I met with three friends yesterday to share the pleasure of their company, to talk about at issues in the way never possible over Zoom, and to enjoy the sunshine in Alexandra Palace. It was great to be able to do that, and so life affirming to see them.
But we all recognised the issues. We wore masks when appropriate. We socially distanced from other groups. The hugs that were so much part of our past lives did not happen. We know that this pandemic is not over yet.
Then I saw this:
Horrified to see this.
These anti-mask, anti-lockdown protestors in Hyde Park today are beyond selfish - blatantly risking spreading Covid to vulnerable others.
The death toll is over 150k.
1000 NHS staff have died to protect others.
And this behaviour is sickening. pic.twitter.com/1CvN3fe7Ss
— Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) April 24, 2021
And of course I agree with Rachel Clarke. She is right. What is on display here is the politics of selfishness. We are used to it. It is rampant in Downing Street. It permeates from there. And it is a killer. Modi has shown that. The politics of populism is all about mass spreader events that puts the lives of others at risk. This was one.
I am sickened by the politics of the indifference to others.
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Symptomatic of an agnotological society.
A society where everyone is right apparently but where truth is ignored – hence this bullshit in Hyde Park.
Specious claims using the legitimate means of more legitimate and superior claims = confusion.
My brother has had real Covid. His view is that he has never been so physically poorly in his life. His mental health is under pressure from dealing with Long Covid and he worries about being able to work as he carries the physical scars of the infection (shortness of breath; palpitations of the heart, fatigue – to name but a few) which also nag at his mind (he is 54).
This country has been having a mental health crisis since 2010 with austerity (set to continue BTW) and increasing income and employment insecurity and service reductions that have already affected mortality rates! Yet our difference about face masks and BREXIT are more important it seems!?
This Tory government has blighted my life with wage reductions and uncertainty over employment to the point where I can quite honestly forget in the most extreme way possible some key components of the 10 Commandments! I’m serious! Tory treatment of me and thousands of others has negated their humanity to me. I consider them and ANY poxy-tician of any party who subscribes to Neo-liberalism and bullshit like Government debt being like household debt etc., as a major threat to my well-being and that of the country: a threat that must be removed increasingly by any means possible, the longer it goes on. And I’m talking here as a true patriot, tired of seeing his countrymen abused and manipulated so coldly.
Yet these poor misled and frightened individuals in Hyde Park think that wearing a mask is their biggest problem. And let’s not forget that these people might also be protesting probably because the Government has not been helping people through Covid as much as it could have done.
I’m sitting here looking at a Covid test issued to my children since they have been back at school. Although it says who these have been made for (The NHS – of course we can use that to blame them for not buying British), little clues printed on the other packets can be found as to WHERE they have been made : China.
So here we are – crying out for jobs and income and yet STILL we are using cheap Labour from abroad to keep costs as low as possible in our faux ‘bankrupt’ country. But I wonder how much the middle men and women in all of this are making out of the cheap labour of this provision?
So in the midst of Covid we can still see the future: Nothing will change. Cheap labour will still be used. There will be no ‘good jobs’ except if you know a Tory minister of course and the rich will inherit Britain.
The Tories just don’t want to know. They have no need for this many of us.
How long before we get issued with home euthanasia kits – just to piss off out of their way?
Made in China of course and labelled ‘NHS’ – just so we know who to blame as we decide we can’t take it anymore.
With the best will in the world, we don’t have the manufacturing base to produce the lateral flow tests in any sort of quantity. Getting them produced in China or elsewhere overseas was a necessity because we couldn’t have produced them over here in the first place. All down to the fact that we sold off our industry and moved the globalised model of outsourcing manufacturing to cheaper countries decades ago, of course. Same goes for PPE and all sorts of other stuff we’ve discovered that we need in the event of a devastating pandemic!
I’d argue that these tests aren’t a huge deal of use, either, especially given the way they are being used. A vast outlay for so many millions of barely accurate tests which mistakenly lead people to think they aren’t infected/infectious when they could well be so.
Mariner
Look – someone is being paid to get these done – alright? It would be good to see a breakdown of who is getting what for a start. And would it not be good if those were UK citizens on the production line? My answer – Yes – it would.
And as much as I agree about capacity and urgency – no-one in this short termist Neo-liberal addled island seems to value thinking ahead. We could have had the capacity to produce our own tests and much more, but we simply didn’t want to invest as we de-industrialised our economy. We just wanted to shed costs like wages and increase the wealth of owners and investors instead and globalisation was the tool.
It’s the same ignorant thinking that meant that our stocks of PPE went out of date or went short EVEN WHEN pandemic awareness was growing internationally.
Testing and PPE could have been produced nationally here. So how about making sure that next time, this is what happens? In an age pandemics, surely being able to produce your own kit and vaccines makes sense?
There is no test that will accurately discriminate all the real positives from all the real negatives. They are not magic or infallible. There will always be false positives and false negatives, and the two are often in opposition (lowering the threshold to reduce false negatives will increase false positives, and vice versa).
As with any test, you need to understand what the test can do and what it can’t. You have to work out what a positive or negative result means, and what you should do with that information.
The coronavirus lateral flow test is simple and quick and cheap, and it is fairly good at having few false positives (but even so they can be an issue at low prevalence). The cost is a high rate of false negatives, perhaps as high as 50% in field conditions when used by non-experts. So, if you test positive, you almost certainly have it. If you test negative, you probably don’t (because most people don’t) but you still might. It is a fairly good “red light” test but not much use as a “green light” test.
Unfortunately the lateral flow test is being used as a “green light” test in a variety of situations – schools, test events, etc. A negative test does not mean you are free of infection. Far from it.
Precisely
Well put
I beg to differ: it’s not indifference. Most of these people care passionately what you think, they just want you to be upset, frustrated and angry.
I think for many of them it comes from general frustration with modern life. Brexit was supposed to be the Great Fix. Take back control. But they didn’t get control back. They feel swindled.
There’s an axis of right populist policies – pro-smoking, libertarian, Leaver, anti-woke, anti-climate change which is formulated around looking what progressive values are and forming counters. The only reason they care about things like climate is because they know that people like you and I care about it – and they want to oppose us, upset us, provoke a reaction.
My cousin works for the NHS in Essex. He told me it was like a war zone. He is an example of the collateral damage in the war these people are waging on people like you, me, Owen Jones, Jeremy Corbyn, Greta Thunberg, anyone who says stuff that they don’t like. And they passionately care how it lands – their only reason to do this is as a giant F you to the people they oppose.
Agreed Simon
With reflection I realise that’s a desperately grim place to leave it so I’d like to come back with some hope.
These people aren’t the majority, people activist enough to go on right wing peaceful protests are really few. Lockdown may be an exceptional case. Farage tried numerous times to get mass protests, even a Jarrow-style march, and almost no one came.
Next, speaking strategically, the whole Nazi thing is a real problem for this politics. The world has been down this route before and it was a disaster. These politics will always attract nutters who like 1940s German Nazism and that’s a killer for getting it off the ground as a mass movement.
Brexit is winding down as a cause. Most people think Brexit ended in Jan. Europhobia will flare up from time to time but the great rallying cry of Get Brexit Done is over and done with.
The various independence movements offer genuine hope. I hope, and am an activist for, Scottish independence, and a chance to show the world and rUK in particular a gentler better way to organise a country. An Irish border poll looks likely and reunification has a real chance. Wales will wait and see how the others fare but if we do well and England doesn’t then Welsh independence could follow. The Northern Independence Party organised by socialists on twitter is gathering genuine momentum as it’s dawning on people that breaking off from the UK could be a real alternative to FPTP Westminster politics. London independence and Cornish independence are ideas that are out there. I think this is great, Britain would be a much better place as a patchwork of several small countries rather than one rather entitled decadent ex-Empire.
And of course there’s people like you, me and your other commenters who keep fighting for hearts and minds even if it’s one at a time.
Well said.
The attacks on “woke” attitudes are purely reactive. The attitudes are sought out and pushed into the make believe world constructed by politicians, journalists and commentators, where they are held up for ridicule. Real people rarely enter this realm, where ideas about them are freely exchanged in their absence. Since there is nothing to anchor these ideas, they are free to whip up into storms that we cannot control. We are even told how to think about them. We should not care that our prime minister sees a pile of dead bodies as a small price to pay for GDP. A commentator will tell us this. We have no say on the matter. It all happens beyond our reach. Nothing is real, everything is possible. The collapse of democracy does not always end with purges and direct intimidation. Sometimes it’s enough to turn truth on its head and turn opposition into apathy.
You cannot condemn the anti-lockdown protestors whilst having previously defended the right for women to protest against the Sarah Everard killing. Covid makes no distinction between the two protests. You can either support both groups’ right to protest, or neither’s.
How crass can you be?
I was criticising their motives, not their right to protest
I’m fairly certain he knows and is deliberately reframing it onto rights. You’ve probably noticed it’s a standard tactic of the “anti-woke” Status Quo Warriors: turn all incoming criticism into an attack on Rights (any criticism of protesters is an attack on their right to protest; any criticism of a journalist, “comedian”, or other public figure, is an attack on their right to freedom of speech; call any random reactionary out for acting boorish on social media and you’re Attacking Their Right To A Different Opinion).
They’re blatantly acting in bad faith and probably don’t deserve sincere responses; it’s just an attempt to tie you up in a contradiction.
So to be clear: you support the anti-lockdowners right to protest and although, you rather they didn’t turn up at Hyde Park, you can live with the fact that they did.
I can, and I will
The Clapham women intended a vigil, not a protest.
They intended to socially distance until the police prevented it.
They sought to protest human rights.
The March on Saturday was meant to be a super spreader event that sought to promote the abuse of rights
The two are not in any way alike
If you cannot see that I am sorry for you
But I offer no apology in saying you are absolutely wrong
On the scale of the India disaster, it is instructive to compare not absolute numbers but excess deaths per 100,000 of population. By those measures these idiots are chancing all our arms in a country whose rates are far, far worse than those in India.
Nigel, you are right about the Excess Deaths.
Talking to half wits over the weekend who still have the soft focussed selling of Bozo to them by the BBC AND the Guardian along with the rest of the owned media readership. They parrot ‘we are ok, we done better than everyone! – they won’t listen to the basic stats – they can’t listen they can’t believe that they are lied to and this admit they really are not Free and Fair but are just fake passengers who don’t deserve to have respect – not when there are mighty posh boys who must be trusted like their betters…
The ratchet is being turned under the guise of wokeness, uncritical Climate change Action and a never ending propaganda blitz on Russia and China.
Whilst extreme censorship and equal monstering is applied against these who would steer us away from the Ice Fields we are in; using the tactics of depriving the oxygen of publicity (Alba , Corbyn) ; Legal kafkaesque skullduggery (Salmond, Craig Murray , Assange) and plain and simple heavy handed ness , I wake up to find they have come in the night to get satirists and cartoonists.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2021/apr/26/steve-bells-if-about-to-breathe-its-last
What exactly must be DONE to them, before people realise they are just deluded mugs and willing fascists, who think they are as usual on the ‘right’ side, if they cheer a hot housed teenager or a medically demented leader, to save them from the masses of the rest of humanity? When all they are doing is sacrificing themselves as the human shields of the same old high and mighty rulers who have disdain only for the population. The coming third wave is already being narratively set up as ‘foreigners’ I’ve heard Brazil and India being used as excuses this weekend and a complete disregard of the Kent variation that is raging across the continent.
The simple basics of mutations just doesn’t compute with the dumbed down Brits – there are hundreds daily …
Politicians, Political Party’s , Journalists, Academics…CARTOONISTS!
When will we put our boots on and march to Whitehall to really TAKE our country back?
It ain’t going to be GIVEN to us, for sure.
The UK government’s repetition of the same mistakes has have killed over 150,000 people already. It is the old adage about one person’s death being a tragedy, but thousands of deaths are just a statistic. There would have been deaths in any event, that is for sure, but even if we had done as “badly” as other countries, there would be tens of thousands of people who are still alive.
Things in India are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better.
Our own mass stupidity as a species is going to kill us. Literally kill us.
I can understand people’s wish for this to be ‘over.’ But believing it IS over, or, worse yet, asserting that it never happened in the first place, is about as stupid as you get.
I reckon, by now, just about everybody in the UK knows a few folk who had had Covid, and some will know people who died of it. (I know two of these–NOT elderly, by the way.) Many of us also know people who work in the NHS and know the pressure they’ve been under. There is no excuse for this kind of asinine attention-seeking, childish, head-in-the-sand-I’m-all-right-Jack behavior.
And so it’s NOT going to end, is it. Or at least it’s not going to end well.
We’ll soon be getting yet another wave. Even vaccinations are not necessarily proof against new variants, which keep springing up all the time, because idiots like these keep passing the virus around.
Wishing, praying, protesting, voting stupidly, acting selfishly, farting around with one of the most serious issues to face this generation, refusing to accept what is blatantly obvious because it’s not what you want to hear …NONE of these attitudes are going to keep the virus at bay and eventually wear it out.
The mind boggles. Really, it does….
When my nephew was three he used to say “I don’t wanna, wanna, wanna!” when he was told to do something he didn’t like.
When I look at these people that what’s I see. A group of three year olds.
They don’t wanna, wanna, wanna & they don’t care how that affects anyone else.
They should all be identified and fined.
I watched part of the Anti-Lockdown march on YouTube later, and read some of the comments. One or two were quite disturbing. In a discussion about where next month’s demo should be held, one commentator said something like, “Let’s all go to the BBC or STV studios and shake them up.” Another quickly replied, “Yeah, let’s burn the place down.”
While as a Scot permanently frustrated with the Corporation’s anti-Scottish bias, I share the demonstrators’ antipathy to the BBC, I certainly don’t wish upon that institution an experience such as we saw in January’s assault on the Capitol. Yet I would imagine it was in just such a forum that the seed of that heinous idea was sown, and I trust our keepers of the peace are taking note.
They say that Politics is the Art of the Possible. The writing on the wall suggests that Boris and Modi share the same mindless nationalist agenda and are on course to build strategic partnership to offset the economic impact of gaining sovereignty from EU. Both have tactically ignored the global implications of Vaccine Nationalism by steadfastly pursuing an elected democratic populist/authoritarian vision irrespective of the living conditions of the ordinary citizens while enjoying the patronage of the corporates and billionaires. The next three years will determine the real impact of the Covid pandemic on the former coloniser (Britannia) and the ex-colony (Bharat). One thing is certain. Money not only talks but walks the talk.
Can I just say that I interpreted this post as being something about morality – or moralities of the Covid epidemic and even the moralities of our mode of capitalism which have been laid bare.
Whether the tests work or not was not really the locus of the thread for me.
We know that lots of jobs have been lost and incomes have reduced dramatically in this country. Had we had the capacity here in the UK to make more PPE for ourselves, more tests and even the vaccine – those jobs would be secure. More jobs might have been created.
Today I heard a R4 presenter stating how ‘ironic’ it was that India is in the throes of a catastrophic second wave and/but they make the Astra-Zeneca vaccine.
Ironic?!!! Ironic – as if things like this ‘just happen’ naturally. This is the point I was trying to make really. India is making a vaccine for the West – and it’s own people it seems can’t get enough of the vaccine. Yes – we know Modi has messed it up like Johnson and Bastardo (sic) in Brazil.
There’s something inherently wrong about all of this though. There really is. Globalisation has shown itself to be indifferent to these matters. No matter what happens, the supply chain must clank on being ‘global’ and nothing else. Export or die.
Try telling the victims of the Indian outbreak about ‘irony’.
‘Irony’ – the new indifference – courtesy of the BBC.
It’s disgusting.