I watched some of the press conference led by the prime minister yesterday on the government's plan for managing Covid this winter. I then tweeted this:
I think that a fair summary of what I heard.
Johnson is abandoning Covid controls, and repealing them in law.
He is asking but not telling people to be careful.
And it is clear he and his advisers are suggesting that we can vaccinate ourselves through this when the World Health Authority says otherwise because the delta variant requires 98% vaccination rates for that to happen, and it is clear that we will never get there.
Even the Tory papers have realised this. They are talking of lockdowns, and many deaths, this winter as the NHS, already at breaking point, is stretched beyond its limits.
If The Mail can work this out why can't Johnson? Maybe he can. Maybe he does have a plan. And maybe he thinks it is cunning.
My suggestion is this. What Johnson knows is he is useless. What he also knows is that his days are numbered. And he knows that nothing he is doing is working. But, and this is his version of the cunning bit, he might also believe that if there is outright chaos then no one will want to take over from him, and so he will stay in office precisely because he will have created a situation where no one wants to clear up his mess.
Is that what Johnson is really about? Does anyone have a better explanation for incompetence on this scale?
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Boris Johnson – the thick man of Europe
Any ‘plan’ that Johnson ever made would not survive the next lie that he seems pathalogically incapable of avoiding. Chaos is the inevitable result but possibly not the original intention.
I’m pretty certain at least one aspect of his plan is the collapse of the NHS and the delivery of a lovely insurance based scheme instead. There is already a significant rise in the number of people going private because of he length of the waiting list. Clearly the lists are only going to get a lot worse as Covid admissions rise. Exhausted staff will be leaving the NHS in bigger numbers to go to a more manageable job in the private sector.
Presumably also part of the plan continues to be a background of herd immunity, and hiding the impact of Brexit behind a very convenient Covid curtain.
Right on, Richard. Your penultimate paragraph hits it spot on. Johnson even said it himself once — he likes chaos because that means that people will have to look to him for ‘solutions’. I wonder whether Gove would be interested in this mess. I have a feeling that he may be so greedily ambitious that he would take the job on. And he could be worse. No, … wait.
If we wish to understand Johnson’s actions we need to know who has power over him. I would suggest the following (incomplete) list as I know that you like lists:
1: Conservative and Unionist party donors such as food and drinks businesses, commercial property landlords and construction companies. All of whom would be negatively affected by stricter covid prevention measures.
2: Conservative and Unionist MPs who keep him in position for their own gain. He may be a buffoon but he is useful shield for their own nefarious activities.
3: The Conservative and Unionist party’s view that the NHS is the physical embodiment of socialism. Their Friedmanesque ideology hates that and they wish to sell it off to their corporate donors, at a vastly undervalued price, then lease those services (which we paid for) back to us at a significant mark up. No doubt there will be plenty non executive directorships to be had on those company boards for complicit MPs.
So I would suggest that it it is not incompetence which drives Johnson, rather naked self interest. In true Conservative and Unionist style
Your first point is interesting. I recently came across a paper on Adam Smith (who was discussed recently on this blog) which, after detailing his observations that ‘those who live by profit’ have the ear of Parliament, quotes this:
“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought
always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having
been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most
suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the
same with that of the publick, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to
oppress the publick, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and
oppressed it.”
The paper is by Deborah Boucoyannis 2013
http://dboucoyannis.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/9/3/13938365/smith_paper_oct_2013.pdf
I found it an interesting read in view of previous discussions and my rather limited reading of The Wealth of Nations. (It’s very wordy)
Thanks
I think it was in a rare moment of honesty that Dominic Cummings described Bojo and crew as a 3D Government – Deny, Delay & Deflect.
Having been found to display a “profound lack of transparency” by yet another high court judge the Government is looking into the operations of the FOI ‘clearing house’ run by Mr Gove. The kind of thing the judge didn’t like was acting purely to prevent exposure to censure. For instance “The ‘Clearing House’ unit encouraged the Treasury to avoid releasing historic documents about litigation taken by haemophiliacs infected by HIV in the early 1990s – including a private acknowledgement from then Conservative health secretary, Ken Clarke, that some health authorities had been negligent when treating haemophiliacs with contaminated blood.” . The judge was not impressed that “a Times journalist found that one of his FOI requests to the Environment Agency was flagged to the Clearing House as sensitive because the customer is a journalist” ( both quotes from Open Democracy)
The solution the Government has found would appear to be to appoint a new Information Commissioner to oversee things. But, as usual for this elite, the new Information Commissioner, John Edwards like the BBC DG appears to be a sympathetic political appointment. Mr Edwards feels that the public should pay the full cost of meeting the requirements of a Freedom of Information request (FOI). That is what he told the Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
Apparently nobody has told Mr Edwards that the public already do meet the cost through taxation. Nobody has pointed out that the act carries subtle clues of its intentions in its name. FREEDOM of INFORMATION. He was one commentator said “more concerned with hypothetical abuse by the public rather than the demonstrable abuse of the process by public authorities.” (mySociety)
This is the mushroom principle of Government. Keep the electorate in the dark and shovel manure on their heads from time to time.
I made my opinion of Johnson the BrexShit clown clear many times so won’t repeat it. He is clearly ready to wander off to his promised billionaire lifestyle out of the public gaze as Blair and Cameron camps have.
Today it is the escalation of the manufactured inflation that is of interest – the inevitable ‘collapse’ of all these new tangled companies offering ‘cheaper’ Energy.
Why weren’t they hedged against rising prices? Now millions will be put on the highest rates that the monopolist suppliers have – bingo even more inflation- the BoE will get its way and light the blue touch paper of interest rates and the inevitable ‘bust’ which will allow the usual suspects to gather up the assets that will be available in so many bankruptcies.
But as usual the Narrative Manufacturers always have the squirrel to pint at or dead-cat to throw the n the breakfast table – today was Bozo’s speech to Tory donors a month ago!
It is also what is needed to divert the peoples attention as the century of dead ‘heroes’ in the MIddle East escapades ends in a rout and retreat leaving some private City States behind. That starts with the Saudi Proxy Princelings suddenly waking up and realising they are just expendable proxies and all the trillions they have earned and spent on Western Armaments and mercenaries really was just a long con.
Richard in my view is right to point out this sort of stupidity from Johnson and his fellow social luddites.
Just look at this quote from the book ‘Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty & Solidarity’ (2020) by Timothy Snyder pp. 140-141:
‘ The most influential of market economists Fredrich Hayek, opposed oligopoly or ownership by the few, which he compared to Soviet central planning. Our (referring now to American medicine – PSR) medical industrial complex is a set of oligopolies. Our big data industry is also a set of oligopolies. Hayek is right: they should be broken up. In his most famous work, ‘The Road to Serfdom’, Hayek worried about a “dispossessed middle class” which commercial medicine is now creating. He took for granted that in civilized countries everyone would have access to care. “The case for the State’s helping to organise a comprehensive system of social insurance” as he wrote, “is very strong”. He knew that ” there is no contradiction between the state’s providing greater security in this way and the preservation of personal freedom”.
Snyder’s notes quote from The Road to Serfdom, ed. Bruce Caldwell (2017/1944), University of Chicago Press, pp. 207, 215, 148-49.
I’ve added this as a comment because it seems to me that like Adam Smith, even Hayek is misquoted by the vested self interests of greedy people who are prepared to make money out of anything – including the medical needs of others. Hayek seemed to a have a moral line on this issues. His so-called ‘followers’ both in the U.S and the UK obviously don’t and seem to have taken Hayek’s ideas further than maybe he would have liked?.
And, if we apply Hayek’s thoughts to Johnson and Co, we see what can only be described as an abrogation of responsibility and wisdom for the way in which the Tories have managed the NHS since 2010 (if not before) and Covid-19.
Hayek equates freedom from disease (one of the UK post war 5 Giants that helped to justify the free NHS) as an essential freedom for individuals and acknowledges the State’s role in this.
Well, well. Who’d have thought it eh?
Upon reflection, modern Neo-libs are just parasites who use their wealth and power to make the world as they want it and call the shots.
It’s a circular arrangement – the ultimate parasites being enabled by the ultimate day-dreamers – politicians of nearly all castes – whose ignorant dream-worlds are funded by the parasites in an ‘anything goes’ economy.
By the way, tying in with my Snyder quote about Hayek, I am now on page 158 of ‘The Road from Mont Pelerin’ (2015) in Chapter 4 about Neo-liberalism in America (van Horn & Mirowski).
It seems that when the Volker Fund was setting up and financing the economics department at the University of Chicago in support of neoliberal ideas, it was a major player in influencing the direction of the proposed school.
It’s two drivers were (1) enabling American corporations to take advantage of the economic chaos of the second world war and achieve hegemony (make the most of – capitalize on – the lack of competition in the post war world) and (2) an absolute ideological rejection of anything that seemed remotely ‘socialist’ as informed by the emergent Cold War with Russia and its allies.
The result according to Mirowski and von Horn was a particular American version of Neo-liberalism that ‘even eventually Hayek , would just have to learn to adjust to the emergent characteristic doctrines of neoliberalism”.
So, even the mighty Hayek had his work hijacked by powerful others in the pursuit of unfair competition and sheer anti-socialist ideology with seemingly no room for compromise.
Sound familiar at all?
It seems that there is a neoliberalism and a more extreme version that we are actually living with today that is firmly American in its genesis.
Richard, back to your original point about Boris and planning: The NHS, I picked this up from a review of the NHS Communications’ notice of the 40 hospital builds, which is entitled
NEW HOSPITAL PROGRAMME COMMUNICATIONS PLAYBOOK. Note the two dates, i.e. publication of the document and the deadline for the expressions of interest.
GOV.UK – NHS 40 new hospitals plan
Health Infrastructure Plan: selection process for the next 8 new hospitals
Updated 9 September 2021
Trusts were invited to submit a completed expression of interest form
to futurenewhospitals@dhsc.gov.uk by midday on 9 September 2021.
Tories don’t plan anything to do with public services or the public good, they are private profiteers that rely on market idiology , they do what their paymasters tell them.
We have witnessed masses of covid deaths without so much as a whimper from the public at large, so from their point of view, there is no need to change a habit of a lifetime.