With the media froth about DC’s ‘revelations’ concerning his former boss and who paid for the wallpaper at the Downing street flat – you’d think Boris Johnson never cheated, lied, misled his way into that property with the latest woman to add to his random offspring (and no – in case you are losing count –not the one he was shagging in the then family home who later received lucrative government grants).
Yes, sleaze is something that resonates when talking about the Tory party but I do not understand why the possibility of dodgy décor grabs the nation/opposition’s attention when thousands of unnecessary deaths in an entirely careless approach to a pandemic and the accompanying profiteering did not. You’d be forgiven for thinking there aren’t multiple ongoing investigations into this government’s grubby behaviour. There are half a dozen. Do a significant number of Brits secretly have wallpaper fetishes?
After the first wave of the pandemic hit – the one
that really tested the metal of each country in terms of reaction and resources
and simply caring about its population, the UK had the highest excess mortality
rate in Europe barring only Bulgaria. And Bulgaria is in no way on a par with
the UK in terms of resources and infrastructure.
Excess mortality is the most accurate measure of
success or failure as it shows rates of death over and above what could
normally be expected. This is hugely important because this government has
tried to fiddle the figures by, for example, only attributing covid deaths
where the patient died within 28 days of diagnosis.
Check out the British Medical Journal BMJ
The Tory Broadcasting Company was breathlessly recounting
gossip about whether Johnson said or didn’t say he’d ‘let the bodies pile up’
rather than go into another lockdown. Why is what he may or may not have said
news worthy when he did actually LET THE BODIES PILE UP?
As the summer gave some respite we moved into a
strange autumn. Boris Johnson more often flanked himself with grown-ups from
the world of science – Vallance and Whitty – though he still refused to follow their
advice in a timely fashion.
I highlight this single issue of excessively high
excess mortality because it’s easy to get lost in the fug of stats and endless
government briefings – and that is partly the point of them. We segued neatly
from deaths to infections and for many – odd as it seems to me – vast numbers
of unnecessary deaths at the start of the pandemic evaporated as yesterday’s
news as if Johnson was caught dropping litter in a nice park. Remembering how
Gordon Brown was hounded and – in many ways had his political career ended -
when he was caught on mic calling a bigoted woman a bigot – I do begin to
wonder if we passed through some warped space time continuum after the Tories
came to power over a decade ago.
Add to this the third rate reporting - somewhere below what Kate wore to the shops or some bollocks on
the shite TBC shovelled down to the plebs – about the economy and you begin to
wonder just what deal Johnson did with the devil. As per my doodle of two posts
ago – we step blinking out of the latest sort-of lockdown into the glare of
economic ruin of a truly terrible Brexit
deal but all anyone can talk about is can they go on holiday or to the pub?
What I do not understand – and this relates, I
supposed, to the previous post concerning The Deference Disease – is why… WHY after over 40 years of almost unbroken
rule by Tory and/or public schoolboy disaster-bots, do the working class of
Britain – and especially England – keep voting for self-harm. It’s as if
someone who regularly takes a punishment beating went out once every few years
to buy the thug dishing it out – a new baseball bat…
In a world where attention spans are short and distractions are legion, and Johnson seems to be portrayed as the guy who not only invented the vaccine but personally jabbed into everyone’s arms and then saved football, it’s hard to remember important stuff. But we do not need Dominic Cummings to tell us that Johnson is a lying lowlife.
Who paid for the décor in
Downing Street is a nothing news item. The corruption and profiteering of
Johnson and all the Tory pals will seem as nothing in the Brexit mess that is to come.
So, let’s all grow up and start talking about the stuff that matters – like how
Britain is going to function economically now that literally all the family
silver is sold off and we’ve pissed off our main and nearest trading partners.
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