Covid Surges - Tories Clueless

This weekend, the Tory Party is holding its spring conference in Blackpool, whose residents may be wondering what they did to have the variously entitled and out of touch rock up for sea front photo opportunities and make a nuisance of themselves at the Pleasure Beach. For most of those attending, the world is excellent. No poverty of any kind, no disease, no discomfort will afflict them. And it shows.

Oliver Dowden - rich, and clueless with it

This aloof cluelessness has been demonstrated by the party’s co-chairman Oliver Dowden, who stood before the assembled faithful - well, maybe not very many of them - to denounce Keir Starmer, and in the process let slip that the Tories have taken their eyes off the ball when it comes to the basics of Government - keeping the people safe.

“The danger has not passed. The Corbynistas - they are still there. You know Starmer, he cannot resist kow-towing to the cancel culture brigade, because his base are [sic] the cancel culture brigade. He’s frightened to defend women’s rights or protect our heritage from vandals because he fears he would be cancelled”. Sadly, there was more.

“And he won’t argue against state handouts because his party don’t believe in rolling back the vast Covid state [!] at all. And he can’t even get his own MPs to vote for measures to stop the self-righteous environmentalist activists blocking our roads because the lockers-on and the gluers-on are his own Labour councillors. And that is why we cannot let him into office”. Thank you Tedious Maximus. For making no sense at all. As usual.

Droning on about a Cancel Culture that is entirely the invention of our free and fearless press - frightened witless that social media makes it not only possible, but very easy, to call out their unprincipled hypocrisy and lame journalism - while demonising someone who actually cares about their fellow human beings. Whining about protesters while failing to tell his audience of the authoritarian clampdown that voting his way would bring.

But worst of all, Dowden gave the game away with “The vast Covid state”. That would be the state that is entirely a construct of the Government of which he is a member. And he carries the implicit message: the pandemic, dontcha know, is over, because alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and his coterie of ineptitude say so.

Well, have I got news for Ollie. He and his pals can declare the Covid pandemic to be over as loudly, and as often, as they like. The reality is that it has come roaring back, the removal of all restrictions bound to be contributory factor, the Government is about to end the availability of free testing, and all the Tories can offer is hot air and deflection.

The number of positive tests is now nudging 80,000 a day over the past seven days (data as of yesterday). In all possibility, it’s well above 80,000 by now. More than 1,700 a day are being hospitalised, with that number also increasing steeply. The daily death toll, which was hovering just above 100, is now beginning to rise. But CANCEL CULTURE, eh?

It has been reported “More people over 70 are testing positive for Covid-19 than at any time in the pandemic, as cases rise in every age group and region”. Over-70s. That, Oliver Dowden, is mainly your own voters. It’s hitting schools too. So future voters as well.

Clueless and irresponsible in the face of a health emergency. No change there, then.

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