Kakistocracy XII:Get Lucky.

"We've come too far to give up who we are. So let's raise the bar and our cups to the stars" - Get Lucky, Daft Punk. 

So, Daft Punk have split up. A dizzying work rate of four albums in twenty-eight years must have completely exhausted them so they're hanging their robot suits up and presumably lounging around the Bois de Boulogne smoking Gauloises and drinking Paul Ricard now, content with the huge success, critical acclaim, and wealth they achieved during their floruit.

I'm being facetious, of course. Like most people, I liked Daft Punk a lot. I wasn't what you'd call an expert but had a couple of albums and could never tire of singles like Da Funk, Lose Yourself to Dance, One More Time, Around the World, and, of course, Get Lucky. But Daft Punk didn't get lucky. Daft Punk had innovative ideas, a sense of showmanship, and the ability to write tunes that got you on the dancefloor and refused to leave your head.

I tell you who has got lucky of late, though. The government - and me (not in that way, there's a pandemic on you know). I'll come back to my own good fortune towards the end of this piece but I'll start with something I never thought I would in these Kakistocracy blogs. Praise for the government. Highly conditional and partial praise, for sure, but, compared to everything else they've done it looks like they're finally doing something right.

Or nearly right. Time will tell. Boris Johnson's 'roadmap' to ending lockdown restrictions actually looks measured, flexible, cautious, and sensible (three adjectives you would never normally apply to the man). They are, of course, too cautious for the likes of Steve Baker and the disingenuously named Covid Recovery Group. They are, equally, not cautious enough for others. Particularly as regards kids returning to schools while vaccines are still not prioritised for teachers.

If Boris Johnson is serious about this being the last lockdown, and history teaches us that as a man he is neither serious nor truthful, then this 'baby steps' approach is the right way to go. Hell, I desperately want to meet my friends for walks, go to the pub, have a curry, go to an art gallery, and visit people who live outside of London but I understand if we can all just be a little bit more patient we have far more chance of getting there with considerably less loss of life. Get there safer. Stay there longer.

So, well done for finally getting your shit together. It's only taken over a year and it's only cost a mere 121,305 lives (the fifth highest death toll in the world, the fourth highest death toll per head of population) and well done on the speedy rate of vaccination (over a quarter of the UK population have already received their first jab). But these blogs are not about dwelling on what the government gets right (or when they get lucky). They're about holding them to account (and telling you what parks I've been going for walks in, of course).

Not necessarily for getting things wrong. Everyone gets things wrong. But for when their divisive and untruthful leadership intentionally gets things wrong and people die because of that. When they refuse to accept that they have made lethal mistakes that have cost people their lives. When they line the pockets of their friends (as Health Secretary Matt Hancock has been found to do so) and in doing so inflict further death on people and damage to the economy.

When they take credit from the NHS (staffed by the very people whose pay rise block they famously applauded) for the vaccination programme but take no responsibility for the outrageously high death toll they allowed Covid to notch up in the UK. Writing in The Guardian, Zoe Williams put it succinctly when she said they "privatise the losses" and "socialise the gains".

Alex Bourne, a neighbour of Matt Hancock's who used to run The Cock Inn (with Hancock's track record, amazingly not The Cock Up) in Thurlow, Suffolk, was making a living making plastic cups and takeaway boxes for the catering industry. So it seemed a bit strange when Hancock presented him with a £30,000,000 contract to produce Covid test vials. 

The MHRA (The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) certainly thought so. They launched an investigation and it turned out that Mr Justice Chamberlain, a high court judge, agreed. Matt Hancock, the judge said, had acted unlawfully in not publishing details of the contract. It had been a serious and very costly breach of transparency regarding how tax payer's money was being spent by the government.

The escalating death toll, the chumocracy and cronyism that will remain a clear and present danger even when the threat of Covid abates, the complete inability to even apologise or to stand down when laws have been broken. Yet the government keeps getting away with it. It doesn't help that Keir Starmer isn't going in harder (I support Starmer, but he should go much harder on this) and a supine media either cowed by government threats (BBC) or with their own right wing agenda (Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph) doesn't help either.

Nor does it help that some have become so desensitised to the death tolls and so far removed from political debate they genuinely believe the government have done the best they can with the hand they were dealt and nobody else would do any better. A simple look at a list of the death tolls prove that to be untrue. The UK has a higher per head death rate from Covid than even the US (whose own death toll passed the grisly half a million mark last week - many avoidable and many directly due to Trump's vanity and incompetence).

When I speak to my mum, and in the last year we have spoken more than since I was a child, she remarks on how 'when this is all over' there will need to be some kind of reckoning, an investigation in to how the UK government handled this so very badly. But, don't bank on it. With the weather getting better, with a vaccine bounce behind him, and with a country desperate to get back to some kind of normality, Boris Johnson will revert to his standard mode boosterism and say we need to focus on the future and not dredge over the past.

Those who say we do will be called doomsters and mocked as gloomsters and Johnson's government, not to put a fine a point on it, will be free to kill again. If a government can allow tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and get away with it, it will certainly be free to participate in some very risky experiments in governance over the next few years. Following a health crisis and an economic crisis, we may soon be facing, perhaps already are facing, a crisis of democracy.

The blunt tool the government will use to slip out of the shackles of responsibility for their own wilful negligence will be, of course, the culture war and the materiel for that war is being assembled right now. In truth, production never ceased once during the pandemic.

Joe Biden's welcome announcement that the US is to stop arming Saudi Arabia so that they can no longer inflict death and disaster on the people of Yemen was very refreshing to hear after four years of incomprehensible bullshit and boasting from Trump. It would have been nice if the UK government had said they'd also take this position but James Cleverly, the Minister of State for the Middle East and North Africa, has announced that they will not be doing so.

He put a few mealy mouthed words together about needing to put some checks and balances in place in the hope that that would put an end to any further questions on the subject. He kicked the can down the road because, at heart, our government is putting Saudi money before humanitarian law and human rights and if that upsets the liberals and the left then great, that's a bonus.

Get them so angry they say something bad and then point the finger at them. Make it about others. Blame others. Take, for just one example, Priti Patel appearing on LBC to say that she thought the Black Lives Matters protests last year were 'dreadful' and that she would support more peaceful means of protest. 

Taking the knee is, demonstrably, a peaceful form of protest. So presumably Patel approves? Turns out the proven bully does not approve of taking the knee. Which undermines her entire point. She's not the brightest, Priti Patel, we all know that. But that's not the point. There is no need for joined up thought and there is no need for joined up policy. Patel's job, like Cleverly's, is to antagonise, to enrage, and to divide.

With those KPIs in place, you can be sure she will receive a favourable appraisal from her Prime Minister when the time comes. Not all of the confusion this government sends out in the public sphere is malicious like that. Some is down to simple incompetence. Take, as an example, Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapp's announcement that we should not book holidays abroad or even in the UK for summer 2021.

A clear message in its own right but one that's hard to take seriously when Matt Hancock lets it be known that he has booked his own summer holiday in Cornwall. Boris Johnson, of course, fully backed both of them. A cognitive dissonance not unfamiliar to observers of Johnson's career but also the point where incompetence is juiced into policy.

The appointment of the unelected David Frost, Baron Frost to Johnson's cabinet (due to take place on 1st March) certainly isn't incompetence. It's an affront to democracy and it really ought to upset all those people who voted for Brexit because they were fed up with unelected bureaucrats. Frost is nothing but an unelected bureaucrat whose rise to power has happened simply because he can't get his tongue far enough up Boris Johnson's arse and Boris Johnson likes nothing more than a tongue up his arse.

An unedifying image for an unedifying government. A government of 'slippery cunts' who, even as lockdown starts easing and the days get longer, we need to keep our eyes on because they've not finished damaging the country yet. While we keep one eye on them, however, we should also try to keep one eye on the future which, in some ways, is looking a little brighter than it has done in a long time.

For me at least. I've not had a lot of good luck in recent years but I've taken solace in the comforts of nature, music, and, most of all, friendship and, this week, that has paid off for me. My dear friend Cheryl referred me for a job at her place, I was interviewed last week, they offered me the job yesterday, and I start on March 22nd. I'm very happy about this and I'm very thankful to Cheryl as well as Michelle who helped me tidy up my (very messy) CV.

It's not the only happiness I've had. With the power of Nurofen Express and Co-Op own brand cranberry juice drink, I managed to mostly swerve what could have been quite a nasty gout bullet and, I can't stress how much difference this makes, the weather has started improving. The sun has been out, the birds have been singing, and I've been on a couple of (reasonably) long walks. On one of them I even managed to pick up a takeaway vegan sausage roll from Greggs.

That's always a pleasure. I've walked in Peckham Rye Park, Peckham Rye Common, Dulwich Park, Dulwich Woods, Sydenham Hill Wood and even as far as Burgess Park (a beautiful February day that saw swans, geese, coots, mallards, and even a heron) and South London World Cup of Parks winner Crystal Palace Park (an even more beautiful February day that saw dinosaurs, sphinxes, and alpacas) where I had a very tasty ciabatta tricolori from Bloom on the Triangle and washed it down with a can of Coke.

I've attended (online) a London Fortean Society talk on love-locks and a SELFS talk on the lore of love (it was Valentine's weekend), I binge watched (and wrote about) Adam Curtis' Can't Get You Out Of My Head, I had great fun at an eighties themed murder mystery evening arranged by Kathy with lots of help from Mike, I came a close second in Alex's quiz to Tony (my supreme Flump knowledge surprised even me) and remarkably I won my Dad's sports quiz (I'm not that knowledgeable about sport as anyone who saw me on Eggheads will know).

A couple of weeks ago I was quite down. It was hard to see in front of me. During that time I had life affirming uplifting conversations with both my mum and my dad and my dear friends Adam, Michelle, Ben, Vicki, Shep, Cheryl, Valia, and Simon and they, undoubtedly, helped me negotiate that slump. Now I can see light at the end of the tunnel (while hoping, and here's one for the Half Man Half Biscuit fans) that its not an oncoming train) and that is a very nice feeling.

 

It's forty-nine days today since I met with another person in real life but, on Sunday, I'm planning to (hopefully) meet with Pam for a walk around Sydenham Wells Park and I'm really looking forward to that. As the next few weeks roll on I will meet other friends, in parks at first and then in beer gardens hopefully, and I will start my new job.

It will be a long and arduous, and sometimes bumpy, journey back to something resembling normality but it's one I now feel mentally equipped to take. The government have done a lot of work in trying to make this country small minded and cruel but my friends, I'm proud to report, have not taken that bait and have continued to be as kind, considerate, creative, curious, and funny as ever. When friends were being handed out, I sure got lucky.