It’s going to get worse before it gets better
From today “non essential” shops in England can open for business provided that in advance they’ve rendered themselves ‘Covid-secure’ or whatever it was that Boris said they should.
Obvious I cannot speak for any else’s view of how things are going for the UK at the moment, but mine is that we’re on the road from bad to worse.
My first item of evidence is that there’s clearly a large proportion of the general public who – whether they’re just too thick, bored, fed up, don’t care and/or (as some ‘wokey’ psychologists who like to air their views in the media would have it) are simply suffering from a degree of perfectly natural mental stress or strain – have taken the Government’s announcement of the easing of the lockdown as a signal to go instantly ‘straight back to normal’.
To be blunt, based up my own experience, most of the public in my neck of the woods did this about two and a half weeks ago.
My second is that the business/finance lobby has finally won the day and convinced the Government – or is it Dominic Cummings(?) – that it’s now so critically important that shops and businesses should open in order to get the economy going again (and avoid hundreds of thousands of businesses great and small going to the wall) that it no longer matters a jot how many more Coronavirus-related surges, second or third waves, localised breakouts or ‘excess deaths’ might now also occur as a result.
From now on these will be simply be filed under the heading “Sad, unfortunate, but necessary collateral damage”.
My third is that for once the hounds of our ‘liberal’ media elite seem to have got it right about two decades ago.
Our esteemed Prime Minister has revealed himself to be little more than an amateur B-list musical hall turn/bluffer – moderately amusing in small doses e.g. when deployed at small parties, church hall functions or on telly current affair quiz programmes – but utterly hopeless in the real world when the chips are down.
My fourth stems from the now-highly-fashionable Black Lives Matter ‘movement’ and here I must be careful because inevitably (whether justifiably or not) anything negative or contrary I say about it might and probably will be marked down as an example of a white person’s subconscious and/or uneducated and racist-tinged ‘head in the sand’ arrogance.
However.
Although I don’t doubt that many if not most BAME Brits have suffered – and occasionally still do – from the racist and patronising attitudes of some white people, it is also the case that over the centuries this country has accommodated a vast influx of people (not least refugees) from around the world of every possible race, nationality, religion and political persuasion that anyone could possibly identify.
Two further points. I may be kidding myself but I like to believe that the UK is a tolerant country that has never had a problem with people of talent, positive attitude, ambition, drive and capacity for hard work ‘rising to the top’ in any walk of life there is, whatever their background or origin.
Let’s face it, arguably any country seeking to go places would be shooting itself in the foot if it did any less.
And yet there’s also a degree to which anyone wanting to succeed and get to the top needs to identify, and fit in, with those he or she is seeking to ‘join’ if not emulate.
Why? Because it is also in the nature of human beings that – if we have the choice – we’d prefer to spend our leisure hours, our working day and our creative time with others of similar attitudes, values and interests to ourselves.
To my mind, even in these ‘woke’ and critical times, overall we haven’t been doing too badly.
Anyone who watches television in the UK will see plenty of BAME presenters and contributors – whether on news and current affairs output, game shows, popular mainstream programmes or drama and comedy/light entertainment offerings.
Granted they may or may not have had a hard time getting there, but the point is they’ve made it. They’ve ‘bought into’ British culture and succeeded in an industry that is notoriously hard to get into. Fair play to them.
My problem with some of the outriders who have joined the Black Lives Matter juggernaut – part of whose thrust seems to be that, if “equality of opportunity” really existed in this country (which they maintain it doesn’t) then every BAME man and woman born here would also automatically rise to such prominence – is that they’ve ignored some of the qualifying factors set out above.
Unless their argument is that BAME culture (in all its infinite varieties?) is somehow different and distinct from its British counterpart and yet deserves equal prominence in any event.
My reservation about this proposition is that, logically, it presumably effectively condemns all those excellent BAME presenters and contributors who’ve made it in British television/media (and thereby made good livings) over the years as little more than “Uncle Toms”.
