No. 209 – July 19th - Freedom Day Approaches!

Dear James,

We have been at war against Covid 19 since January 2020 and the war is far from over. Yet Boris is announcing victory or ‘Freedom Day’ on July 19th.  On that day, England will throw off its mandatory requirement to wear face masks in shops and public transport and enter the medical version of those glorious, Brexit, ‘sunlit uplands’. Boris is hungry for immortality, eager to cry ‘victory’. And he pretends fear of no one, not least the virus. 

If this were that other kind of war, the Day of Freedom would be like Churchill declaring victory in WW2 on June 7th 1944. By that date, we had landed in Normandy and established a small bridgehead in Nazi occupied Europe. In Boris’s version of June 7th 1944, - July 19th 2021 - he is in effect declaring victory, cancelling air raid sirens, closing shelters, and telling everyone that they now live in peacetime normality. The man has never been good at timing. He was late in the first wave, delayed lockdown again in the second and promised us all liberation at Christmas last December. Now he is in danger of making his biggest mistake yet. Boris is a man of simple enthusiasms. He is a little boy with his first train set. Childish optimism itself is the antidote to every problem. He dreams of ‘freedom’ not caring that freedom is only free if it hurts no one else. 

We all thought last January that the blond mopped public schoolboy had grown up. He said that from then on decisions would be made on data, not dates. As far as I know, July 19th  is a date and 33,000 daily infections are data? The latter is today’s count on new Delta variants of Covid 19 and it is predicted to rise to 100,000 by July 19th.  But Boris cries. ‘We have broken the link!’, ‘Infections no longer translate into deaths or hospitalizations’. In terms of 1944, it is the equivalent of saying that the enemy is in retreat when they have merely fallen back to Caen. 

Covid 19 is a clever and resilient enemy. It can transform itself overnight into new variants that can wreak havoc with lives and vaccines. The vast majority of the world is still unvaccinated allowing the vaccine to mutate yet again, into more deadly and more transmissible variants. Even in our own nation with the Delta variant running riot, it may not kill as many this time round but it could change its DNA once again and attack us through the back door. Then there is the question of Long Covid which is still so little understood and yet may cause un-foretold suffering and economic damage. 

Boris cannot see this. Once again he is politicizing the virus and adding to the death count already attributable to his own dithering. Instead he is passing the buck to you and me, dressing up his decision under the mantra, ‘Over to you, the ‘responsible individual’. That is abnegating the proper power of government. In wartime, voters are willing to temporarily give power to ‘responsible governments’ that override freedoms in the interest of human safety. Unfortunately this government, with its Brexit fixation and right wing obsessions, has been far from responsible. Today they are saying, ‘You wimps can stay in your air raid shelters, while we, the brave, are walking in the streets with our heads held high’. I just hope that the viral equivalent of a V2 is not about to land in a street near me!

If Churchill had declared victory on June 7th 1944, borders would have been frozen across much of Europe allowing the Nazi scourge to persist and the menace of the V1 and the V2 to be amplified. Churchill however, was a realist. Boris is not. He is a fantasist. And he fails to see that Covid 19 is with us for many years to come. To quote, Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Head of the WHO, ‘None of us is safe until we’re all safe’. 

An Opinium poll in today’s Observer, reports that 73% of respondents believe that face masks should be continued. 50% say that July 19th should be pushed back. As usual, it is the public showing the responsibility and common sense so clearly absent in our government.  Churchill had to wait almost a year until the Nazi menace was finally crushed. Today, James, It would make much more sense to wait until a much larger percentage of the world’s population is vaccinated before attempting to declare any day as, ‘Freedom Day’!  

Sorry to spoil your own day James! 

Kind regards, 

BH - Your Concerned Constituent.