The joke that is a British Government lurching from pillar to post over what to do next would be funny if their actions and decisions were not already causing such distress and pain. Boris & Co really are on the way to making the UK we knew before March little more than a nostalgic moment as we all begin to wake up and long for what we then had.
Whilst observers have been watching the descent of British Politics since long before the Covid-19 Pandemic even put a toe across the horizon, the horrid pill that we have all found ourselves having to swallow has been that the demise of Government, the Public Sector and the Establishment has been accelerated tenfold as we have observed the Johnson Government push measure after Lockdown measure forward since this horrid chapter in our lives began.
As I said to a 63 year old stranger I met on my morning walk today who opened up by telling me that he was on furlough and expected that he would never work again, the genie was let out of the bottle the very moment that Johnson and Co shut the Country down.
No matter how much the Government protest and how much of our money the Chancellor throws at their hair-brained ‘investment’ schemes, the UK and the World Economy is never going to return to the place that it had once been.
Shops and businesses will not reopen. Jobs that were never at risk before 23rd March will never exists again. The merger between the parallel universes of real life and the internet have been supercharged as never before.
Yet the stupidity of this political class continues. And where the lessons should have been learned much sooner than now, we are instead living and breathing the coerced regimentation of our lives. Not in a way that genuinely helps any of us. But in ways that are creating increasing distance between all of us and dehumanising the relationships that we have with each other like never before.
As I write, we have seen new ‘localised’ Lockdowns being imposed on our fellow Brits in the North in the past 24 hours. We have found ourselves having to wear muzzles in shops to pick up everyday goods for the past week. And meanwhile, the latest threat from our would-be Churchillian Prime Minister is that the measures we were supposedly on our way out of are now likely to be returning. Many are already wondering if they will end up being even worse and more draconian than before.
This whole charade is no longer about the safety of you or I, as we might ruefully dare to hope was the genuine case at least momentarily at some point before.
No. This whole process is now about political control. About continuing to frame the agenda. About making sure that none of the catalogue of mistakes and errors that this Government has made will ever be exposed.
What should be happening is the Government and the Public Sector should be focusing on doing its thing and dealing with cases as it is their responsibility to do so, whilst we should all be treated as adults and allowed to go about doing ours which is to live, work and go about life as usual (or as best we can), so that everything we collectively value doesn’t collapse into a heap or fall.
Coronavirus or Covid-19 is now known to us all, as are the steps that are thought likely to protect us from a new virus or rather another form of an already existing virus that may have been around for a very long time.
People can and should be treated as the adults that they are. They should be trusted to make their own choices about whether to wear masks, to isolate or do anything else on the basis that they can do as they like as long as they respect another individual’s choice.
It’s the same for businesses too. They already operate in probably the most regulated environment ever as health and safety and all other issues go. And with a customer-centric culture at the heart of every business, it is the owners and the managers who run them who or best placed to make a judgment about the measures they can take which are reasonable and strike a fair balance between the interests of the customer and ensuring that the coronavirus overkill doesn’t condemn them to permanently close.
Between people and business, common sense is all that we need to prevail and keep the wheels moving. It’s the common sense approach that the politicians don’t dare risking to let us have.
Boris and his cronies are too insecure and self-interested to see and understand the damage that they have done and the legacy they are still creating, the responsibility for the damage done to this Country by the Lockdown is completely in their hands.
If these politicians were the leaders that believe they are or perhaps genuinely set out to be, they would understand and live the virtue that books, history and the advisors who can quote them are only there to inform and to guide. They are not there to take the responsibility and the decisions out of any elected representative’s hands.
It is not the People who lack the common sense that it will take to live with Coronavirus and to embrace the reasoned steps that it will take.
It is the politicians themselves that have become the victims of their own fear and are inflicting chaos and unseen consequences on the masses as they flounder around, desperate to control the uncontrollable whilst trashing the lives of People that if they were any good they would surely already understand.
Adam Tugwell 