Wednesday 14 October 2020

The tiers of a clown

All through the first wave of COVID, the PM and his Cabinet claimed that it wasn’t their fault, they were just following “the science”. Following the science, from the scientists they approved over. So far, so bad. I mean, the figures speak for themselves. The dead, the sick, the NHS and the billions spaffed on useless PPE. But yesterday, as MPs debated the traffic light system to simplify the lockdowns , by way of three 12,000 page Sis. Later in the day, a document “dump” from SAGE revealed that they had wanted a lockdown some two weeks ago, and the Prime Minister had refused. As he still does. The problem here is, not only is he not following the or his preferred science, the delay in the inevitable imposition of a “short, sharp” lockdown of two to three weeks will be ever ineffectual, and will result in thousands of un-necessary premature deaths. Up t this point, the Labour Leader had backed the PM, saying to judge him on results. News of the break from “the science” lead to Starmer calling for a nationwide lockdown of a few weeks. Which the PM has refused, and now cannot as it would look like Starmer knows better than he does. Starmer does, but that’s beside the point. The Government has failed to introduce a testing program with the capacity to cope with an incoming second wave, even before then, capacity was in the wrong place or the app for booking tests was wrong and gave potential appointments hundreds of miles away.

And then the Government has failed to create a working track and trace system. The only part of the system that is working well is the local one run by councils and NHS trusts, the national one, sub-contracted out to companies like SERCO have failed and are getting worse, whilst dealing with “simpler” cases that the local health authorities.

A lockdown could give the Government time to roll out a working local service to the whole country, but it would need the Government to admit that it was wrong, Johnson to admit he was wrong, and be able to fix it in 21 days or less.

The Government could have given every pub and bar £100,000 to cover lost business, spend the same amount on a track and trace app based on Apple and Android and have £4BILLION left over.

Instead, as with everything, Johnson is hampered with negotiating within his party as to what either side will accept, neither will achieve saving the economy or stopping the virus, and a longer, stricter lockdown will have to be introduced.

That the same people in his party who want restrictions to end to save the economy are pretty much the same ones who are only too happy to sacrifice the economy on the Brexit Altar.

You really could not make this shit up.

I wish I was.

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