I didn’t ‘Clap for Captain Tom’ last night. It was certainly nothing personal against this wonderful man who became a national hero during the pandemic. Clearly, for Captain Sir Tom Moore, it was about serving his country, as he did so bravely in the armed forces. I doubt that we shall see his like again and the country is better for everything he did. Still, I stayed indoors at 6.00pm on Wednesday. Did I have a good reason? Well, 109,335 of them, actually.
The weekly ‘Clap For Carers’ during the first wave of the pandemic felt right. It was, more or less, a spontaneous act and during unprecedented times, we could express our appreciation for what those on the frontline were doing. It gradually fizzled out and an attempt to resurrect it before Christmas died a quick death. Where we were all metaphorically linking arms before, this felt contrived, mere lip service, an empty gesture. Then Boris Johnson announced the ‘Clap for Captain Tom’.
I had very little respect for Johnson long before he became prime minister and now I have none at all. We all knew he was a serial liar and completely unsuited to the job of prime minister. Yet the British people, who supposedly despise lying, incompetent politicians, elected him in December 2019 with a landslide. Everything he has done since his elevation to ‘world king’, which as a young boy he always aspired to be, has been disastrous.
“We did everything we could,” said Johnson, as the death toll exceeded 100,000. Just imagine if he hadn’t done everything he could have. How many more would have died? He talks endlessly about Britain being ‘world-beating”. The only thing world-beating about Johnson’s handling of the pandemic is the death toll. A better human being would have held his hands up, admitted he had failed; shamed the nation. The death toll was, in part, down to his dithering, his incompetence, his mixed messaging and refusing to sack his henchman Dominic Cummings when he drove to Durham for a COVID holiday in the middle of the pandemic. But Johnson doesn’t do resigning because he is not an honourable man.
Captain Sir Tom Moore wanted to raise money for the NHS and he did so gloriously, to the tune of £39m when you include Gift Aid. This will change lives. Johnson promised that if we left the EU, the NHS would get an extra £350m every week. It never happened and when COVID-19 hit, our NHS had been run into the ground by Johnson’s Conservative Party, underfunded and underprepared for such a national emergency. When it kicked off, an understaffed NHS kicked in and because we the people stayed at home, hospitals did not get completely overwhelmed. But it was close.
There are calls for Captain Tom to be recognised in death as he was in life. There is, for example, a petition doing the rounds for him to have a state funeral or a funeral with full military honours. I don’t know the protocols for either, but if that’s what his family want, it would be good enough for me. However, there is a better way to honour his memory: for this government and future governments to properly fund the NHS.
Charity exists to provide for the things that the public deems not important enough to fund collectively through the system of taxation. I struggle with this notion at the best of times, given the number of vital areas in which charities provide services that otherwise would not exist. But the NHS? Should we really be leaving our NHS to survive on charity?
The good captain inspired a nation and reminded us what was decent and good. You clap if you want to, but I believe he deserves far more than a round of applause. If we love him as much as we say we do let’s build and improve our NHS. He deserves nothing less. And Johnson can start it all off by giving the NHS the extra £350m he promised back in 2016.
