We are in an extremely dangerous situation I am afraid. We have a government that has been installed through deception, with absolute control, no scrutiny by Parliament and with sweeping powers. If one does not see a connection between HMG response to the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit and the last election, one must be blind.
I of course know that the Covid-19 pandemic is real and quite dangerous and have argued in the other thread that the government’s response has, and still is, incompetent, slow, too little too late, wishy washy, no clear directions, causing confusion rather than clarity. I am now beginning to think that these actions are deliberate.
I believe that since the referendum one of the main aims was to align UK with US in every way, politically, socially, economically and of course militarily. In many ways UK has been the cat’s paw of US foreign policy regarding Russia and has been mainly responsible for the new cold war, and deliberately so. During this period UK has refrained from antagonizing China and pretended to run a sort of policy of looking at China for a possible post Brexit trade deal. Whether this was real or whether it is actual a reflection of a real division within the Tory party, is difficult to determine. I believe that there is a very strong Atlanticist faction within the party. The most recent international political activity has been to start blaming china for the pandemic as was done by IDS today and echoing the rantings of Trump and Pompeo.
The new policy now is to try and reduce the panic. The chief medical officer has now picked the figure of 20,000 deaths as the projection of what will happen, and this has become the target of analysis. We were told on the BBC and Sky news by some analysts that this about 650 extra deaths due to Covid-19 as the others would have died anyway of flu or other cause and that this is the estimated excess mortality from the virus. But it is of course too early to make this assumption seeing that cases are still on the rise, and that any social distancing measure will take at least two to three weeks to show an effect.
I do hope that there is still a mechanism for retribution after the dust has settled and an enquiry would show how ill prepared the government was for this predicted scenario and has lost two months of planning. The parlous state of the NHS has come to light and the lack of a clear disaster contingency plan, or the lack of its implementation is a serious indictment of this government. But I am afraid it will not be the politicians who will be to blame.