Isolation XVIII:The View From The Gaslit Uplands.

"So we are saying don't go to work, go to work, don't take public transport, go to work, don't go to work, stay indoors, if you can work from home go to work, don't go to work, go outside, don't go outside - and then we will, or won't, er, something or other" - Matt Lucas' parody of Boris Johnson's new 'Stay Alert' advice.

"Well, it’s clear what we have to do then: go outside, but don’t go outside, start to socialise again but not with more than one person and not at a distance of less than two metres, and go to work but don’t go to work, and don’t go on the bus if you have to go to work, but if you do go to work don’t get the bus, please, and if you have to work (and you can! And should! But don’t) then drive yourself there. Fines will be increased for rule-breaking. Nobody on Earth has any idea what the rules actually are. Just know that fines are looming, somehow, for something. So to clarify: work is bad, buses are bad, rules are bad, work is good, rules don’t exist, fines are everywhere, fines are nowhere, disorder reigns" - Joel Golby's take on that same 'advice' in The Guardian.

On Sunday night at 7pm Boris Johnson spoke to the nation. As he stared out at the screen earnestly, with the face he uses to deny affairs to his various wives and girlfriends, he strung out a load of fluently (for him at least) expressed bollocks that even a cursory scratch of the surface proved to be vague and divisive and will, more than likely, prove to be dangerous, and deadly, too. He made a complete fucking pig's ear of going into lockdown. Why would anyone imagine he'd take us out of it in a different way?

Telling people, some people at least - construction and factory workers - not important people, that they can go back to work tomorrow morning at 7pm on a Sunday night. That's a shitty move on its own (people like at least some notice for stuff, you know) but by not being in tune with the far more safety-first and, small c, conservative measures announced in Wales and Scotland he's created yet further confusion at a time when many many people, though admittedly less than a few weeks back, are still dying from this 'thing'.

Of course the economy is a concern but dead people don't spend a lot of money and surely it'll be hit even harder by a botched relaxation of lockdown and then a return to another, possibly lengthier, period of quarantine than it will by a very gradual easing? Johnson's message (using, as Golby hilariously described it, "a graphic stolen from the Nando's peri-peri sauce-meter", when you read between the lines, seems to be that those already most at risk (lower paid workers, often BAME) need to go back to work and risk their lives even more so that the rest of us can stay at home having Zoom meetings and that shareholders aren't too badly hit by the crisis?

'Stay alert' is far more unclear than 'stay home' as a message and that's no accident. The ambiguity is intended. If you go out and catch the disease now, if you die of it, then it's not their fault anymore. It's yours. For not being 'alert' enough. Johnson most likely knows more people will die because of his messaging. He doesn't want people to die. I don't believe that of him. But I do believe he's quite indifferent to their deaths. He's far more concerned with covering his arse.

A jokey mock up of the government's slogan heavy new messaging reads "OOH, CAREFUL > MIND HOW YOU GO > BE LUCKY" but a more hard hitting one reads "BE VAGUE > COVER OUR BACKS > SHIRK RESPONSIBILITY" and that's where we're at now. It was noted that the colour red on these signs has been changed to green. Red means 'stop' or 'stay in'. Green means 'go' or, here, 'go out'.

That might sound like reading too much into a simple change of graphic design but this incarnation of the Tory party spend a lot of money researching how to send subliminal messages to people to get them to do what they want them to without actually having to say to them to do it. That way they can't be blamed for it. We're back, again, with the nudge theory that proved so fatal a couple of months ago. Even worse, Johnson and his toadies (all competent and sane voices in the cabinet were kicked out in favour of hard Brexiters and arse lickers) are, it seems, still pushing us towards the discredited herd immunity. As many have already pointed out they're not telling us to get back out there because the threat from coronavirus has disappeared but because they've now got enough ICU beds for us should we catch it.

As with so many things from Brexit to veganism and on to trans rights the people are being divided into two and the noises being heard the loudest are those from either extreme end of the spectrum. There's little room for nuanced voices, few attempts to reach consensus or make compromises, and the centre, as has been the case so often in recent years, struggles to hold.

Fervent Brexit supporters once waxed lyrical about the sunlit uplands we'd emerge into once we'd rid ourselves of the imaginary shackles of the European union but, instead, we've come out from the first wave of coronavirus darkness blinking into a different kind of uplands. A gaslit uplands. A place where we know there are rules but we don't know what they are, a place where the government have shown a deadly dereliction of duty to the people that elected them, and a place where we know whatever we do somebody, somewhere, will tell us we're doing the wrong thing.

It's almost as if, following weeks of unprecedented kindness in our communities, the government are getting scared. This can't carry on. We need people to get back to being nasty and prioritising wealth and aspiration above health, family, and friends. We were always likely to get there but why so soon?

The current global Covid-19 death toll is north of 280,000, there are 80,000+ dead in the US alone, over 32,000 have perished in the UK, and 20 countries in total (from India to Indonesia, from Portugal to Peru) have registered more than 1,000 deaths. Brazil, as predicted by many due to Bolsonaro's denialism, are the big climber in the global death league, becoming the sixth nation (besides the US, UK, Italy, Spain, and France) to get into five figures.

With this as the background you can imagine how disappointed, though not surprised, I was to see someone, a former friend, from Tadley (where I grew up) sharing an image of Johnson dressed as Churchill telling the 'haters' to fuck off. An idea that thinking 30,000 deaths are bad now makes you a hater. Johnson's BFF, Trump, goes further. 30,000 deaths aren't enough for him. 80,000 aren't enough. He now claims that the US needs to accept a lot more death and he's opening the country up again, before they've hit their peak, because, he says, the economy is more important than life.

That's insane but the truth behind it is far worse. Trump's re-election is, to him, more important than the economy and people's lives. He's indifferent to anything other than himself. He'd piss in a dying baby's face if it got him votes - and it probably would do. To be fair to Boris Johnson I don't think he'd do that. He'd probably snigger at the fact that Trump was doing it and allow his supporters to trot out the old mantra that at least he's not as bad as Trump.

George 'Useless' Eustace, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs appeared on Question Time to say we shouldn't compare ourselves with other countries (even though his own government had been doing exactly that until the comparisons started to look really bad) and, elsewhere, excuse after excuse is wheeled out for Johnson's negligence in dealing with this. As Keir Starmer pointed out to Johnson at Prime Minister's Questions last week. Starmer was forensic and dispassionate in his debunking of government lies. To his critics that was a bit boring. Why bother with a serious approach, you fucking square?

Ok, the morgues are full to bursting and people can't even be with their loved ones on their death beds but we've just had VE Day so why not get the bunting out and celebrate British (always meaning English) exceptionalism while, at the same time, conveniently forgetting our allies because it doesn't fit the idea that we're the best, the very best, in the whole world. A belief shared with Brazil and the US. It's almost as if jingoistic populism, myths of exceptionalism, and nationalist rhetoric aren't effective ways of countering a deadly virus.

Elsewhere in the coronavirus-sphere we're seeing, as Afua Hirsch said on Question Time, a lack of 'intellectual curiosity' on the part of the government as to why BAME people are more susceptible to succumbing to Covid-19. The lack of information on this baffles me. Is it because BAME people are disproportionately working in key worker and frontline positions or living in more densely populated areas (which would highlight how much racial inequality our society still allows) or is there a genetic factor? If that turns out to be the case it seems highly unlikely that that would not be juiced by the racist extreme right to 'prove' white racial superiority. Talk of eugenics, which were already in the air before all this, tend not to be far behind such twisting of science.

I'd love to write more about that but, first, I'd need to have more information about it and it's not coming. Instead, we're distracted with stories about Professor Neil Ferguson, the government advisor from Imperial College in London, who, despite being one of the key people behind the decision to go into lockdown, breached it himself, twice, to visit his married lover.

Don't get me wrong. What he did was wrong, very wrong considering his role in all this, and he deserves reproach but the first of his transgressions occurred, and was seemingly well known about, in March and it appears that the government held on to his (unpaid) services until they needed a distraction, a dead cat to throw on the table. Becoming the European country with the second highest death toll, it was time to throw someone under the bus and Ferguson, stupidly, had put himself in a position to be just that sacrifice.

Ferguson had made a great mistake but that mistake has been used to mask far greater (and more deadly) failings on the part of the government. This government cannot, and will not, lead by moral example so it was hardly a surprise that they were taking advice from a man cut from the same cloth. When the government announced relaxation of lockdown, in England only, they said we could sunbathe, have picnics, and leave the house more than once a day. Even meet with friends as long as we do it outside and maintain social distancing.

These are not necessarily bad moves and most of us had realised a few weeks ago that social distancing is key. Many in London, including me, who have no gardens have already been inching towards those things. It was once said of Boris Johnson (and I can't remember who by or I would credit them) that he is a man who when he sees a crowd runs to the front of it and shouts 'follow me'.

It's a very accurate and prescient consideration of the man's character but it's a terrible pity that so many who chose to follow him did so to their own deaths as will surely happen to those who follow another cult, that of Christianity. There can hardly be any denying that Johnson and Trump are cult leaders. They encourage their followers to place faith above reason and when you hear Christians campaigning for increased relaxation of lockdown because they "need to physically be with Jesus" more than they need food (yeah, good luck with that) you realise that the most deadly development in the politics of the US and the UK in recent years has been that politicans have started acting like quasi-religious figures beyond questioning and criticism.

That never ends well and this story has got many twists and turns to take yet. With a charlatan like Johnson at the wheel there will be plenty of crashes along the way, more and more mistakes, and, worst of all, more scapegoating, blaming, and passing the buck. If he comes out of this looking like a hero we're in, almost certainly, for further bad times. If we learn our lesson we can start to make the much talked about 'new normal' a better, more fairer, more equal normal rather than the same old normal we had before that left so many in poverty, depression, and despair.

I've, fortunately, escaped those things over the last couple of months (today is my 59th day of lockdown) and that's, primarily, down to the generosity and kindness of friends and family. Since I last wrote about this I've spoken, multiple times in some cases, to Mum, Dad, Michelle, Adam, Ben, and even my brother Andy and my nephews Alex and Daniel. We even did a family quiz to go along with the Kahoot quizzes I've been doing, and loving, with a very dear group of close friends.

My friend Dan has been sending me a tune a day to keep my spirits up (today was the Dave Holland Quartet, yesterday was Pauline Oliveros, the day before Sister Rosetta Tharpe - the quality has been excellent), I'm continuing to set my daily music challenge on Facebook (most days the thread stretches beyond one hundred posts), and, on the same platform, I'm still running down my one hundred favourite reggae songs (today it was Alton Ellis, yesterday Culture). On top of that I've been listening to lots of the joyous, beautiful, and transcendent music that Little Richard, Kraftwerk's Florian Schneider, and Millie (who have all passed away in recent days - none, it seems, Covid-19 related) have gifted us. If you formed a triangle of my musical tastes those three could easily be the three corners.

I've been for walks on Peckham Rye Park, Dulwich Park (where I 'bumped into' Pam), One Tree Hill, and Nunhead Cemetery. All of this has served to keep me feeling positive about things. Even when there is so much darkness around and, in the threat posed not just by coronavirus but our negligent and self-serving leaders, the promise of much more to come. Writing about the VE Day celebrations in The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland said "it was natural for Britons to bask in the May sunshine and remember a brighter moment, to take comfort from it and draw strength from its lesson: that even the darkest hours end eventually. It made sense to come together and raise a glass for the day when we will meet again. But we are fighting a different war now, against an invisible enemy, and led by lesser men."

We can, and should, come out of the darkness. But when we do we must make absolutely certain the person that leads us out of it does not lead us somewhere even darker. Current evidence suggests that's a lesson we've yet to learn and if we can't learn it from this can we ever?