Six-month extension to restrictions is draconian

ONE year ago, the chaotic, incompetent, corrupt, uncaring and unconscionable Conservative and Unionist Party commenced one of the most disastrous series of responses to a health emergency of any government across the world.

And now, three months after the PM took to the television and lied to us once more about the road to freedom being the vaccination of those at most risk, last week he and our local MP signed all of us up to another six months of draconian restrictions.

I lived in Moscow during the end of the fall of the Soviet Union.

I remember meeting Russians whose faces were etched with decades of living under the control of faceless party members.

Rules were created and enforced for the good of the people, but in reality they were for the good of those who held high office.

To keep the people in check they were kept in fear of the unknown enemy. I spoke to many who asked me why we in the UK wanted to destroy them with our nuclear weapons.

I was asked so many times to sell my shoes in meetings, the state lying that westerners were given nice clothes and shoes to wear during visits, but lived in the same soulless grey world when we left.

We pretended to have freedom to make them feel downtrodden, but our freedom was just a facade.

I didn’t much like the Soviet government, but I did learn to love the Russian people.

They were fed lies and deceits but they were warm and generous to their visiting enemy.

But 22 years later, and as our local MP, told once again by the party machine to keep her constituents under lock and key, the fear of new variants being the latest excuse for strict controls, I now have more respect for the honesty in the way the Soviet Union treated their citizens than I do for the high-handed and contemptuous way Laura Farris treats her constituents.

Farris has shown she is no more than a Tory apparatchik.

So, as we start another six months under Laura’s state control, she may want to reflect on the last 12 months, and start to consider how she will respond to future public enquiries. Because in her vote last week to support the extension of lockdown regulations Laura has now given her tacit support to the next six months of damage to this country when it needn’t have had to continue.

Every additional life lost to cancer, business destroyed, children’s futures damaged, self-harm victim, home broken, must be counted and laid firmly at her door.

But, like the Soviet Union this corrupt Tory regime will crumble.

Laura, like Johnson and Hancock, has turned a blind eye to the catastrophic results of their decisions.

They will claim they focussed on responding to Covid and couldn’t quantify the harms of their policies. But the Russians have a saying:

“There is no shame in not knowing, the shame lies in not finding out.” Laura may have pushed that enquiry back another six months, but it will come, and I for one will raise a glass of vodka and say ‘Nostrovia’.

CHRIS GABRIEL

Bartlemy Road

Newbury