.
Aneurin Bevan ranked Tories “lower than vermin” but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and promote them to fully fledged rats. What are rats good at?
Well, Tory rats are good at pulling things apart (the EU, NHS, welfare state, society) spreading diseases (they have excelled at that recently) and have a natural gift for lying and dodging responsibility.
The way that the global elite evaded blame for the 2007/8 global financial crash (GFC) offers a template for how the Tories will scuttle to evade charges of criminal negligence over their handling of Covid-19.
In the run up to the GFC, many people were handsomely rewarded for making decisions, but when those decisions went bad they all suddenly claimed to be hapless victims of someone else’s poor advice. (See where this is going?)
Before the bubble burst, people all along the securitisation chain made money by trading in toxic bundles of debt: a trade faciliated by ratings agencies like Standard and Poor who said they were AAA.
When the music stopped and pension pots around the world were ruined, the ratings agencies became a human shield for all involved. For their part the ratings agencies just spread their hands in sorrow and said “oh well, it was just our opinion”; thus everybody kept their bonuses, nobody went to jail, the taxpayer got stiffed with a bill for trillions of dollars and the game was reset to continue much as before.
For the Covid-19 debacle in the UK, the fall guys will be scientists. Not for nothing is the current Tory mantra ‘we followed the science’. The implied message is that government cannot take responsibility: it just trails behind science and does whatever it says.
But the science offered by the WHO and widely ‘followed’ around the world was clearly different to any ‘followed’ in the UK. While most nations scrambled to test, trace and lock down, others (with the UK and USA as their exemplars) were relaxed and even cavalier. While South Korea and New Zealand acted swiftly, the UK went down the pub and off to the races.
Why the big difference in health policy? The answer is obvious: the differentiation was rooted in both ideological temperament and political expediency.
Boris Johnson’s political branding pivots around British exceptionalism and his own bumptious libertarianism. Drunk on their own Brexiteer rhetoric, the Tories were never going to embrace the mass testing and lock downs of South-East Asia. That was why the UK spent crucial weeks engaged in wishful thinking and why tens of thousands of people are now dead that would otherwise be alive.
A scapegoat will now have to be found so that Tory rats can survive and scientists will do just fine. Being boffins and all, the lads and lassies in white coats can already feel the weight of the jacket that is being slid none to subtly on to their shoulders.
So every time you now hear a Tory or a senior civil servant saying ‘we followed the science’, what you are hearing is advance preparation for the public inquiry that lies ahead.
At that inquiry every Tory will spread their hands in sorrow and say that their hands were tied by the bad advice of UK scientists; and will try to imply that science is not comprised of different opinions that the government must choose between, but is instead a lumpen amalgam that must be unquestioningly swallowed by poor innocent politicians.
If all that politicians do is to ‘follow the science’ then let us do away with them altogether, since we clearly have no need of these superfluous middle men in what is actually a technocracy. The truth however, is that politicians do make decisions and Tory politicans made all the decisions in the UK about how to respond to Covid-19.
The Tories are very happy to seek the rewards and status of public office; always delighted to endlessly affirm their vital importance and mythical competence. In the teeth of a public health calamity they must not now be allowed to cowardly blame their advisors or to distort the very nature of science so as to hide their criminal negligence.
Just as the trail of disaster that lead to the GFC did not begin in 2007 but can be traced back to Thatcher, Reagan and decades of toxic neoliberalism, so the Covid-19 health disaster in Britain did not begin in 2020 but can be traced back through a decade of Tory misrule.
A decade in which we have seen the toxic mismanagement and underfunding of the NHS, the suppression of the findings of Operation Cygnus in 2016, the damaging preoccupation with Brexit, and the grotesque spectacle in 2020 of NHS staff forced to risk their lives without the PPE they need to stay safe.
The Tories are now scrambling like the rats that they are to deflect the blame for their sins on to anyone they can find. We must not be frightened to say that tens of thousands of people are now dead because of the negligence and incompetence of this Tory government: it must be witnessed loudly and clearly.
If we honour the dead then what we must insist on is not just an end to the spin and misinformation of the daily press briefings – but justice.
As far as I am concerned, the line between honest mistakes and criminal mismanagement has been repeatedly crossed and those responsible must be held to account.
As we have said many times, if we allow the Tories to get away with this – if we allow the establishment to cover up this – then we risk laying the ground for more tragedies, horrors with even darker shadows than the ones we walk between today.
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.
Great post John and an interesting personal insight at the end,
I can identify with your position very strongly myself.
Any chance we could have a chat about something we have been trying to get off the ground for a while?
If Interested please message me on our Twitter account – (Our Website has been suspended because the service provider didn’t like our politics – we are fixing that as I write)
by all means – drop us a line via the contact page when you are back up.
The fact that this Government is all too happy to give bundles of money to all the big banks, corporations etc to assuage their fears of going bankrupt, while requiring mortgagees, small businesses etc to apply for (and often being refused) loans/payment moratoriums, speaks volumes about their ideology and priorities. It’s said that less than 10% of business loan applications since CV-19 have been processed. Ditto the million applications for UC. And that’s not including the 5 million self-employed not being supported because they “don’t meet the criteria” for various reasons. All while a simple UBI of £1000pcm to every adult would have been the very essence of simplicity and ease to implement. Utterly disgraceful. And yet they have the cheek to espouse that they’ll do “whatever it takes” and will “put their arms around every business” to keep the economy going. Makes me shudder; like some creepy uncle with ulterior motives. And we haven’t got to the part where they try to claw back as much as possible from ordinary peoples’ already devaluing savings with “wealth taxes” that the super-rich will dodge as usual. We ought to be able to sue the bastards.