What Price Victory?

It is 204 days since UK Prime Mafioso Boris Johnson announced a total lockdown in England. It is 258 days since Britain declared its first case.

2020 has been a difficult year.

We've seen restrictions gradually ease, before being tightened again. As politicans seek desperately to find a means of reducing the transmission of the disease without backtracking on an entire summer of declaring schools safe and then discovering they weren't, we're left wondering what's next? An entire winter of isolation? Ever-tightened restrictions and reduced freedoms?

We're stuck with an enormous elephant in the room. England reopened successfully for two months before an explosion in Covid cases. It reopened pubs, bars, restaurants, gyms, hairdresses, tattoo studios, casinos... all without a dramatic increase in cases. Schools and universities returned, and suddenly everything went to sh*t.

Cue media channels everywhere embarking on their favoured trope of 'blame the millenial', however it isn't the fault of pupils that they were told to go back to school. Nor the fault of the university student that they were advised to return to campus. Woe betide universities have to discount their extortionate fees to reflect the savings delivered in distance learning.

So as everything has collapsed in a matter of weeks, and it becomes steadily more clear that the government hasn't got the slightest clue what it's doing (apart from siphoning off £3 billion of missing public money off to their mates in return for 3 aprons and a facemask), I find myself left experiencing a good deal of schadenfreuede. It was so clear that schools and universities were potentially going to drive transmissions through the roof. In fairness to the government, they couldn't have been sure that it would, so attempting to restore them wasn't in itself an horrific concept. However, instead of blithering on for months about the futures of our children – which turned out to be being caged inside university accomodation without adequate food and supplies – they could have made a contingency plan. They could have put measures in place to row back on university resumption, or come up with some kind of plan to reduce or rotate attendance at schools.

Instead, they did nothing other than blast out meaningless rhetoric to their nostalgic Brexiteer base. "Do your patriotic duty – eat out to fight Germans, and go to the pub - it's what Vera and the Queen want you to do!" All while quietly starting construction on enormous lorry parks in Kent in the hope that no one notices the realities of Brexit starting to bear fruit.

The government are running out of places to hide. They botched Test and Trace by outsourcing it to their underqualified mates. By the way, when I say underqualified, I mean that in the same sense that Rolf Harris is underqualified to own a playschool, or in the sense that Boris Johnson is underqualified to deliver a sermon in church on the sanctity of the marriage; the two things should never meet.

So, they botched Test and Trace. They botched the long-awaited NHS app. They botched exam results. They've botched the lockdown. They've botched the return to school. They botched all public goodwill with lockdown compliance by supporting Dominic Cummings on his long-distance eye test. They're in the process of botching Brexit still further by failing to negotiate a deal, and by closing sectors like leisure where no statistical evidence exists to support their decision. They are – without par, in my opinion – the most incompetent British administration in history.

nterestingly of course, they're still neck-and-neck with Labour in the polls. I suspect until Brexit really happens, and lorries are tailed back from Kent to Milton Keynes and Dave from Stoke realises he can't travel as easily to Ibiza post-Covid, they'll still enjoy a consistently strong electoral base of around 35% minimum.

So the unfortunate truth is, we've got a lot of lies and incompetence still to be revealed and unfold. Until they've shut everything except schools and universities and then have to admit they were completely wrong this summer, cases won't come down in the way they did in June/July. Until Brexit has gone through and peoples lives are made demonstrably worse, they'll continue to enjoy support.

The only – and I mean only – hope, is that at some point, the dust will begin to settle and these ill-qualified, incompetent charlatans will be exposed for what they truly are. Of course, they are in the process of atttempting to double down on their control of the press through the BBC and other sources, in an attempt to delay or prevent this from happening, but let's assume we don't go full fascist by 2024.

In the mean time, we sit back and attempt to follow instructions that aren't working (see cases in areas in lockdown increasing five-fold), led by evidence that doesn't exist (see gyms closing) or they won't share, delivered in a manner that doesn't make sense (see any government announcement since August).

When all is said and done, what will remain? Suicide rates amongst men have hit an all-time high. Unemployment is rising fast. Shop after shop and restaurant after restaurant are shutting down for good. Try rebuilding all of that next year, when we've left the European Union and are gorging ourselves on E. Coli riddled American chicken (which the government is doing its best to allow in through the backdoor). Oh, and in case you missed it, that whole Brexit thing? If companies suffer losses and hardship? It's because they didn't prepare well enough, according to the government. The same government who can't tell us – or businesses – what Brexit looks like in three months time, despite having four years now to put together a plan.

Happy 2020!