Failure

At yesterday’s PMQs, Starmer changed tack slightly and indicated that the Labour Party would not support further lockdowns.

Turns out that Labour had some information.

Soon after PMQs ended, they released a report which showed that those 20 areas of the North and Midlands that have been under some kind of enhanced lockdown since the 3rd week of June have seen infection rates increase, in some cases hugely so.

Leicester was locked down on 29th June, and has seen a 13% increase in infections since then.

But others have had it much worse.

Kirklees was locked down on July 30th, and since then has seen a 492% increase in infections.

But it gets much worse.

Bury was also locked down on July 30th, and their rate has gone up by 1,203%.

But is that your final answer? Heck no.

Top of the class is Wigan, also locked down on 30th July, and their infection rate has gone up by, wait for it, 3,653%. In a little over two months.

Its not that the idea of a lockdown doesn’t work, it’s that there is no way of policing it, either by the actual Police of PCSOs, but by local councils who for a decade have had their budgets slashed and forced to take on more tasks that had been centrally funded.

And then there is the moral authority of the Government. Shot to pieces by the Cummings’ affair, able to break the rules that we as citizens understood as they were so simple at the time: stay home, keep safe, protect the NHS.

And now the Government has stated, on the Parliamentary record, that it’s policy in regard to Brexit and the WA is to break the law. If the Government isn’t going to obey the law, why should the public?

And you can make anything illegal, give breaking it a £1,000 or £10,000 fine or higher, but if there is no enforcement, then it is meaningless. Government is now by social media, and by neighbourhood watch, encouraging you to snitch on your neighbour, or take picture of a Conservative MP or the PM’s Dad not wearing a mask in public spaces or on the train. Oh no, the last is nit-picking and you should have something better to do.

We are going into a stronger lockdown because the testing capacity isn’t high enough, and what there is is falling apart with tens of thousands of test results going missing thanks to the £12 billion scheme relying on an Excel spreadsheet. Yes, twelve billion, not twelve million as I have said on previous occasions. And it is the privatised end, run by companies like SERCO that is failing, not the NHS or local authority part.

Government has had six months to fix this, and has fiddled, told us it was our patriotic duty to drink in pubs, bribed us to eat out through August and threatened us with the sack if we did not return to the office.

But it is our fault.

As always.