We sacrificed and socially distanced and masked and cancelled and stayed away and didn't see friends and family and gave up non-essential shopping and forewent events and films and concerts and trips, and so much more.
Boris Johnson will bin all that effort instantly on 19 July.
See, it doesn't matter how well we behaved, how many hardships we endured, how many sacrifices we made, when the new and improved strategy is "let the virus fall where it will". Because if Boris Johnson's wild eyes-shut bet is wrong, millions will catch it and many will die.
And nobody - not even the Tories - is pretending the situation is under control.
Far from it, in fact. They fully admit that cases could climb to 50,000 a day, even 100,000 a day - but that's ok because, well, it has to be ok. No logic, just empty circularity.
July 19 is the literal embodiment of "I can't be bothered any more" for Boris Johnson. At that point, the pandemic becomes our problem not his. And if he has to intervene again, it will be because our common sense wasn't sensible enough i.e. it will all be our fault.
And even if the vaccine keeps deaths low - What's "acceptable"? No government minister will ever say - the spectre of long covid isn't going away.
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More hilarious Brexit verbal contortions in the Express...
Compare the headline - which a casual glance might suggest was about the UK - and the article itself, which is about how Brexit has benefitted IRELAND hugely (while hurting the UK).
Strange sort of "win".
Why do they write such misleading headlines?
Because they know many (most) of their website visitors won't read the article, but they'll see the capsule summary embedded in the sidebar on other pages.
And that looks like this... Propaganda achievement unlocked!
Here's another example.
Grossly misleading headline? Check.
Article that's the exact opposite of the headline? Check.
An average of 11 people died with COVID-19 every HOUR since Boris Johnson warned us on 12 March 2020 that "many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time".
Probably the most accurate statement ever made by a political leader.
11 people. Per hour.
That's a coach crash every 4 hours. An Iraq war every 16 hours. A plane crash every day. A Titanic sinking every 6 days.
And now he's giving up. Throwing every last scrap of mitigation in the bin, and betting everything on the vaccine.
It's like someone heading for Vegas and staking the deeds to their house on "00" on the roulette wheel.
The gamble *might* come off. But almost certainly we lose.
The problem with having fascists in power is that you have to gain power in order to remove them.
In the meantime, they have the full apparatus of state available to them to cement their own grip on power, and make a future defeat less and less likely.
That's why we have things coming up like...
- Draconian anti-protest laws (1+ person protests punishable by a year in jail or 10 years for defacing a statue)
- Mass voter suppression (voter IDs likely to disenfranchise over a million people)
- Sidelining of parliamentary scrutiny
- Boundary changes that favour the Tories
- Possible neutering of the Electoral Commission
- New curbs on online freedom, including (if the idiots have their way) removal of end-to-end encryption. Sure, that will destroy ecommerce and banking, but it will allow wiretapping, so...
What happens a few months down the road if they seek to extend the definition of "protest" to include spoken (TV, radio) and written (newspapers, magazines, books) dissent?
Again under the same juicy conditions that it's the Home Sec who decides...
Takes 3-4 weeks for coronavirus cases to translate into deaths.
3-4 weeks ago, we were around 5,000 to 6,000 new cases a day. Now we're at 27,000.
Do the maths.
And yet, there is a deceit playing out every day in the pages of the tabloids, aided and abetted by willing politicians: the pretense that today's death rate is somehow reflective of today's new caseload.
The pandemic is all about gazing in the rearview mirror. Always has been.
Here's an example from the front page of the Daily Mail website right now...
It actually commits two deceits in one, because it also doesn't account for the fact that the number of deaths reported ALWAYS falls at the weekend. (We're at 15 today, up from 11 this day last week.)