You can imagine my disappointment when I discovered that Bristol had been placed in Tier 2 of the government’s failing Tier system. Where I live, in South Gloucestershire, we are still in Tier 3. This means that Bristolians can go on a pub crawl as long as they have a full meal in each pub along the way (I assume excess food keeps the virus at bay?) whereas in South Glos pubs remain closed. The main disappointment for me was not that pubs can reopen as long as they pretend to be restaurants, but that I had already half-written a blog called Welcome to the Hotel California.
Rather wittily, I feel, I had drawn the analogy between the fictional hotel imagined by the popular beat combo outfit, the Eagles, and Tier 3 where “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.” Matt Hancock’s decision to reposition Bristol rather put the kybosh on that one.
The timing rather astounds me. Bristol’s pubs will reopen tomorrow (Saturday) on what is likely to be the busiest shopping day of the year. So as well as gathering in crowded, airless shops, the good people of Bristol will be invited to go into crowded, airless pubs. At a time when COVID hospitalisations at Southmead Hospital are on the rise, as is the infection rate across England, I am at a loss to understand this. Because, it seems to me, that England is going in a different direction from the rest of the UK.
Take Northern Ireland, for example. From Boxing Day, they are going into a hard six week lockdown where everything except essential shops will close. Wales and Scotland are adopting far tougher restrictions than we are in England. Why on earth are we in England not doing the same thing? I have one simple explanation for this: Boris Johnson.
At every single stage, Johnson has been behind the curve. Late in locking down in March, leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths, opening everything up in the summer when the virus was still at loose, refusing a short, sharp shock lockdown in September leading to a longer lockdown later on and now telling us that he won’t ‘cancel Christmas’ but at the same time telling us to cancel Christmas. Johnson promised that the virus ‘would be wrestled to the ground’ in 12 weeks, that things would be normal again by the summer and of course by Christmas. Why does anyone believe a single word that awful man says?
My prediction is this: the country will enjoy a relatively normal Christmas and by January, maybe before, England will be in a full national lockdown all over again, as infections rise and hospitals get overrun. I so hope I am wrong but somehow I doubt I will be. This is a government, led by a prime minister, that makes up policy as it goes along. There is no vision, no grand design. And many people are going to get very ill and, sadly, die because of its sheer incompetence.
And maybe I was right about the Hotel California after all: you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
