Brexit and Lockdown 2: Two crises for the price of one

To be honest, I found the whole thing thoroughly depressing and it put the Brexit omnishambles front and centre in my thoughts again.

And that was on top of the previous day’s news that the whole of England was going into Lockdown 2.

Two crises for the price of one. I wonder what the common denominator is.

It’s no wonder people’s mental health is suffering. I have to confess my famed easy-going inner calm and equanimity is being sorely tested by a combination of a deadly pandemic, a looming no-deal Brexit and the deep, deep sense of dread and foreboding that we are governed by a bunch of talentless clowns who couldn’t negotiate their way to a cheaper broadband contract let alone come up with a free trade deal with the EU.

And it isn’t helped by the abiding thought that the Government’s coronavirus strategy (I use the word strategy in the absolute loosest sense) seems to be made up on the fly.

Let’s just look at how we ended up here in Lockdown 2.

At the end of September, the government’s scientific advisers in SAGE told prime minister Boris Johnson that the trajectory of the pandemic wasn’t looking good and called for a short, sharp lockdown of maybe two or three weeks to get a grip, bring down the number of infections and hopefully give the time for the shambolic outsourced test, trace and isolate system to be fixed.

But Boris ‘we follow the science’ Johnson decided he knew better and elected not to ‘follow the science’ instead opting for the ludicrous ‘Three Tier’ system.

There’s a lag between the SAGE briefings to the prime minister and the publication of the deliberations. So three weeks after Johnson was first given the advice he chose to ignore, it became public.

And it was at that point in mid-October, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer realised just how serious things were getting and called for a short national lockdown timed to coincide with school half term holidays in an attempt to cause minimum disruption.

So how did Johnson respond?

In bad-tempered clashes at PMQs, Johnson dismissed calls from Sir Keir and his own SAGE advisers for a ‘miserable’ national ‘circuit breaker’ and accused Labour of ‘opportunism’ for coming out in favour of Lockdown 2.

Interestingly, a poll in the Daily Mail – of all papers – revealed the British public overwhelmingly backed a short, sharp nationwide lockdown at half-term with 68 per cent of those questioned by YouGov giving their backing for the plan to some extent.

Now I’m not party to the Government’s decision-making process but we have Johnson’s own words to judge what he considered most important when he said his job was to balance the economic and wider interests of the country with the science, saying: “The advice that I have today is that if you do the regional approach…we can bring down the R. We can bring down the virus.”

Some quotes don’t age well, do they? There we have it, the economy before lives.

Goodness only knows why Johnson didn’t go for a half term lockdown. Maybe it was hubris, maybe it was political spite because Labour suggested it first, maybe he really believed he was saving the economy. Who knows? Not even Johnson seems to.

In any event, the outcome is undoubtedly going to be many more needless unnecessary deaths.

Already, the projections by the scientific advisers say without a lockdown, cases, hospitalisations and deaths would far exceed their worst-case scenario with hospitals unable to cope within a matter of weeks.

So we are where we are. Bonfire Night marks the start of Lockdown 2 for four weeks with the Government already admitting it could go on even longer. It’s not looking good for Christmas, is it?

In my naivety, I had assumed most people would support the lockdown given the evidence of the Daily Mail poll and the dire warnings we were treated to in Johnson’s televised press briefing on Saturday.

Apparently not.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Esther McVey, MP for Tatton, who tweeted on Sunday night: “I’ll be voting against these latest lockdown measures when they come to the House on Wednesday.”

And in an Instagram post she said: “The ‘lockdown cure’ is causing more harm than Covid.

“The world cannot be put on hold and the Government must stop pressing the pause and stop button for the whole nation on a whim with all the disastrous effects this brings to our lives, livelihoods, health and relationships.”

Sorry Ms McVey, I just don’t agree with you. I’m struggling to think what could cause more harm or have a more disastrous effect than death, and this virus is a killer.

According to Public Health England, there have been 54,833 excess deaths in England (just England) between March 20 and October 16.

I don’t want to be in lockdown any more than you but thanks to the ineptitude of the Government, this is what we are reduced to so please don’t tell me the cure is causing more harm than Covid. There are 54,833 families in England alone grieving for dead loved ones who probably wouldn’t agree with you either.

Perhaps if your government hadn’t spaffed £12billion on a failed test and trace system, or made sure those asked to self-isolate had enough money to live on we would have been in a better place.

So can I make a suggestion? Turn your considerable talents towards ensuring test, trace and isolate is working properly, that we stop wasting money on £7,000 a day consultants and put pressure on the government to get some kind of a free trade deal with the EU because as it stands, all those businesses you care so much about will have a matter of days between the end of lockdown and us exiting the EU.

Happy Christmas.