is that there are no guarantees about how long it will actually take before the UK and the World has Herd Immunity and that in the meantime more people are dying from natural causes and illnesses like cancer than COVID-19, and the deaths that are going to follow from the impact of the Lockdown will be considerably more in the relation to the time that the UK is Locked down, than the number of deaths from Coronavirus will ever actually be.
So what’s the difference?
Well, Coronavirus has a name. So its easy for Politicians and journalists who dont really think about what they are doing to attribute deaths to this Virus rather than have to talk about other causes that are not easy to quantify in some way. Be under no illusion, they are attributing other deaths to COVID-19 too – because it serves the purposes of the narrative and somehow justified in their minds the chaos, pain and misery that is yet to come.
The UK cannot wait until we have reached Herd Immunity for the Lockdown or any social distancing measures to finally end.
The fabric of our society is currently being destroyed.
The sun might be shining. The flowers might be out. We might all be thinking that this all ok because its temporary. Meanwhile, the Government is terrified that it is going to be found out.
And it will.
But the future of our children, our families, our communities, our businesses, our employees, our industries and all the people we care about – whatever it is that they do cannot wait until that time comes.
Not enough of us are actually catching COVID-19 right now for any of this to make sense in any way.
Even if there were a bombproof guarantee that every one of us could be vaccinated next January, the damage to life, our lives and the economy cannot be justified by extending the Lockdown even for another day.
We have to open the doors to business, get on with our lives and deal with Coronavirus if and when we catch it. It is only the Government’s responsibility to deal with our care at that point and to provide a meaningful framework that encourages everyone to present themselves for treatment, care or monitoring as soon as they have recognisable symptoms.
Even at this point, considerable damage to the UK and the World economies has already been done. But the way to face that fact is not for us all to be continually encouraged to hide.
Coronavirus will kill people. But so do many other things. Death is actually a natural part of this life. How is it we so easily and so wilfully forget this?
Right now we are being led like a herd by the ideas of the few who have got the response to the Coronavirus emergency completely wrong.
What we need to do is accept that we are likely to catch this virus, just as we are likely to catch the flu or catch a cold, or find ourselves at the doctors on any day with an illness that could kill us, or find that we got killed in a car crash whilst we were on the way.
If we don’t, we might well help a fear-led bunch of glory-obsessed politicians to save or rather prolong a few extra lives.
Great!
But what will it all be for?
What we will certainly guarantee as we do so is that the pain and suffering that is going to hit each and every one of us in the coming weeks, months and probably years is going to be even worse for each and every day that passes between now and when the Lockdown and this assault on our freedom to just be ourselves finally comes to an end.
Then, when the vaccine is finally ready, we might still be alive but we won’t be left with lives to live.
Which would you prefer?
Be the Herd.
Adam Tugwell 