All change for Christmas!
Yesterday – no doubt like many who, bored with their routine of taking afternoon exercise, have taken to having afternoon naps instead and thereby regained the half stone that they’d previously lost – I tuned my radio to listen to the Prime Minister’s early evening press conference on the Government’s plans for what happens after this second national lockdown ends on 2nd December.
I’m afraid that after about ten minutes of Boris’s ebullient “overgrown public school prefect addressing the Vth Form” routine I’d had enough and moved on to other things, figuring that watching the BBC1’s Six O’Clock News would be an infinitely more effective route to an understanding of what was proposed and how it would work.
It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that UK has reached a position in this Covid-19 crisis where everything’s become a bit of a bugger’s muddle.
At one and the same time we’ve got one lot of scientists and medics demanding that ‘defeating the virus’ is the priority – and another group virtually saying quite the opposite, or is it that, whilst the strategy may indeed be correct, the tactics are completely wrong(?) – I’m not quite sure.
Meanwhile all the traditional cornerstones and foundations of how we live life have been either parked or challenged.
Near the outset of it all we were told to work from home if we possibly could – then later we were encouraged to go back to work but by then nobody was bothering because by then we’d either begun to enjoy working from home and used to not commuting and/or decided that the trains and buses were too dangerous to risk … and/or indeed discovered that being furloughed on 80% of salary was actually a preferable existence to working anyway.
At the outset, of course, all financial constraints were abandoned as Government set about throwing everything it had in its support of the NHS’s response to the pandemic: “Whatever it takes” was the watchword.
It then soon became a case of balancing the irreconcilable – viz. “It doesn’t matter what decision you make because – to be frank – in this situation there’s no de facto right or wrong answer and, as night follows day, whatever decision you take will be criticised anyway. Ultimately, from time to time, it is sometimes necessary in human affairs that a decision has to be made: what that decision happens to be becomes a secondary consideration”.
It seems to me this Tory Government has turned the principle into an art form.
