No. 175 - Boris has Lost Control of the Virus and Abandoned the Science. Someone Put him Out of his Misery! Please!

Dear James,

He was warned. Three weeks ago, at a meeting on 21 September, SAGE, the government advisory council, told Boris that he should have a short circuit lockdown to stop the dramatic rise in the infection rate since the beginning of September. Boris decided to go against his SAGE advisers. Instead he introduced a 3-tiered system that put different areas into bad, very bad and very, very bad categories. Yesterday the latest infection rate was 17,234. Total Excess Deaths stood at  over 54,000. Yesterday Sir Kier Starmer called Boris's bluff, saying that local restrictions were not working and accusing him of ignoring the science. He called for a ‘circuit breaker’. At least 60% of the public are with him. Starmer looked like the leader we do not have. 

Yet again Boris is dithering. He cannot make up its mind. He is stuck between the false claims of the Great Barrington Declaration - the extreme right cry for herd immunity - and the first claim of every individual in our nation for our 'safety first'. The Coronavirus is as fiendishly complicated as the government’s own confusion of MPs. Some want to keep the economy going, others want to protect health. Every region has its own spread of the pandemic. Some believe it comes from deprived areas of high density housing, others from the influx of returning students. Yet others from their particular night life culture. The problem is that they are all probably right. Nothing is easy with this pandemic and yet there is a common theme to all this confusion. It is the absence of leadership. Boris has lost control of the pandemic because he has been following one man’s agenda.

Mr Cummings may be out of the limelight currently but behind the scenes he has been orchestrating everything. He is attempting to centralize power in order to change everything for good. Using the pandemic as a shield, he wants to by–pass parliament, cut back the judiciary, lay waste the planning system and re-boot the BBC to propagate right wing views of the world. The Coronavirus is just a hindrance to his real aims. From the moment they entered Downing Street and attempted to set themselves up at the centre of a physical hub his determination to grab power and centralise everything has become ever more obvious. Today Boris and Mr Cummings, like Donald Trump, have crashed into a reality called Nature. And thanks to nature, it is clear that, so far their plans are comprehensively failing.

Our nation has a long history of successful, local civic society and this week the regions have begun to fight back. Today we have 134 Directors of Public Health across 152 local authorities. They know their areas on a street by street basis. They have support structures for dealing with meningitis outbreaks and flu epidemics. They have systems of local testing laboratories. And yet in this pandemic they have been at best ignored and at worst deliberately cut out of decision making by central government. Rather than use what already existed, the government has wasted money, time and lives on the likes of Deloittes, Serco and Sodexho, money which would have been better used to fund the local authorities. But no. The Tory ideology that favours free market companies to handle anything and everything on the basis of knowing very little about anything and everything, has been revealed for the sham that it is. Only in the last few days has Boris been forced to talk to and involve the mayors of the north like Andy Burnham in Manchester and Joe Anderson in Liverpool.                                   

Boris is clearly not enjoying his role as PM. Just witness his regular drubbing at PMQs. This job was supposed to be fun but this week he has looked pale and drained. He is fighting Coronavirus, local leaders, his own MPs, and most of all himself. His government is divided at the top and scrabbling for local action at the bottom. It is time that this charade is ended.

The kindest thing would be to put the poor man out of his misery. Where are those famous Tory ‘Grey Suits’ when we need them?  And if they are there, then please, Gentlemen, make sure Mr Cummings and his partners in crime go with him before they do untold harm to Britain. The future of our country is at stake in more ways than one! We need real leadership! We need it Now!

Kind Regards,

BH – Your Concerned Constituent