Well done to Bristol’s Mayor, the not very Marvellous Marvin Rees, for taking Bristol out of the COVID-19 Tier 1 and plonking us in Tier 1+, which doesn’t even exist. Something, as they say, had to be done to address the rapidly rising numbers of the coronavirus in our fair city. Here is the Mayor’s five point plan in full:
- The city will employ no less than eight COVID marshals as part of a compliance drive to ensure covid-safe behaviour in the area. Presumably, these marshals will be riding around on big horses, wearing stetsons and proudly displaying large tin badges with ‘Marshal’ written on them. Offenders will be shot.
- Doing some track and trace stuff given the mess Didi Harding’s £12 billion Serco are making of the national effort.
- Using data to provide messages on how to safely use public spaces.
- Er…
- That’s it.
I shouldn’t take the piss out of Mayor Rees because I think he is doing the best of a bad job. Moreover, given the mess the Conservative government nationally is making of dealing with the crisis, I can only imagine a Tory Mayor making an even bigger Horlicks of it.
I think he’s sincere, too. He knows what a disaster going into Tiers 2 and, inevitably, 3 would be to the Bristol economy, not to mention the city’s mental health. He’s doing what little he can to try to avoid the inevitable and I think he deserves no small credit for doing so, even if it’s probably doomed to failure.
The COVID marshals might have a limited effect in small parts of the city but come off it. Whizzing from here to there on their electric bikes – believe it or not I was joking about the horses – telling people to not stand next to each other outside the pubs, the bus stops and the taxi ranks: that’s bound to have a major effect on the rate of transmission. And when they’ve done, they can visit hundreds and thousands of flats to see just who is breaking the rule of six.
I understand why Mr Rees wants to do some local test and trace stuff because the government’s privatised system has been a disaster, but this is a well-meaning example of shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. No electric scooter will round that bugger up.
And ‘using data to provide messages on how to safely use public spaces’? The government, under Dominic Cummings, is one big data mine. Data is the be all and end all of the government that Cummings leads. If all the money Boris Johnson can squander on providing messages doesn’t work, I doubt that a few adverts in a paper no one reads or on radio stations that no one listens to, will make the slightest difference.
Mayor Rees is desperate, as well he might be, for a crisis that is none of his making. He’s a good guy, too, trying to save Bristol from an even worse fate. Sadly, it will all be in vain.
We all know, don’t we, where this is heading. The numbers of new cases are increasing, the death rate is doubling every 15 days and now over 1000 people a day are being admitted to hospital. This isn’t going to improve all on its own and Dominic Cummings will soon have to tell Boris Johnson to act. And we know what that will mean: a lockdown just like the one we had from March.
However, unlike in March people no longer have faith in the government. Dominic Cummings, the man who was closely involved in creating the rules for the first lockdown, as well as the ‘Stay at home’ messaging decided the rules didn’t apply to him. He could go on holiday to his second home in Durham and take his wife out for a jolly to Barnard Castle in Durham on the occasion of her birthday. (Alternatively, you can believe the story Cummings spun to the country, along with his 60 mile eyesight test to make sure he could see properly.) Even the most hardline Tory knows Cummings and Boris Johnson have failed disastrously to protect both the public and the economy. Put simply, people have had enough. Like Cummings, they will interpret the government rules to suit their own lives.
I can only think that the only reason Cummings and Johnson have not locked down yet is because Labour leader Keir Starmer followed scientific advice and said they should. But the science isn’t going away. It’s how many deaths the government think they can get away with that matters.
In the bleak midwinter, it will not only be the frosty wind that will moan. We all will be when Johnson is sent out before the cameras to tell the nation that Christmas for 2020 has been cancelled and we must all stay at home and eat Christmas dinner by way of Zoom.
The Bristol Mayor’s marshals will certainly be rushed off their feet, with the city being at Tier 3+, trying to establish who we are watching the Queen’s Speech with. The two words they will hear when knocking on people’s doors won’t be ‘Merry Christmas. In fact the second word will be ‘off’.
