No. 188 - The World Puts the UK into Solitary Confinement!

Dear James,

Can it get any worse? Yesterday the rest of the world put the UK into a very solitary, solitary confinement. Ports were slammed shut, flights from the UK and into the UK were cancelled, cross-border passengers were banned. Today the M20 down to Dover and Folkestone is blocked by stationary trucks and Manston Airport is filling up fast. In the international press, the New York Times called us ‘Plague Island’ revealing a lot of pent-up Schadenfreude for this sad little island. And it’s coming our way, thick and fast. ‘Die Welt’, the German conservative newspaper, said, that after Boris’s latest U-turn - when he promised us Xmas on Wednesday and cancelled it on Saturday – that this had “once more shown the yawning gulf between the prime minister’s airy promises and the real world,”. It went on, the vacuum is “fast being filled with the anger and fear of a nation hit ever since by horror story upon horror story”. They mean us James. You and me and 60 million others! 

There is a tiny bit of good news for you, James.  None of the above is due to Brexit! It is down to the pandemic which, so far, we have shared with the rest of the world, sprouting a new variant, much more transmissible than the original. So this time James it is not your fault! In fact it is faultless because this virus doesn’t do blame. It just does survival of its kind, like the rest of us. Now I never thought I’d have to admit that you and your government were blameless James! However, the good news stops there. 

What is your fault is the lack of leadership, competence and trust within your government. The problem is that when you have to give reasons for taking  strong, firm measures to lock us all down, very few people believe you any more. Your messaging is received with cries of almost despair, ‘Oh no, not another one.’ ‘Not another bloody rule with its exceptions, tiers and whatever else!’. But it’s not just the confusion in messaging. It is the messenger himself who is the problem! Who with any sense or perspective would believe anything that Boris Johnson says?  Even I am beginning to feel sorry for this hapless pseudo leader. And the EU have certainly got his number! 

It has all been said many times before, Boris is an entertainer. He’s a good time boy who is great as long as the tide is going in his direction. This year the tide has fled him and Boris is beached, high and dry and become the butt of jokes from Cornwall to Caithness. He still comes before the cameras but his mojo left him long ago and he stutters, waves his hands, attempts to communicate by creating mountainous stress patterns in his speech which are no substitute for real meaning.  What a relief it is to listen to Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland or Mark Drayford in Wales, both of whom, with hardly and ‘er' or an ‘um', use quiet logic to deliver their messages. 

On Sunday night Paddington and other main line terminuses were thronged with people escaping newly, Tier 4 London for the provinces - and in so doing, spreading the new variant to every other part of the UK!. It was like stream of refugees escaping this latest version of Blitzkrieg. Did no one in government foresee this? 

And yet Boris bumbles on!

What we are really seeing is an unexpected dress rehearsal for what may happen on January 1st when we leave the EU for good. The chaos has come early to our benighted nation. While the Brexit negotiations rumble on towards their inevitably disappointing climax, we are watching our well established supply chains to our nearest neighbours collapsing before our very eyes. Again the international press put it well. The current continental blockade could well be “preparing the British for what Brexit might actually mean”, said the New York Times, “since there is still no agreement on a trade deal, 10 days before the deadline.”

Today Johnson is facing intense pressure to impose another national lockdown. Scientist are warning him that inaction could cost thousands of more lives and create ‘an economic, human and social disaster’. 

Can it get any worse, James? The answer is probably yes. We are witnessing the true cost of ‘reclaiming sovereignty’. Before our very eyes!

Kind regards, 

BH - Your Concerned Constituent.