I worry about how politics might come out on the other side of omicron. Can democracy survive the idiots that we have in the Commons?

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I have already noted this morning that exceptionally serious scientists and the UK's chief medical officers all agree that we face the risk of the NHS being entirely overwhelmed by the Covid crisis that we now face. The scale of risk is utterly unprecedented.

In the face of this we get the likes of Marcus Fysh MP who has said in the Express that:

Yesterday on the BBC he said:

And this from a man who voted for voter ID to be required in future elections. His choice of 'papers please' appears to be entirely dependent upon whether it is his freedom that is being impinged, or not.

As Nick Robinson of the BBC noted:

And as Prof Colin Talbot of the University of Manchester noted:

Defeating an enemy sometimes requires actions that are necessary even if normally undesirable, such is the scale of the threat.

But, apparently, we do not face a threat from omicron according to these MPs.  Note this crass tweet from last night:

It so happens that I agree that vaccine passports are not a great idea. They will not stop the spread of covid. The evidence of that is now so clear that we should instead shut all hospitality and places of mass entertainment now and require that people work from home. And we should definitely be closing schools and universities with no plan that they will reopen in January until the risk has abated, as it eventually will if that is what we do.

The government is nowhere near discussing these absolute necessities, which is what they are.

Nor, come to that is Labour. It is calling this wrong.

Instead, we have politicians frightened to use the evidence that now unambiguously exists to both demand and then decide upon the appropriate measures that we need to address the crisis that we face, which they are utterly unwilling to do.

How politics might come out the other side of this I do not know. I can only hope that something better might. But I fear it will cost a lot of lives to get to that point. If it does we will have a duty to deliver the changes to make sure this never happens again.


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