You might expect another spectacular u-turn from Boris Johnson and his turgid band of haunted goons to be met with anger and derision, and you’d be right. The way he brushes his hair (or doesn’t) is enough to infuriate most of us. Not that anything he does stops even his opponents from referring to him as ‘Boris’ as if he’s their mate and not some entitled, over-promoted journalist who can’t count high enough to tell you with any accuracy how many children he has. But it is his policy making and inability to handle the current crisis that have regularly sparked the most criticism and anger. And justifiably so. The man is a tedious, vacuous imposter playing out his Churchill fantasies.
This latest u-turn is perhaps the most spectacular, which is quite something when you consider that he was recently forced to change his mind about his policy of trying to starve children. A footballer made him do that, which is ironic given that the same people who call Johnson ‘Boris’ are also quite likely to view footballers as greedy playboys who are destroying civilisation one tweet at a time.
Anger has cranked up as a consequence of Johnson somehow raising his already prodigious u-turn game. He told everyone just a couple of days ago that the rules around social distancing would be relaxed for five days over Christmas, only to announce today that not only would they tighten again but that for many they would be more severe than they has been before. The planned five-day window of relaxed measures is now reduced to one for those of us lucky enough to live in tiers 1 and 2. For London and the South East, moved from tier 2 to tier 3 only three days ago, Johnson has invented tier 4. Tier 4 is a baron wasteland in which Christmas is pretty much cancelled except for the shit bits like the Mrs Brown’s Boys special. No mixing with other households and if you happen to have made plans to travel to or from that area to see family then you are now forbidden from doing that too.
Plenty to get angry about there then, as complex and often expensive plans are being cancelled as I write. Yet it is the timing of the change of policy which has outraged the lockdown ultras and not necessarily the measures themselves. They have been calling for the Christmas relaxations to be scrapped ever since they were first dreamed up. That doesn’t seem too out there as a concept. I’m still with them at this point. Perhaps increasing the number of households allowed to mix just because of the date on the calendar doesn’t feel like the most logical step. Covid doesn’t know it’s Christmas. That’s a fact. Bob Geldof wouldn’t even have to ask.
But the most enthusiastic lockdown advocates don’t just want the Christmas plan scrapped. They want a full lockdown. Apparently we haven’t had one yet which is why we need one now. The relish with which some of them have been calling for this is something to behold. All they want for Christmas is for legislation to force them to stay at home. That’s a sentiment which wouldn’t work quite as well in a Mariah Carey song. But it’s what they want. Desperately. If they have to open another pair of socks on Christmas Day when what they really want is to be able to look forward to working in their pants and another series of Gethin Jones on Morning Live there is going to be trouble.
I can understand why they feel we need a lockdown but I struggle with the strange notion that we haven’t had a lockdown already, which is the tale that the real champions of lockdown are peddling. The idea that we are in this situation because people were not placed under total house arrest since March is mildly offensive given what everyone has been through. I failed maths at school three times but by my reckoning we are about to enter the third lockdown in the last nine stinking, noxious months. I should have had a kidney transplant in the first half of the year and by the end of it my family and I were being prevented from visiting my dad in hospital except on days when he was considered critically ill. By the time he passed away we had already been brought in to see him three times - braced for the worst each time - having been told we had to stay away on the days that he was well enough to enjoy the company.
So the issue here is not that we don’t have a problem with Covid or that we don’t have to significantly reduce the numbers of infections and hospitalisations. The issue is that Covid is far from the only problem and that tackling it with the blunt instrument of lockdown is merely a pausing mechanism - a sticking plaster which throws up all kinds of other issues that in many cases are as bad or worse. Absolutely no attention whatsoever is being paid to the very real human cost of lockdown.
Debate on this issue is shut down before it begins. Failure to support a policy of endless harmful lockdowns is of course viewed by the far left as some kind of poisonous Ian Duncan Smithery. For an encore I’ll no doubt be out in the streets (when it’s safe) protesting against the award of my own disability benefits. Yet for all we’ve been through because of lockdown I might still support it if I thought it was going to bring about an end to the pandemic. Every time I hear someone say that we should stay in so that we’ll be back to normal sooner I want to vomit and commit random acts of violence upon their person. We have been sold this lie by Johnson and his imbecile colleagues too many times. It’s got nothing to do with getting us back to normal sooner. Its only achievable aim is to temporarily reduce hospital admissions so that we don’t run out of ICU capacity should it be needed. That might be a very real danger but If the u-turners running the country hadn’t spent the last 10 years deliberately under-funding the NHS then the threat of that might be greatly reduced.
The government can’t take responsibility for that so they need to find a way to get the few remaining dissenters to believe in lockdown and to keep those who back it on board for longer. Enter the ‘new strain’ of Covid which is apparently even more infectious than the one which is so infectious it has demanded people hide from it for most of 2020. It has an infectiousness spectrum similar to that of the speedometer settings on the spaceship in Spaceballs. Ludicrous infectious and ‘are you nuts?’ infectious. If it is more infectious than the original strain then you must be able to pass it on just by looking at someone from outside your own household. No wonder people are worried.
The new strain doubtless exists, but it has done since September and there is no evidence either that its effects are any worse than the original or that it won’t respond to the vaccine. Wheeling it out now because you’ve got to find a way to pull off an about face on Christmas regulations without sparking a riot (also bad for Covid) is just the kind of docile shithousery you’d expect from the most incompetent leadership since David Cameron decided to ask xenophobes about our membership of a major trading block.
The joyous reception which greeted news of the Covid vaccine feels like a very long time ago now. Yet it remains our only hope of a return to normality. In the meantime measures will be tightened and then loosened more often than Johnson’s trousers. People will die, many of them from Covid despite the measures and the best efforts of medical staff. But many will die also because they missed their cancer screening, because their transplant was delayed or because nine months of restrictions with no end in sight pushed their fragile mental health over the edge.
Just don’t expect to see a running daily tally of those casualties on Sky News.
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