Boris’s great idea? Burn the house down... t wice
THE Prime Minister is like a man who finds a wasps’ nest in his house – and burns the house down to get rid of it. The wasps, having more sense than him, flew off as soon as they felt the heat. But the house is gone. Now he stands by the smouldering ruins, blaming everyone but himself for this futile catastrophe.
I suspect that some of the things he said on Tuesday night will bring him down, especially the outrageous threat to use troops. If we have been as well-behaved as he pretends to believe, how can such things be justified?
His actions make nonsense of his words. It was the same when he said: ‘I am deeply, spiritually reluctant to make any of these impositions, or infringe anyone’s freedom.’ No he is not. If he was, he would
NOW that the National Trust appears to have become a Trotskyist organisation, mainly concerned with railing against the sins of the past, I have a suggestion: As the NT has taken over the franchise for spreading Leftist propaganda, I am thinking of setting up a new body called the Workers’ Revolutionary Front, which will buy up beautiful stately homes, and encourage visitors to come and see them, offering tea and slices of walnut cake in relaxed, chintzy surroundings. Then the NT can get on with the revolution in peace. have listened to the many brilliant experts whose wise counsel he has ignored from the start, such as Sunetra Gupta, John Lee and Carl Heneghan. They would have told him that the wild prophecies of Imperial College, and the equally wild projections offered on Monday by Messrs Vallance and Whitty, Undertakers to the Nation, were not necessarily right. Johnson was never compelled to strangle the economy and turn daily life into a crime. He chose to do it.
All he can now suggest is doing it again, on the basis of figures so dubious and stretched that sensible people gasp to see them. Isn’t there a saying about doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result?
Well, I think that did it. Can you hear the faint but definite sound of minds changing? The Prime Minister’s wild arm-waving appearance on Tuesday night has at last alerted many previously complacent people to the danger we are in. The poor man had so plainly taken leave of reality that even his most loyal supporters now wonder if this can go on. After long slow weeks of coaxing the nation back to work, he told everyone to go home again.
A large part of the crazy, unenforceable tangle of new regulations seemed to be based on the belief that Covid spreads only when you are standing up. Millions of eyes opened to the discovery some of us made long ago – that anti-social distancing rules are not based on serious research, but on random guesswork and a desire to frighten us all into doing anything they tell us.
ATER spending piles of funny money bribing the nation to go out to restaurants, he slammed new and dispiriting restrictions on them. Business owners – who had assumed till now that he must know what he was doing – finally broke cover to say these new rules would destroy jobs. Actually they have already done so. The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, chose on Thursday to avoid any direct reference to the true economic state of the country. It is too frightening, and he knows it.
When he eventually does produce a Budget, it will be one of the most miserable and stringent anyone has ever seen. Instead he found a clever way of voicing his despair with the direction of the Government.
The words ‘We must learn to live without fear’ demand a complete U- turn from a Cabinet that has distilled power out of fear for six disastrous months – and used that power to smash up the wealth of centuries. Has there ever before been in this country a government that destroyed so many livelihoods on purpose? People wrongly think the phrase ‘herd immunity’ sounds cruel (It is not. It has been used for decades, by vaccination experts. I suggest ‘national immunity’ as a substitute). But the months of furlough have been far crueller, keeping up the pretence that dead jobs can be brought to life again.
The reckoning is coming, far too late, but at least it is coming. Let us hope it comes quickly. The faster this absurd Maoist experiment is brought to an end, the more survivors there will be.