I’ve just had one of those WTF moments. Skipping through twitter, which in my case is broadly speaking little more than an echo chamber for people who have similar views to me, I come across a tweet from Sky News in which Damien Green MP (who he?) told an interviewer that discussions on the next phase of the fight against Covid-19 should not be revealed by government for fear of confusing the public (my italics). Not just WTF but WTAF! Do these politicians think we are all thick?
Its true that some booners have bought into the absolute lie that 5G either causes or increases the spread of Covid-19 and in some instances, phone masts have been set alight, but most of us are adult enough to understand a simple government strategy. I’m more concerned that the government doesn’t have one.
Not revealing government policy hasn’t worked all that well to date, has it? It has only been due to the efforts of some, not all, journalists that the government’s serial mishandling of the pandemic has become apparent. At every stage, Boris Johnson and his ministers have been a step behind events, in some instances more than one step. At first deciding to go for herd immunity until it was realised that in the region of 500k people might die and then backtracking when the virus was on the march. Then the failures of PPE and the shambles over testing. Secrecy has been a disaster.
Instead of hiding discussions from the public, Johnson and his ministers should be involving us. And anyway, how hard can it be to tell us what they have in mind? Given that we elected them, they have a democratic duty to keep us in the loop. It is our lives, our jobs, our very futures at stake.
None of this stuff is going to be easy, not least because this is a government of the untalented, led by a chat show host and after dinner speaker who specialises in a posh boy buffoon act and outright lying to cover up his many deficiencies. But that’s Johnson’s problem, not ours.
We find out today that Johnson’s chief political advisor Dominic Cummings, to all intents and purposes the unelected man who is running the country, has been sitting on independent the Science Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), along with another of Johnson’s political allies, and Vote Leave data analyst Ben Warner. I beg your pardon? Independent? Not with Cummings around, it isn’t? Now I am very concerned about what sort of science the government has been following when the country’s most effective political spin doctor is in on the decision-making.
I’m probably not the best person to have an opinion on Green’s comments because, even with the benefit of a modest back garden and somewhere to walk during the day, I’m getting stir crazy at the prospect of this semi-lockdown going on forever. I’m pretty well at the stage where I need to know what the future holds, how the government intends to restart the country and when they are likely to restart it. Following Prof Chris Whitty’s carefully timed interjection at a press conference last week that the lockdown could last another year, I want, I need, to have some idea of what the future will look like.
Knowing what comes next will not confuse the public. If presented correctly it could encourage us to work even harder to bring us closer to the day life can assume some semblance of normality. Even the hope would be enough for me now.
