LOOKING BACK IN ANGER - WHERE WE WERE A YEAR AGO AND WHERE WE ARE NOW

The latest figures from the ONS are at the end of this article. Please do have a look.

Here is the blogpost I published on 7 January 2021:

'THIS PRIME MINISTER LED US INTO THE WORLD OF HERD IMMUNITY - WE ARE NEARING 100,000 DEATHS

 The responsibility for our carnage lies primarily with the prime minister and his special advisor - Johnson and Cummings - who made the wrong decisions back in February last year. Their actions and inactions then are part of the sequence of neoliberal Tory misgovernment that followed. 

I have spent my lockdown charting this tragedy in Dying to Know and am now back on the familiar path of finding a literary agent/ publisher. My book is well worth reading. I am the historian by academic training and I have become a fledgling scientist and economist for the purposes of my pandemic tale.

I hope you find this BLOGPOST worthwhile. It would help my path to publication for my book 'Dying to Know' if you would press the Follow button at the top of the blog post (on a full screen) - 29 followers to date. Thank you. 

 

Here is the latest twist in this sordid story, courtesy of SKWAWKBOX today:

'Former Tory MP Matthew Parris appears on Sky to exonerate catastrophic PM - while MP Lucy Allan quietly deletes 'like' of tweet calling for abolition of NHS

'Operation Absolve Boris' has begun. The Conservative party, which can never quite disguise its contempt for the Labour-founded NHS, has sloughed off even more of the facade to start its campaign to water the idea in the public consciousness that the blame for Boris Johnson's appalling and frankly murderous handling of the pandemic crisis rests with the NHS, not the Bullingdon boy.

Johnson's 'battle' with the pandemic - with grateful acknowledgements to Martin Rowson, cartoonist at the Guardian

Former Tory MP Matthew Parris was on Sky News this morning (thanks, reader and Labour activist Val Colvin for the pointer) - and Parris not only suggested that the latest scandal of slow vaccine roll-out was the NHS's fault, he 'jumped the shark' and suggested that he

couldn't think of anything that Johnson could have done differently to reduce the scale of the UK's pandemic disaster, which has left this country with one of the world's worst death rates and worst economic collapses:

https://skwawkbox.org/parris-nhs-blame1-mp4/

Parris is not alone, with various Tory voices being given media time - or making comments on social media - to attack the NHS and shift the blame onto our underfunded and austerity-withered Health Service. Tory MP

Lucy Allan 'liked' one such attack calling for the complete abolition of the NHS:

Allan deleted it after the public challenge and did not respond to a request for comment.

But Parris's willingness to rewrite history stands out. Blaming the NHS for the snail's-pace roll-out of the vaccine is bad enough, but the idea is beyond bizarre that Johnson has done nothing untoward and the UK's atrocious outcomes are just some mystifying phenomenon that nobody understands.

From the early days of the pandemic, the gaping flaws in Johnson's response were unmissable - and widely criticised: 

And as the crisis progressed, the bungling, arrogance and straightforward dishonesty continued to pile up:

• a PPE catastrophe and billions wasted on cronies' companies for materials that often never materialised or were unfit for use
• the initial 'herd immunity' strategy that would have killed a million people and was never truly abandoned
• thousands killed in care homes - while Matt Hancock boasted of throwing a 'protective cordon' around them that was more like the fences around a death camp; and official Department of Health policies were to keep feeding known-infected patients back into homes packed with the most vulnerable people
• delayed lockdowns
• delays on school closures in the spring - and Johnson's insistence they had to stay open in the autumn, then yet again this week
• the 'world-beating' test and trace fiasco
• allowing flights into the UK from virus hotspots for months, with not even the most basic checks on passengers
• still no coronavirus tests on incoming passengers even now
• Johnson going AWOL, on holiday and skipping COBRA
• stubborn delays in including facemasks in social distancing measures - and flatly forbidding them in classrooms
• not sacking Dominic Cummings for 'Barnard Castle'

And this is nowhere near an exhaustive list.

Watch the media with an eye open for subtle - and not so subtle - attacks on the NHS and the manoeuvres of 'Operation Absolve Boris' and you'll soon see they're as frequent and piled high as Johnson's fatal mistakes and deliberately lethal policies.

Just don't let it pass without comment and make sure your friends and family are alert to what the Establishment is doing. They'll certainly never hear that warning from the so-called 'mainstream' media.'

PLEASE DON'T LET THEM GET AWAY WITH REWRITING HISTORY.

FACTS ARE FACTS ARE FACTS.'

Our NHS is on the point of breakdown

Now, nearly a year on, what has changed? Still the same prime minister. Still the same pursuit of herd immunity. The NHS hospital system still on the edge of collapse. And over 70,000 more British bodies in coffins. Due to the coronavirus - and the misgovernment of this country. 

The man in No. 10 is a narcissist who feeds those still listening with sound-bites about how this nation is world-beating. Consider these facts:

The USA, which has the third largest population in the world (332 million) has recorded the most coronavirus deaths: 823,000 to date. The UK has a population of 68 million. That's just under a fifth of the population of the USA. Yet deaths in the UK due to this virus (172,000 to date) actually exceed the proportion of deaths per head of population in the USA - just multiply 172,000 by 5 and you get 860,000. That makes us truly world-beating.  

Our economic well-being depends on our physical health as a nation. The man in No.10 doesn't seem to understand this simple truth. He has done what the New Zealand PM has declared 'the unthinkable': he has sacrificed our nation's health on the altar of business profit. Yet our economy is still flat-lining - and we have over 172,000 dead. 

What a fatal choice! Johnson as the British PM has been lethal. An exterminator.  

SARS-CoV-2

Here are the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), as of yesterday:

New coronavirus cases: 189,213 - a 45% increase over the last 7 days;

Daily admissions of coronavirus cases into hospital: 1,152 - on 15 December, the figure was 774;

Coronavirus patients in hospital: 11,898 - the day before it had been 8,246; 

Coronavirus patients on ventilators in hospital: 868;

Deaths from coronavirus: 332.

                          Enough is enough.