WHAT LIFE COULD HAVE LOOKED LIKE IF ONLY WE WERE NOT BEING MISGOVERNED

A moving reminder of what life can look like in an island nation that isn’t run by idiots and monsters (with no opposition)

Jacinda Ardern, the PM of New Zealand

Steve Walker of SKWAWKBOX has created this post and given permission for a wider circulation. Jacinda Ardern is also one of my heroes and has her place in 'Dying to Know', as does Steve Walker, Jeremy Corbyn, Naomi Klein, Stephanie Kelton ..... the list is worth exploring. Time for my appeal: 

I'll start this blog-post with what for some of you may be a familiar appeal. Please - if you have come to value my writing and would like to support my bid to secure publication for my pandemic journal: 'Dying to Know' - do press the blue Follow button on this blog-post. You will find it at the top on the right-hand side but only when you have a full website screen in front of you using a laptop computer. It seems it is not visible when you are in phone mode.   

And now to the amazing news that New Zealand has seen twenty-five COVID-19 deaths. In total. We have had approaching 80,000 COVID-19 deaths. 

The SKWAWKBOX has received a moving video of a simple time when proud parents and grandparents could pack tightly into a school hall to watch their children receive recognition for their hard work in class.

Today.

The video, taken by a friend of SKWAWKBOX editor Steve Walker and used with permission, shows his daughter receiving an award at her school - in New Zealand:

https://skwawkbox.org/nz-school-mp4/

The proud young girl even receives a hug and kiss from the teachers presenting the award.

New Zealand has suffered just over 2,000 cases of coronavirus since the pandemic began, with 25 deaths - because as an island nation its Prime Minister seized the opportunity to close borders and ensure that the

virus never took hold enough to overwhelm attempts to eliminate it, instead of boasting how well prepared her country was and sitting back while disaster arrived.

NHS hospitals came close to being overwhelmed as the UK was swept by first one wave and now another

As a result, life in New Zealand today looks much like it did a year ago. But to the UK, which has suffered tens of thousands of needless deaths and one of the worst economic collapses in the developed world, it looks like archive footage of a lost era, with scientists warning that even a vaccine is unlikely to restore normality for a long period yet.

The people of this country are still being misled enough by politicians and the media that many of them don't properly realise what a disaster the UK has suffered, let alone how different it could have been with a decent government - or even an 'opposition' [the Labour party under the leadership of Keir Starmer] that actually opposes instead of approving everything the Tories are doing as if there were no better options.

No new cases of COVID-19 in New Zealand

The proud dad told the SKWAWKBOX, "We won the leadership lottery" - but New Zealand is not the only country whose government responded better to the crisis than that of the UK. Islands such as Japan and Iceland and the peninsula of South Korea also showed how different things could be when governments exploited their geographic good fortune for the good of their people.

When the Tories boast, or the media tell you that the UK pandemic was unavoidable and focus on scenes from hard-hit landlocked countries, they're lying to you.

If Jeremy Corbyn and Labour had won the December 2019 general election, this could have been our story