Back to normal and the land of no return
Three days into the UK Government’s supposed “pathway back to normality” from the Christmas 2020 Covid pandemic lockdown – and with its intended 21st June “final escape” now seemingly under threat from the Indian variant of the virus currently causing concentrated outbreaks in the North-West etc. and ministers to queue up on the airwaves to urge us all to remain Covid-wary – I’m beginning to get a bit concerned, or is it suspicious, about what’s actually going on.
After all the confusions of last year – not least the Government allegedly religiously “following the science” throughout and yet also apparently executing weekly extravagant and contradictory U-turns in its strategy & tactics as to how it was dealing with developments (and then forcing us all to respond to them) and the hospitality, arts & entertainment, leisure and airline industries beginning to bore us all with their incessant squeals of “Let us resume business all we’re all going to go permanently to hell in a hand-cart!” from the rooftops – it seems to me that recently everything has changed … but not very much.
I’m not here going down the route of claiming that Boris is a travesty of a Premier, a posh “entitled” idiot who is completely disorganised and out of his depth.
Or indeed that he’s one of those scary individuals who went into politics desperately wanting not only to become Prime Minister, without really knowing why or having the attributes required of it, but also – and arguably far worse – popular as well.
Rather just to mention that, for me, it seems as if – after effectively a year under the yoke of lockdowns, and with the public getting fed up and restless – the Government has decided that it cannot hold back any longer on “taking off the brakes and exiting lockdown-land” despite being simultaneously (and unhelpfully) being told forcibly “by the science” that the Indian variant of the virus and its complications make this decidedly unwise and dangerous.
Not to mince my words about it, if the advent of the Indian variant and its likely inevitable consequences had occurred at any time between April and November 2020 there is no way that the Government would have embarked upon “gradually emergence from lockdown” strategy, with or without its attendant warnings that we must all remain vigilant and that the previously-announced “key date” stages would be subject to review and ultimately depend upon how things were going, when it did.
Nevertheless, towards the back end of last year the Government – despite still feeling that ironically (and unfairly) there’s a large degree of “whatever it does is going to be wrong” (or at least viewed as such by the pundits, scientists and ultimately the public) – decided that early 2021 was the right moment to begin the process of leaving lockdown and that, to delay it any longer, would be to risk both permanent damage to the UK economy and a gradual widespread disrespect for Covid restrictions/regulations if not eventually a breakdown of law and order.
Talking about a “no win” situation, or being “between a rock and a hard place” is easy … but that’s exactly where the Government thought it seemed to be at the time … and who knows, maybe they were right.
All that registered, it still feels to me as if the Government is like a cowpoke leaving the starter gate enclosure for the rodeo arena on board a bucking bronco – or possibly an Arabic character in a pantomime who has just let the genie out of the bottle – and at the moment nobody has the slightest idea where we’re all going from here.
One thing we can be sure of, however.
Wherever it is – in six to twelve months’ time – filled all the “benefits of hindsight”, every man (or woman) jack of us from politician, pundit and scientist … to old git sitting nursing a pint on the corner of the local pub lounge bar … will be holding forth upon how our masters got it wrong.
