It’s time to shout

YOU can stick your minute’s silence and endless lockdown anniversary TV coverage where a test swab don’t reach.

What exactly is the point of all the ifs, buts and maybes? What we need now is will do, can do and definitely.

In a nation where mental health issues are in danger of crushing even the most optimistic, retrospective doom and gloom is the last thing any of us should be force-fed.

Especially at this time of year when nature is bursting with new life, the days are longer and the air tingles with anticipation.

Or it should do. But we need our “leaders” to do the one thing they have never properly done. And that’s give us hope.

Proper hope. Not stupid metaphors about trains and tunnels, football matches and goals.

And especially not anything to do with waves and “washing up on our shores” as Bozo did this week.

Muttering darkly about the state of Europe and how we’re “not safe” then, oh deep joy, extending the emergency Covid laws so they can lock us up whenever they feel like it again.

I know clowns can be scary but this lot make Pennywise from Stephen King’s It look as terrifying as an Easter chick.

On what level of madness/ uselessness (delete as appropriate, though it’s probably both) did someone decide that the best way to get the UK through a pandemic was to terrify, bully and make hugging your granny a criminal offence?

Even now, with death rates, hospitalisations and infections all falling and the vaccine programme proving beyond successful, we’re threatened with huge fines for trying to leave the country “without good reason” and the poor sods who work in care homes told they

HAVE to be vaccinated. And accept without even flinching. What have we become? Might be melodramatic to compare us with North Korea but the ease with which we’ve been terrified into handing over basic freedoms is deeply worrying.

The trouble with Bozo’s roadmap is that it doesn’t have an end, does it? It’s the road to hell. Even when the unholy trinity of the PM, Hancock and Whitty have good news they always couch it with a huge “but”.

Perish the thought that any of them are actually getting off on this perverse sense of power over a cowering public. Research from all over the world has proven that vaccines work. So why are we still being sold the message that face masks and social distancing will be with us forever? Do they have any idea what this is doing to people already close to the edge?

The countries that have managed the pandemic well have done so by working with their populations with wellthought-out, well-executed strategies. They offered a supportive democracy, not a draconian dictatorship.

The good, hardworking and mostly law-abiding people of the UK have been turned into an exhausted, petrified population who have simply had enough.

And we all know what rats backed into a corner do.

Of course we will always remember those who have lost their lives to Covid. But I am not marking the anniversary of something when millions more will continue to be killed by cancer, depression and poverty for decades to come. Especially as yesterday’s minute’s silence and light shining for “unity” have been instigated by politicians and scientists who have spent a year isolating us.

Silence? No, we should be shouting. Loudly. this we