Johnson and his inept cabinet let your loved ones die, remember that when you hear his hollow apology:
The UK has now passed a tragic covid-19 milestone: 100,000 total deaths. That is more British civilians than died in both world wars combined. It is also the highest death toll in Europe, and one of the highest per capita death rates in the world. Last March, the chief scientific adviser, remarked that 20,000 deaths would be a good outcome. This catastrophe is not only a tragedy, but an avoidable one.
Throughout the pandemic, the government has been nothing short of an abject failure. Since the very beginning, Boris ‘Woke’ Johnson and his claptrap cabinet have failed the people.
From his missing of the first 5 Cobra meetings, to his woefully misguided promises of ‘sending the virus packing’, the prime minister has been a picture of ineptitude.
The lack of an effective Track and Trace System, nearly a year after the first lockdown, is contemptible. The blunders are so numerous and with such grave consequences to chronicle them all would make Pope Pius IX’s ‘Syllabus of Errors’ document look blasé.
Make no mistake: Johnson and his public-school cabinet have blood on their hands. Johnson, which covid-19 tested positive for, is most at fault: a miscarriage of statesmanship. Matt Hancock, reminiscent of a prepubescent schoolboy, has failed utterly and entirely in his role as Health Secretary. So-called Education Secretary Gavin Williamson is a stain on the office he somehow still infests. Rishi Sunak’s false dichotomy between saving the economy and saving lives has perhaps been the most damaging narrative in the pandemic, and ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ was foolish speculation that only propagated the disease. Priti Patel, whose wet dreams are of everyone in grey cells, doesn’t even bear thinking about. Michael Gove is a lizard.
So too have the media failed: The Daily Mail, at times comparable to the Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer, and other newspapers have failed to hold the government to account. Most printed headlines of the understatement of the decade by Johnson, ‘I am deeply sorry’ and then subsequently absolved him.
Could it be that the media have subscribed to the Stalin’s apocryphal quote, ‘The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.’? Could it be, desensitised by the endless statistics, charts, and death tolls, we have slipped into a national apathy? Or could it be Gove’s [bat] wife Sarah Vine at the Daily Mail hiding her husband’s government’s failure? Only a few newspapers reported this ugly milestone properly, the New Statesman being one of them with their ‘The Lost’ special edition. This rightly dedicates the time to examine the colossal misgivings the public should have with the current administration.
In the face of such bleakness what is needed is the promise of hope and regeneration. Covid-19 is the greatest disaster this country has seen since the second world war. Afterward World War II, blessed with the forward-thinking, progressive, and radical Attlee government we saw the creation of the modern welfare state, the NHS, the National Insurance Act. All these we now take for granted, and in some cases, actively seek to destroy. It was the post-war socialist dream. What is needed now is a similar regeneration, a post-covid dream: a chance to build a greener, fairer, and kinder future. That will require a brave, competent, and compassionate government. No chance of that from this lot.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
