Don’t be fooled by the sunshine – there are only dark days ahead

IHAVE come to hate this beautiful weather, the loveliest spring for 50 years. I long to wake up to a filthy morning of dirty grey skies and miserable rain, like the one Tennyson described when he wrote ‘ghastly, thro’ the drizzling rain, on the bald street, breaks the blank day’.

This is because I think the British people are lost in an unreal, sunshiny dreamtime of delusion, seeing the current crisis as a sort of holiday after which they can all amble off back to the world they once knew, a world that died for ever some time ago.

I am reminded of John Wyndham’s terrifying science fiction novel The Day Of The Triffids, in which everyone is captivated by an amazing, spectacular meteor shower – and all those who watch it late into the night, oohing and aahing with delight, wake up the next morning permanently blind.

Except, in this case, we will all be permanently less free and permanently poorer. And that will, of course, include the sacred NHS, which the nation love-bombs every Thursday night but which is already so threadbare that it cannot properly equip its doctors and nurses. Just wait and see how much worse this gets in the coming era of post-shutdown austerity.

Not to mention all the various zealots and fanatics who already see this new world as an opportunity to impose their various dogmas and fads on us.

I won’t dwell yet again on the damage the Government has already done, and which deepens every day. I only say that without serious and angry opposition, this will only get worse.

This clueless Cabinet is motivated only by fear. People who strove all their lives for office now have no idea what to do with the powers they thought they wanted, and are terrified of the responsibilities that came with them.

They do not understand what they are doing and are not in charge of their own destiny. And until they are afraid of the wrath of the voters, or perhaps of the courts, they will continue to hide in their bunker, biting their nails and wondering how to get out of the mess they panicked themselves into a month ago. They cannot admit they gravely overestimated the danger of the virus, and gravely underestimated the damage they would do to the economy.

Please write now to your MPs, reminding them that they were elected to put your case to the Government, not the other way round.

TELL them that this has gone on long enough and is now bound to cost more lives than it saves, as well as all the other damage. And if you get a reply that has obviously been written by a machine, write again.

This will at least keep within the bounds of constitution and law. For, if something does not give soon, I very much fear that millions will simply cease to obey rules which no longer make sense.

Without a clear hope of release from house arrest and forced idleness, many people will despair. And it will be grim for us all if that happens.