Isolation XIX:Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death.

The last five days or so, for me personally, has actually been rather lovely. I've chatted to Mum, Dad, Michelle, and Adam, I've attended (online) a London Fortean Society talk about paganism, I've done Kahoot quizzes with family and friends, I've laughed out loud (while remaining righteously angry) at Charlie Brooker's Antiviral Wipe, and I've taken, as ever, solace in the world of music and walking.

Visiting local spots like Peckham Rye Park, Horniman Gardens, Blythe Hill Fields, and Brenchley Gardens even once a day is enough to fill my heart with sunshine. I return with my heart full of hope too, and that's not just because I've had a walk, got some sun, and seen some flowers and grass. That's also because (almost) everyone I pass while I'm out behaves kindly and respectfully. The vast majority of people are doing what they can to make this as pleasant and bearable as possible. Not just for themselves but for everyone.

After years of division, stoked by those who seek most to benefit from it, people, as I've written before in these Isolation blogs, are grabbing the chance to be kind with both hands. It's been a joy to witness but will it continue after lockdown, after coronavirus even? If there is to be an 'after coronavirus'.

Not if the government and their supporters get their way. The creatively ambiguous, blame shifting, and deliberately vague 'stay alert/control the virus/save lives' slogan has been followed by a steady drip of hints and nudges that it's time we (not all of us, just the working classes) got off our lazy arses, got back to work, and got the economy, for which read the capitalist system that does so much to crush those that are yoked to its plough, up and running again.

Factory workers, builders, and teachers should get out there and risk their lives just like doctors, nurses, and care home workers are doing while their bosses enjoy the wide open spaces and fairways of the reopened golf courses and garden centres. It's no accident that leisure options are reopening first for the rich and work is reopening first for the poor. That's how the rich stay rich. On the back of the poor, and this government is, ultimately, a government for the rich. It will do whatever it can to govern in their favour.

I'm not saying Boris Johnson and his cabinet of cronies want poor people to die. I'm saying they're pretty indifferent to it, relaxed about it even. As long as they don't appear to be responsible in any way for those deaths. That's why the messaging is changing to 'stay alert', that's why they're setting up a narrative whereby anyone who catches Covid-19 now has done so because they were too lazy, too stupid, or too feckless not to do so.

When a highwayman asked for your money or your life you can be guaranteed that they'd end up with your money whichever you choose. When this government ask you to choose between your money or your life you can guarantee they'll get you to make money for them whichever you choose. Of course many will return to work and not die but some won't. Some of their more vulnerable family members they pass the virus on to won't.

Today's front page headline on The Daily Mail is LET OUR TEACHERS BE HEROES (all caps, obvs) and the rest of the front page goes on to talk about the 'magnificent' teaching staff who are 'desperate' to return to work but are not being allowed to by the 'militant' unions who are standing in their way.

There's a lot to unpack there but let's try because once this poison is out in the wider world it tends to circulate like, for instance, a virus. (1) Many teachers have been going in to work during this crisis, (2) the teachers are not being held back by the unions (the teachers ARE the unions), and (3) the entire purpose unions were created is to protect staff from danger and exploitation. If you were to make a list of all the dangers of going to work that you may need protecting from, you'd like to think dying would be quite near the top of that list.

Maybe I'm some awful bleeding heart liberal but I'd go so far as to place it right at the very top. The Daily Mail calls the unions militant because they're trying to protect the health and lives of the people they represent. I can't help thinking it's The Daily Mail with their constant, and bellicose, reference to heroes that's the militant party here.

Siding with The Daily Mail in this willingness to sacrifice so that the rich stay we rich find fervent Brexiters like Isabel Oakeshott (Katie Hopkins with a thesaurus) and, a new name to me but not a good one, Luke Johnson (no relation to Boris). Luke Johnson's appearance on Question Time was one of the vilest I've ever witnessed. My mum said she had to check it wasn't April Fool's Day so close was his schtick to that of a Harry Enfield parody of a grasping businessman.

Luke Johnson questioned figures, questioned data, and questioned science in an utterly immoral display of self-interest that beggared belief but his inclusion on the show was not a travesty as much as his wealth and success is a disgrace. He represents a band of Conservative outliers who serve as testing mechanisms to see what the public will accept, to find out how widely the Overton window of what's acceptable to the great unwashed can be prised open.

They offer up outrageous, deadly, exit strategies as they run turd smeared flags up the flagpole to see who salutes. If nobody, or barely anybody, does they simply scrape a bit of turd off it and run it up there again. Many, remembering the heavily turd stained flag, will see a lightly turd stained flag as an improvement and happily salute it.

These people evoke the language of their beloved Brexit. They talk of 'scaremongering' and warn of 'Project Fear' and they make accusations of disloyalty and insufficient patriotism. If that worked in securing and delivering a Brexit (which may, and almost certainly will, cause enormous damage to the economy that they claim to care about) it's not working so well when there are, at the very least, over 33,000 people dead in the UK alone.

Telling people that being scared of dying is 'cowering', 'scaremongering', or 'Project Fear' is cruel beyond belief. Government by slogan (Boris Johnson's big initiative) isn't working and neither is a government of bullying and intimidation. Another tactic Johnson has excelled at during his political career but is failing him now.

NHS workers are interviewed about their difficulties at work under conditions of anonymity like beaten wives who fear their abusive partners. But who are they scared of? Their bosses, it would appear. Bosses who report to nobody but Johnson's government. James Clayton, on Newsnight, labelled it, correctly, a 'be quiet' culture and stories have come forward of health workers being discouraged from reporting dangers and even deaths.

At a time when Boris Johnson is calling on us to use good old fashioned British common sense! Clearly, so much better than any of that foreign common sense, especially in those countries who have kept their death tolls much lower than ours. If the British had common sense they'd not have voted such an obvious charlatan to lead them in the first place.

Johnson's return to nationalist, jingoistic, populism suggests nothing's changed for him. He may be physically well following his brush with death but he's still a complete moral vacuum and one that, sadly, had sucked us all in. Banging desks, empty slogans, waving flags. These are the things that pass as policy in this accursed and shameless administration.

I'd hoped, earlier in this series of Isolation blogs, that we'd see a change of thinking at the top but it's clear, now, that that will not be led (or driven) by Johnson and his medieval court of harlequins, almoners, and pursuivants. It's up to us. If we want change (and we surely do) we must force it. We must make it happen. We must persuade, we must demonstrate, we must confront liars and right wing cheerleaders with the brutal truths of the shame and wanton death they have brought down on this country.

If we do not they will lead us into further, and worse, disasters. We must do everything we can to stop them. There is hope that those on the centre right are moving away from the far right thinking that has held sway in the Tory party of late. Piers Morgan, of all people, has turned on Johnson. I'm no fan of the man, not even close, but (for unfathomable reasons) he holds huge sway in the public arena and minds are changing, scales are falling from people's eyes.

The Daily Telegraph, in recent years basically a Boris Johnson fanzine, ran a piece (following another disastrous PMQs for Johnson, he can't perform without his mates backing him up with their boos and jeers) by their parliamentary sketchwriter Michael Deacon which was headlined 'Keir Starmer took Boris Johnson apart like a Duplo train set' and if the Telegraph can turn, or even start to turn, then anything can happen.

Keir Starmer did take Johnson apart like a kiddies train set as well. The quieter atmosphere in the house, and the fact that people are watching now for answers and not showbiz, makes Johnson look like he's been caught stealing knickers from a washing line and  Starmer's serious, forensic approach and gravitas stand in stark, and admirable, comparison.

We're under a government that will only allow you to visit your parents if you're accompanied by an estate agent of if you're going to be paid to clean their house while you're there. We're under a government that not only does not, but simply can not, tell the truth. We're under a government, and this bears repeating time and time again, that has presided over the second highest coronavirus death toll on the entire planet.

If you don't want this government gone you really need to take a long hard look in the mirror. Sadly, some ultra Corbynites (though not Corbyn himself) are still choosing to rant about the biased BBC, the biased MSM (mainstream media), and are still calling Starmer's Labour Party the 'red Tories' instead of getting behind the democratically elected leader of the Labour Party as they, when they weren't telling people to 'fuck off and vote Tory', instructed people to do during Corbyn's tenure.

You'd think a socialist man leading a socialist party, destroying the Prime Minister in debates, and even winning over writers at the Daily Telegraph as well as huge swathe of middle England would be enough for people to get behind him. But there are people out there who if they can't get their first choice of dish on the menu won't accept the second.

You might have wanted creamy black lentil dhal with autumn squash and burnt coconut but that option's not available any more. The roasted kabocha pumpkin soup with chestnuts looks quite yummy but you wanted the dhal and if you can't have the dhal you won't settle for second best. So, what you get is the same overflowing plate of festering shit and broken glass that we've all been gagging on for the last decade except this time it might actually kill you.

Last year Channel 4 screened a series called Chimerica in which F. Murray Abraham played a press boss. In it he tells a Bernie Sanders supporter who's planning to abstain rather than vote for Hillary that the election "isn't a fucking salad bar. You don't get a bespoke artisanal candidate. You choose the thing that's not a giant shit".

The giant shit is running, and ruining, Britain right now. If you're not against him you're for him and the blood of thousands will never be washed from your hands no matter how many times you sing Happy Birthday.