Lets get one thing straight that never gets said in the mainstream media, whether we are talking about the BBC, Channel 4 News, the Guardian or Times.
It may be a statement of the bleeding obvious – but it is never made explicit. All the problems we now face in the UK from our Westminster politics have been utterly predictable, totally unnecessary and devastating in their avoidable consequences.
These consequences include
the disastrous financial cost of so-called Brexit (which is still far from achieved and from which daily the government back pedals with ‘special arrangements’ to compensate for the mess, from trying to hire EU lorry drivers to recruiting overseas care workers to cope with the care crisis
the unbelievable cost of Covid19 in the UK, with 150,000 plus dead; a million with the damaging effect of long Covid and absolutely no end in sight for the pandemic with new variants predictably on the horizon.
and so on and so on. We have never had it so bad with no end in sight.
The simple single cause is the present government’s and our Prime Minister’s utter commitment to the deadly, completely failed and hopeless philosophy of neoliberalism – or put simply extreme reliance on the private market to deliver success and the preaching of the small state with government bad mouthed endlessly as wasteful and defective.
That’s the real reason our PM has long refused to impose the kind of restriction on travel in and out of the UK and other preventive measures which would have kept us safe as an island nation.
that is why he has turned to useless friends to make them rich by privatising the response to Covid rather than doing all the tried and tested things that limit a pandemic.
and that’s why the only thing that has worked successfully and meant things are not even worse are the scientists and clinicians who have developed vaccine and the old style state NHS way in which it has effectively been rolled out.
nothing here is an accident. As with the appalling Grenfell Tower fire which killed so many, where the local tory council did not believe in government intervention and didn’t have the infrastructure to prevent or deal properly with a disaster. So now where we have never sorted out rules for non engagement, test and trace and even face masks.
so Mr Johnson hates the idea of imposing public health restrictions on people only ever does it far too late and when he feels he may avoid the most damaging condemnation of his neoliberal MPs and fellow moneymakers who have been profiting from it all so he can stay in power.
So the future at the start of 2022 is simple. Viruses adapt; this one has been doing so; if we are really unlucky it will develop even worse and we won’t catch up with it. Already numbers have mounted appallingly of those infected and we have to be grateful with so many boosted and the symptoms not being very bad, that the cost isn’t appalling.
for two years now we have dithered guided by the barmy politics of neoliberalism which only ever do the richest and most powerful any good.
it is now time to recognised that this is what’s keeping us on a disastrous track and that it is essential to change course – politically and electorally – if possible
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