Day 39 of UK lock down: Smoke, Mirrors and Walpurgis Night

So far the UK government public response to Covid-19 has focused on vague concepts of Britishness, determination, wrestling, and a nice old chap who’s been walking up and down his garden. The motivation is probably two-fold, in part to deflect attention from the uncomfortable and scandalous behind-closed-doors underbelly of the real response, and partly to maintain the myth of British exceptionalism for when the headlong rush to a catastrophic hard Brexit re-emerges into the daylight from behind the pandemic.

Vagueness and lack of attention to the truth are characteristics of the politics of personality much used to prop up dominant conservative ideologies. As a conjuring trick, its success does rather depend on the charisma of the politician, which has evidentially been a problem for the charisma-free UK government during Prime Minister Johnson’s frequent absences from office. Johnson’s stooge Raab had all the conviction and charisma of a UPVC window salesperson at Prime Minister's Questions 29 April 2020, when confronted by a real grown-up politician in the form of Keir Starmer – who is one of the few silver linings in the political clouds currently sitting over Westminster.

Tonight is Walpurgis Night when pests, smoke, and useless politicians are traditionally chased away to clear the air. If only !

Read a detailed and precise account of the UK government's shameful pandemic response here

Day 27 of UK lock down: something else to clap for

To be fair, most countries were ill-prepared for the Corona pandemic. In Britain, the situation has been exacerbated by a government formed from insouciant, Brexit-fixated, exceptionalists who apparently felt that the dastardly virus would think twice before daring to arrive in the land of Horatio Nelson and Winston Churchill. And anyway, pouring vast amounts of money & effort into white elephant vanity projects like HS2 gave much more instant gratification in Downing Street than all that boring forward planning. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/17/hs2-white-elephant-coronavirus-recession-conservatives?

 Against this woeful background, something positive and important has just happened. Mercedes-AMGHPP have collaborated with mechanical engineers and clinicians from University College, London and, in less than 100 hours, developed an open-source, easily reproducible breathing aid for Corona patients.

As an example of collective and generous positive action this will be important to remember when the pandemic has passed and we are re-focussing on the technical obstacles to reducing GHG emissions as a matter of life-threatening urgency.

Day 20 of UK lock down: plucky little Britain

The brilliant Fintan O’Toole absolutely nailed the disingenuous and embarrassing myth of British exceptionalism in a piece in today’s Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/11/coronavirus-exposed-myth-british-exceptionalism.

A whiff of that particular myth has been steadily seeping under the door during the current lock down, accompanied by nostalgic radio music evoking thoughts of how Winston Churchill and Vera Lynn led the plucky Brits to victory over the foreign menace, with a subtext that our uniquely indomitable spirit will see us through the current crisis, regardless of the serial fuck-ups that have marked our response so far. 

https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2020/03/15/health-secretary-matt-hancocks-response-to-covid-19-isnt-fooling-anyone/

Johnson is apparently on the mend but, according to his father, had his own dulce et decorum est pro patria mori moment, by almost “taking one for the team”.

Britain undoubtedly does have some admirable national characteristics in its societal DNA, but so does every other country on the bloody planet, which is hardly surprising given the boundary-crossing ebb and flow of people over the last 10,000 years. To be constantly banging on about our national greatness is more like an embarrassing show of adolescent insecurity than an adult response to an indiscriminate global crisis.