Lockdown Delay - Tories To Blame

At least he was consistent: alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was a whole hour and 50 minutes late to his own press conference yesterday evening, meaning the BBC wisely cut away to Strictly before the questioning started. Another month, another lockdown, and the fault for the dither and delay lies squarely with Bozo.

That there should be a further lockdown, in order to suppress transmission of Covid-19, had been recommended to the Government late in September. When that advice was published in October, Labour leader Keir Starmer called for what was being termed a “circuit breaker” lockdown of two weeks to take place around Autumn half term holidays.

But Bozo, and more importantly chief Downing Street polecat Dominic Cummings and the rest of the wacko libertarian brigade that has infested Number 10 since Johnson became PM last year, knew better. They would not lock down; they would prevail; they could then proclaim to the world that they were WINNING. Thus the flawed mindset.

Sad to say for Polecat Dom and his pals, Covid-19 does not care about his frightfully clever machinations. And Covid-19 cannot be triangulated against. It cannot be taken out with a barrage of misinformation from useful idiot pundits and compliant client journalists. It cannot be embarrassed by revelations about its past. It cannot be bluffed.

So it was that the Tories performed a screeching and chaotic U-Turn: first, the acceptance that it would have to be made; second, the leaking to favoured press outlets; finally, Bozo’s equally chaotic presser. All was done without admitting Starmer had called it correctly, the Tories then played politics in line with the Polecat playbook, and more people had died.

As today’s Observer has reported, “With immediate warnings of the grave economic fallout and a mounting backlash among Tory MPs, the prime minister announced that a series of measures would come into force on Thursday to combat growing Covid infections. They will remain in place until 2 December”. They won’t: the lockdown will go on for longer.

A further U-Turn was made on furlough payments: “In another major reversal, the original furlough scheme under which the state paid 80% of workers’ wages will be extended for the duration of the new lockdown … The move angered regional leaders who had been pleading for extra support for weeks”. Mark Drakeford and Andy Burnham, for instance.

Starmer did not say he told them so. Not in so many words, at least: he “said that the government’s delay in imposing a lockdown will come ‘at an economic cost and a human cost’ and that the government had resisted scientific calls for it since September. He said it was unfair to pretend to the public that Christmas ‘will be normal’ … ‘I don’t think Christmas will be normal and I think we need to level with the public on that,’ he said”.

The Tories were concentrating on poll ratings, not on public safety: “There is also private anger among the government’s scientific advisers, who say that concerns about exceeding the reasonable worst-case scenarios had been known about for weeks. Insiders expressed concerns about the government’s unwillingness to do anything seen as unpopular”. Now they have to act. More people will die. And that will not be popular.

This Government does not know what it’s doing. That’s why we are totally screwed.

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