Mad World

Even people who have broadly supported the government’s lockdown policies - and, incredibly, there appear to be many, if opinion polls are to be believed - are surely not blind to the various kinks in those policies that have been at best misguided and at worst, truly scandalous. Here I list some of Boris Johnson’s most catastrophic missteps in a year full of them. Care homes In a perverse attempt to ‘protect the NHS’, thousands of Covid patients were shunted out of hospitals into care homes , without tests, where they infected others which led to a huge proportion of Covid deaths. (Interestingly, many countries and US states, including Sweden and New York, made the same mistake.) Nightingale hospitals ‘Fever hospitals’ would have been one of many infinitely preferable ideas to lockdowns, which bowdlerise the economy and atomise society  in dangerous ways, and the quick construction of discrete health centres gave rise to the hope that this would happen. But the eight of t...

In my previous post on this blog on 31 December I expressed hope that it would be the last of my 42 articles on the ruination caused by lockdowns as a response to coronavirus. I hoped that the vaccine roll-out would shortly lead to the resumption of some sort of normal life, and that the government would gradually begin to pull back from its draconian, stifling measures. Not for the first time in the past year I was to be disappointed. This repugnant administration has used vaccines to double down on its position, to become ever crueller, ever more thoughtless, ever more totalitarian than before. This godforsaken prime minister has presided over the most fascistic, inhuman policies ever enacted by a British government. Were these to happen in wartime would be bad enough; that they are happening in peace time is unforgivable . For what? A virus. A nasty virus, to be sure. But whereas smallpox has a mortality rate of 30% and ebola has a mortality rate of 50%, this virus has a mortality...