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"School's out with fever, school's out completely" - School's Out - Alice Cooper
The first week of 2021 has been an interesting one. In many ways - most of them not good. A few days before primary school kids were due to return to school the government did one of its trademark u-turns and said that schools in London and parts of the South East would have to leave it another two weeks before they could reopen. Or at least some schools. In London these new rules would apply to 23 boroughs but would not apply to another 9.
How was it decided which boroughs these rules would apply to? As you can see by the graphic below it certainly wasn't geographical. Could it have been that rates of infection in the yellow coloured boroughs were higher? That'd make a little bit of sense but, no, that's not the case. Schools in some boroughs with higher rates of infection and schools in some boroughs with lower rates of infection were to open! It can only have be done, surely and purely, to create further division in the country at a time it needs unity more than ever.
The country needs unity but the Tory party and Boris Johnson's kakistocracy need division and anger to thrive. If we remember correctly that's exactly what brought Johnson to power in the first place and those that make up his administration were chosen precisely because of their fealty to that project and those methods. Not, sadly and lethally for tens of thousands of now dead people, for their abilities.
So we have a Health Secretary completely out of his depth in the most serious major health crisis in over a century, a Home Secretary who doesn't know the difference between terrorism and counter-terrorism, a Foreign Secretary who wasn't aware of the importance of the channel in trade between the UK and Europe, and an Education Secretary who has presided over both this clusterfuck and the A-level disaster.
What an absolute shitshow 2020 was and what an absolute shitshow 2021 will be with these cunts in power. Gavin Williamson did eventually close all primary schools in London for two weeks but why the constant dithering, the constant u-turning, the constant creation of controversies? Not because dealing with a pandemic demands it but to keep us arguing among ourselves and exonerate the government from the blame they so richly deserve for this mess.
Then a much larger u-turn as after the first day back at work, and the first day back at school, for some. Johnson appeared on national TV to announce all schools would be closing and that there would be another national lockdown after all. The tier system had been a complete failure (as everybody already knew) but Johnson lied about that (as everybody expected) and claimed it had been a success.
It was confusing enough for people like myself with no children and few responsibilities except those to the wider community but imagine a mum who has just comforted her child by telling them that it is safe to return to school despite the virus, putting that child to bed at 8pm, only to wake them the next morning to tell them it's now too dangerous to go to school.
Because the nasty lying man said so. Because he'd finally said something vaguely truthful. Children like consistency. Adults like constituency. Humans like constituency. Johnson offers none. Instead he makes excuses, he blames, he lies, and he offers false hope.
Yes, the vaccination roll out is great news but why promise 1,600,000 million vaccinations a week by mid-February when this government have promised so much and delivered so little in the past? To sugar the pill as Johnson kicks the can further down the road. To buy him time as he seeks new scapegoats.
Soon people will forget about each mess he's created as a new one, again of his making, appears to distract them. You couldn't run a Sunday league football club this way, leave alone a nation. To do so with a nation living under a pandemic is lethal. Absolutely lethal. As 79,833 would be able to tell you if they hadn't already died under Johnson's maniacal misrule.
At least, now Brexit's finally happened, the NHS will be able to enjoy the extra £350,000,000 a week that Boris Johnson promised it - although, strangely, he's gone a bit quiet about that of late. I wonder how they're spending their first £350,000,000.
Boris Johnson isn't the only one who writes cheques he can't cash. His supporters are complicit in the tragedy he has enacted upon us too and, sadly, they include members of my immediate family. Several of who voted for the charlatan. So you'd think, wouldn't you?, that they'd be happy to follow the rules he's put in place during this pandemic.
Alas not. The American political scientist and author Francis M. Wilhoit once posited that "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition. There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect" and, in this - if not in many other aspects of his personality, we can see that Johnson, like the man he admires so much - Donald Trump, is an arch Conservative.
The rules, Boris Johnson dog whistles to us during his press briefings, are really only there for those that don't support him, that aren't his friends, that aren't in his pocket. The rules are for THEM. Not US. My family's support for BNP, UKIP, Brexit, Donald Trump, and Boris Johnson has been a huge cause of personal sadness to me in recent years and during the Covid crisis I have been, at least, able to forge a closer, much closer, relationship with my parents.
Sadly, some of the rest of my family are, if not in full denial of Covid-19, at least underplaying the severity of it. They don't like it. They wish it was over. But feelings don't make facts and unless they are prepared to take the precautions required to stop the spread of the disease they're in danger of making this last a lot longer than it should do. Not least with this new, more easily transmissible, variant.
The Venn Diagram of my working and family life, of late, has had a rather bloated middle. I'd been working for the family firm. My Dad started it and he's still the owner. I've always been very proud of him building up such a successful and well respected business from nothing. My brother took over the business some years ago and has done a great job of expanding it. My sister-in-law helps him run it.
Politically, we could not be further apart but as people they're kind, they care, and they want to do the best for others as well, especially their family. Except, it seems, when it comes to not supporting out and out racist politicians and stopping the spread of a deadly virus. Which, to me, is quite important.
I won't go too much into but the upshot was that within twenty-four hours of Johnson's announcement there had been two breaches of the rules by family members and as I was living with one of those family members I was made complicit in the law breaking and feared for my parent's health and my own health - both physical and mental.
At 6am I woke up, left Tadley, and left a note for my nephew explaining why I had headed home. It caused some family upset and I could have handled it much, much better. I have apologised for the way I handled it but I have not apologised for the action itself as I believed, and still believe, it was right.
The upshot is that I am now on furlough and I won't be returning to the job at the end of lockdown. My relationship with some family members is still good, with others it is very poor and is likely to remain so, with others still it was terrible in the first place and had been for decades.
Families, eh? One of the things I wrote in my 'departure' note was that the daily Covid death toll would soon reach one thousand per day and I was, sadly but predictably - you don't need to be a mystic - you just need to be able to understand basic data, proved right later that same day. On Wednesday 6th January the UK Covid death toll was 1,041, the following day it was 1,162, and yesterday it was 1,325. The deadliest day in the pandemic in the UK so far.
I don't regret walking out on my family and the family business in these circumstances - but I do regret the passive-aggressive way I did it. Wednesday got off to a strange start but in the evening it got weirder and yet more unsettling still as I sat down in front of my television and watched a motley assortment of QAnon conspiracists, right wing nutjobs, confused Trump fanatics, and Jamiroquai lookalikes march on the Capitol building in a coup attempt incited by the President himself.
A violent assault on democracy that left five dead. This is what the Trump project (one widely supported by Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Nigel Farage) ultimately looks like. Fantasists who when their fantasy is proved to be a lie will resort to violence. Often lethal violence.
People who would happily overthrow a democratically elected governement, people who wear t-shirts celebrating Auschwitz, people who genuinely believe Nancy Pelosi is in league with Satan and that Hillary Clinton eats babies, people who destroy 5G radio masts during a pandemic, people who share lies and untruths on social media.
A social media that on it's own has done much to damage freedom and democracy and a social media that has been juiced by Trump and his fellow populists to foment so much anger and hatred that it's hard to see how it can ever be put back in the box. Social media that now, and only now - five years at least too late, is finally banning Donald Trump for sharing lies and hatred.
As many observers soon pointed out, Trump's actions to the MAGA riots ("we love you") were very different to his response to BLM protests ("when the looting starts, the shooting starts") but we had hope, at least, in the words of Joe Biden:- "at best the words of a president can inspire, at worst they can incite".
When Trump announced he wouldn't be attending Biden's inauguration in a couple of weeks it was the first time Biden found himself in agreement with the ban. Many are concerned there may be more trouble in the weeks ahead and that it will, again, be incited by Trump. The inauguration itself, always a huge security event, looks fraught and not just because of Covid.
What a world we live in when the man in possession of the nuclear codes is deemed to be too dangerous and unhinged to be allowed a Twitter account, where the slow puncture of Brexit undermines the British economy at the time of a global pandemic that will undoubtedly already lead to an unprecedented recession, where lorry drivers have to get a KERMIT (a Kent access permit) to enter the garden of England, and where such a thing as NERVTAG (the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats advisory group) even exists, where kids can't go to school, where adults can't visit each other's houses, and where there are people who genuinely believe all these governments around the world, some even at war with each other, have conspired to plan this.
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