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The UK government has adopted a passive but sinister Covid-19 strategy, pushing Britain towards a very dark place.
To hide the sins of hard-right wing ideologues and to protect their accumulation advantages, sections of the population have been deemed expendable: not merely in PR spin but in horrific reality.
Loose Tory chatter about ‘herd immunity’ has been replaced with media style sheets that downplay the extent and significance of deaths FROM Covid-19. True to form the UK press has obediently applied them.
I put ‘from’ in capital letters to highlight the media implication that few are dying FROM the corona virus – just dying WITH the virus present. This trick isn’t limited to the sick and elderly: the overwhelming majority of ‘coverage’ has abruptly substituted FROM for WITH.
Alongside this sly re-framing sit two more: the oft touted ‘underlying health conditions’ and median age figures.
Why these juxtapositions? Sky News explained in the breezy tones of Nazi propaganda that the government’s estimate of 20,000 deaths (an outcome already pre-heated as a triumph) should be approached thus:
“One of the governments key advisers hazarded a guess this week…”
so an unnamed adviser, with hidden expertise and credentials says [see picture above]
“…that between a half and two-thirds of those dying would probably have done so soon anyway”
‘probably’ is a dreadfully imprecise word to bet your family and your life on; not that this concerns Sky News and they explain why:
“do the maths and deduct those from the predicted deaths“
While the establishment can hide infections behind a lack of testing – the dead are conspicous.
The solution is to tout statistical models and a depraved utilitarianism; thus Covid-19 is downplayed and individual lives grotesquely aggregated as irrelevant.
The implications are eugenicist. By Tory reckoning, the deaths of sick, and old people can be shrugged off .
This is nothing new (as we explained here)
The government doesn’t count Covid-19 deaths outside of hospitals for reasons all too apparent.
What a brave new moral world! If a gunman shoots up a care home in the next few weeks, the loss of life and the injustice of murder are moot: the dead probably had underlying health conditions, a median age of 77 and would probably have died soon anyway.
Sky News isn’t too bothered about people dying alone in ICU wards, in pain and estranged from their families – then dispatched at funerals that almost nobody can attend: that would spoil the new lighthearted positivity towards suffocating to death that is the new fragrance of the hour.
The BBC deploys this moral propaganda too but consistently declines to muse on how many lives might have been saved had the UK:
- Followed WHO guidelines from the outset and deployed mass testing, contact tracing, public space disinfections and proper PPE
- Had entry barriers and testing at all ports of entry (especially from infected nations)
- Responded to the conclusions of Operation Cygnus back in 2016
- Instigated a timely lock down
- Funded more emergency beds (we have the third lowest per head in all of Europe)
- Funded the NHS properly
- Procured enough PPE, ventilators and testing kits in the 11 weeks following the initial outbreak
instead it just shrugs its indifferent shoulders about demographics that it isn’t permitted to care about.
This pandemic has exposed how few people the establishment cares about. As bus drivers, health care professionals and care workers die sans PPE, the government has admitted that promised ventilators will never arrive to save even those that make it into crowded hospitals.
Even more disturbing are reports emerging that people with learning disabilities are to be marked unworthy of resuscitation and that if one has the misfortune to acquire too many frailty points, then your life prospects look bleak.
How did it come to this? Millions are imbibing propaganda and eugenicist morals that don’t sit much above fascism.
It could never happen here? But it is and every moral person needs to wake up and speak out.
If we tolerate this eugenicist utilitarianism, then heaven knows what’s next. Darker utilitarian calculations may follow: perhaps implemented with little scrutiny in an authoritarian ‘lock down’ society.
Since 2013 I have worked between 4-6 hours a day on this Ad-Free site: trying to give a voice to those without the power or agency to speak out for themselves and uncovering truths that well paid journalists in the corporate media dare not utter.
I am a home schooling parent on a low income – paying for the domain, web hosting and security entirely out of my own pocket.
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Thank you in solidarity with all our readers. John Lynch, Editor.
Love this, well done for shining a spotlight on the failings of government! Now carefully explain how a socialist government would have done better -Without! – saying they would have been prepared for it, because no government was. Then wash your hands.
the dichotomy you draw is false and your assertion though reasonable at face value falls apart on examination. China, Taiwan, South Korea, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany…all have protected their citizens far better than the UK, none are socialist and South East Asia was the epicentre of the outbreak and had the least time to prepare. The dividing line here is not between socialism and capitalism – it is between forward planning, competence and basic morality. The UK? We ain’t got none of that as the weeks past have shown and the weeks ahead will show even more.