Polarised thinking and its accompanying actions being the measure that they are, for lack of thought, understanding, and generally being open to the idea that none of us either know or are aware of everything, often shows itself rather obtusely in the knee jerk reactions that our current crop of politicians use.
It’s not a good look. And with Boris Johnson still apparently unaware that he is in the middle of the fight for his political life over draconian lockdown measures he imposed that he was not prepared to adhere to himself, it is more than alarming that as we say goodbye to Plan B Restrictions on Thursday, the Transport Secretary is removing all Border Covid Testing as well.
Whilst the Government’s Covid Response, the Covid Measures that it imposed and the behaviour of all of our MPs throughout the Pandemic has been fear-driven and without objectivity, the existence of the Covid Virus has never been in question (even if its origins are).
We should never doubt the trouble that variants of Covid can and will continue to cause until fear has been replaced with practical reality and acceptance, and the illness Covid can cause is treated rationally and proportionally – as it always should have been. For a start, we are not helping ourselves by allowing the treatments, suppressants and interventions that we are being coercively given to be called vaccines when their use is neither stopping the spread of infection or eradicating Covid in any form.
There is a euphoria at work today, being fuelled by our ever-irresponsible mainstream media. One that in its fervour for a return to ‘freedom’ is denying the continued risk from variants coming into our communities from outside of the UK, where it is very easy to believe that the position we are in today with Covid and the variants that we know are in the UK are the same everywhere else.
Things are not the same with Covid everywhere else. And the headlong rush that politicians are now in to get ahead of the tide in public opinion that is turning against them just to save their seats in a future election, is putting the stability that has been hard won through the unnecessary repression of the British People at serious risk.
There was nothing rational about the way the Government responded to Covid, as Boris’ behaviour behind ‘closed doors’ suggests they quickly found out. But neither is there anything rational about trying to pretend that the Pandemic and the consequences from the way that it has been handled are over, and that we can just switch all of it off and skip blithely along the other way.
The damage done by the immoral use of behavioural science to control the general population of our Country by politicians who were themselves driven by fear is very deep indeed.
The mental anguish for individuals and the harm that permeates out from it will continue for a very long time. Indeed, without the arrival of events that touch lives in a way that puts all of the Covid nonsense in practical perspective, we now find ourselves at the whim of potential mass hysteria, each and every time a new variant is found in the UK and then defined.
The uncomfortable truth for many, is that even though our leadership panicked and imposed ‘Plan B’ before Christmas, we were very lucky this time.
We should not therefore, be taking for granted the situation as it currently is. We should be taking every step possible to provide a practical level of security and protection against the external introduction of new variants.
Checking the Covid Status of people entering or returning across our borders from outside the UK is therefore a very small price to pay.
It is very likely that we will live to regret the Tories jump from one polar approach to dealing with Covid to the other extreme – only with the aim of saving their own political necks.
Freedom is hard won and must be protected. The day-to-day freedoms everyone who lives in the UK may be reliant on restricting freedoms that may currently be open but only used by choice and by some of us, so that life can really be returned to ‘normal’ in the majority of other ways.
Adam Tugwell 