What We Gotta Do

Yet again the Government has reacted to a spike in the COVID figures rather than following the advice of anyone with an IQ of greater than that of a cactus, so a whole lot of people just got told that either their christmas plans now have to change entirely within the week, or, they don't get christmas plans at all.

Because, you know. We can't just do the smart thing first. We have to reject the smart thing constantly, reject it and reject it until we are blue in the face, and then - three days after the most forceful rejection of the opposition that we can muster - we capitulate and do the smart thing. In a perfect impression of a stubborn child that knows it should do a task but doesn't want to because it was just asked to.

Boris and his mob of cronies commands zero respect and has zero position of authority. They pissed all that way. Mostly through spending most of their current time handing out contracts to their mates and deliberately sabotaging any hope of a Brexit deal, shrugging their shoulders and scoffing as they vote for children to have no food and then get angry when a charity whose aim is to feed hungry children intercedes to do just that.

Where does that leave us?

It leaves us with each other.

This is the camaraderie found in places of hardship. This is the partnership forged by teams that have to work under pressure. I've blogged before about work ethic being less a promise to serve your boss and more a promise to help your coworkers, and that's where we are, right now.

So what do we do?

Pay attention, because this may be the only time I ever do this:

We embody part of the spirit of Christmas, by being kind and thoughtful to others.

...yeah yeah I know, usually I'm the Grinchiest man on earth but - but if there's any one way I can weaponise Christmas into something that will actually help us as a people, then I think I have to, right?

What do I mean when I say that?

I mean that right now, everyone is going to be under a significant stress. Not knowing what the rules are going to be from week to week and day to day - that is stressful even if you are in the lowest tier like me. Even if you don't have an understanding and smart employer like me. I am lucky, very, very lucky. Most people I know aren't so lucky.

I understand that there will be temptation. The Government doesn't know what it is on about, so why not just do whatever we want? Go see Nan? Have a huge party?

Herein is the spirit of Christmas - which isn't "get pissed and have whatever fun we want at any cost". It's remembering those less fortunate than you.

That means, making the sacrifice of doing the smart thing, to protect the lives of everyone you may come into contact with. Be more understanding of others as they do their best under the same circumstances. Shop workers and service personnel aren't your enemy. They are honestly doing their best. We're all Sisyphus right now, pushing that big-ass rock up a hill.

The difference is that sooner or later, that rock will reach the top. We just have to keep right on pushing.

The biggest gift you can give this year is thoughtfulness. The best thing? It doesn't cost a penny.

And never forget that all of this could have been avoided if our Government had actually governed, and not decided to gamble with our lives.

Merry Christmas.

Thank you for reading. Support your humble author via Patreon or Kofi, or follow social media on the right. See you next week.

Creepy Creepy Creep

Anyone ever seen a dog, when it is told it can't do or have something?

You ever seen them do the thing where they look a bit guilty... but don't back off, don't go off to do something else, they just kind of... linger? Just wait about?

If they're told to not eat something, have you ever seen them just... sniff at it? Just look at it? Oh, not EATING it, oh no no no! Good dog, told NOT to eat. Not eating. No. But... looking is fine, right? Sniffing fine, right? Yes, that's just fine.

Have you ever watched as they try and do the thing that they were about to do? Just... maybe a bit sideways, maybe slowly, as if hoping that you won't notice, if you do it slowly enough?

Perhaps you have seen one of the braver canines pause when told no, take a moment, and then just do the thing anyway, because the five-second time period in which you meant the thing that you said has passed now?

I love dogs.

You ever noticed how kids do the same thing?

In a boring place like a waiting room or something, where they have to spend periods of time just being still and relatively quiet, and being considerate of other people, and in an environment that is so not-kid-friendly it hurts?

(Most kids anyway. When I was a kid I loved to just sit quietly, especially if I had a book. That explains a lot.)

So a child, who is understandably bored and antsy and not looking forward to having to see a doctor, is asked to stay still. Now they don't know how long this is for - waiting times in a doctors office are a mystery anyway, and a lot of children have the same timekeeping capacity as dogs. There are three times: The Past, The Next Five Seconds, and An Infinite Period Of Time Impossible To Imagine.

So the child becomes still. ...for a while.

How long until there is looking around and exhaling? Until there is leg-kicking? Until there is wriggling and shifting? How long until the kid is up on their knees on the seat, looking around, and complaining about being chastised because they haven't GONE anywhere, they're still HERE, they haven't even DONE anything...

But chastised all the same, the child becomes still, if sulky.

Until the cycle begins again.

Another thing that kids do - when told to not go upstairs, they will agree, but then maybe sit near the stairs, or on the stairs, and look up the stairs, and then sit a little bit up the stairs, and then have another look up the stairs, but they aren't UPstairs so - and then they're just upstairs because every step prior to that one was fine.

That's just kids, though. Right?

Now - and I apologise for this - picture our government.

Yep, that's them, right there. They look like the equivalent of Bulk & Skull from a UK variant of Power Rangers.

Now imagine that a massive pandemic starts spreading across the world, that you had months of warning about, and that your plan to deal with involves not helping anyone, not following the proposed pandemic measures from an exercise conducted in 2016, and instead just letting people die because it's more economical.

Yep.

Now obviously the general public heard about this and were outraged, so the government backpedalled on it immediately - and even claimed later that there was no herd immunity plan at all, despite there being clear evidence that there was, as reported here.

So measures are put in place - begrudgingly, and slowly, leading to a significant quantity of preventable infections and deaths. Doing what a lot of other countries did, sort of. The messaging coming out of the government was fairly limp, but what do you expect, they aren't very capable.

Some other countries enjoy success. Notably, countries that went in hard and fast on the lockdowns, and didn't faff around for ages saying "well maybe stay at home if you want but everything is fine".

Buuuuut...

...then what if we open just a little bit?

What if some of our advisers and MPs just... go and... you know? Go off and do things? Not EVERYONE obviously just some people?

What if we open just a little bit more, and change all of our signage from "red iconography stay home stay home STAY HOME" to "green iconography wishy washy be alert maybe"?

What if we open yet more, before we've even tabulated the figures from what happened the last time we relaxed lockdown?

What if we shift the onus of responsibility from the government onto the British public, so that it is the people's fault if anything goes wrong?

What if, after all of this, and after all of the half-assed messaging about staying home and wearing masks and social distancing, we then open pubs at 6am on 4th July - but INSIST that everyone will socially distance and wear masks and be safe and definitely do all the stuff they were told to because drunk people are famously good at following instructions? Just like reopening schools, filled with schoolkids who - also - are famously good at following instructions?

Just hoping that you wouldn't notice?

Because they haven't SAID "herd immunity", they're just doing everything NEAR herd immunity, and it's not THEIR fault that the public are doing what the public are doing, and they haven't even DONE anything...

Yeah, that's where we're at.

Setting a stopwatch for two weeks again. And if you've been to the pub, please don't take it personal if I don't want to hang out.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Heartwarming - But A Warning

I've spoken about charity before now, right over here. tl;dr - I argued that, if a government could be trusted, that centralised charity fundraising and spending would be better than 166,000 charities that currently exist in the UK. That was back in November 2018.

Who could have known that, just over a year later, the beginnings of a pandemic that would literally redefine all of our lives would begin in another part of the world?

I digress, we'll come back to that.

This is Captain Tom Moore.

He was born on 30th April 1920, in Keighley in Yorkshire. That's near Bradford - I'd been through there myself in my college days, I think. He went through officer training school, fought in the Second World War as part of the 145th Regiment Royal Armoured Corps and - later - the 146th Regiment Royal Armoured Corps. After the war, he became an instructor at the Armoured Fighting Vehicle School at Bovington - yes, where the Tank Museum is now (and also Monkey World). He was awarded several medals, including the Burma Star, and he used to race motorbikes.

That probably isn't what most of you know this chap for, though.

Let me get you a more recent picture.

Captain Tom is currently raising funds for the NHS; he is walking the length of his garden - 25 meters - a hundred times before his hundredth birthday, which as of the writing of this blog will be in a week and a half. Having actually hit his goal, he says he will keep going, to raise further funds for the NHS.

Not that he has done terribly badly in terms of what he has raised already, literally at time of typing.

Yes, that is damn near £26 million. Quite a feat, for a man of 99 years of age, and a heartwarming and timely reminder that the people of this country are a giving and kind people, for the most part. You can hear it, every Thursday evening, if you listen: people applauding the workers of the NHS, for putting themselves at risk constantly, to save the rest of us.

But.

Why does a man who is almost a hundred years old have to walk over two and a half kilometres - that's a mile and a half in old money - to help fund our National Health Service?

See, I understand. We see what this guy is doing and it is a selfless and beautiful and courageous thing. He is doing something for the national good, and achieving something; but he is doing it because a need has been created and he is answering that need.

That need has been created by mismanagement and malice.

Look at your last payslip.

You should see an entry on there for National Insurance Contributions. Now, below a certain threshold, you don't pay anything toward it. Above a certain threshold, you pay a percentage on the amount you earn above that threshold. It's a somewhat progressive tax in terms of rate, though I would argue far more progressive in what it provides. Employers pay a contribution to National Insurance as well, which is frankly very smart - if your workforce has access to healthcare, you have a healthier workforce. Shepherds tending their flocks, hmm?

In 2018/2019, NI Contributions totalled around £136 billion. For scale - the NHS budget for 2017/2018 was £124 billion, out of a total of £808 billion spent by the government that year.

And yet, the NHS is underfunded. It isn't sufficiently resourced to provide the service it is expected to. In 2017, Chris Hopson - the chief exec of NHS Providers - stated plainly that, while funding had increased by 1.3%, demand had increased by 5%. Calls for further funding have been repeatedly made since 2010, and obviously, totally ignored.

Even when it is made patently obvious that changes need to be made, that improvements must be made, in order to prevent something awful happening. Like Exercise Cygnus in 2016, which wasn't widely reported on at the time, but that you can read about here. Spoilers - not good. I'll come back to that.

The NHS is not ring-fenced away from cuts to front-line services, which have been a feature of governmental policy for a decade. It is under constant pressure to reduce costs, to operate within a restricted budget put upon it by outside, while dealing with an increased need for its services. It was being set up to fail long before now.

Why would that be the case?

Well, the list of former and current MPs that have ties to private healthcare include - but are not limited to - Boris Johnson (current Prime Minister), David Cameron (former Prime Minister), Matt Hancock (current Health Secretary), Jeremy Hunt (former Health Secretary), Andrew Lansley (also former Health Secretary), Gavin Williamson (Education Secretary), Sajid Javid (former Chancellor of the Exchequer), Jacob Rees-Mogg ("Leader" of the House of Commons), to name but a few.

Before the pandemic ever hit, our government was stacked with individuals who had the means to make the NHS fail and were receiving money or had literal business ties to groups that would profit from that happening. Here's some sources on that, here, and here.

Not ideal. Especially when they frame that deliberate reduction in funding as "giving hard-working people back some money," as Sajid Javid did here, while he was still Chancellor.

Now, what was it I was saying about Exercise Cygnus? Oh, right - the results of it were supressed because it went so badly, and have only started to come out now as the current pandemic really starts to hit home.

The strategy to counter a pandemic wasn't implemented. It was clear from the exercise that we would need more ventilators. So obviously the government didn't accept the EU's invitation to their own ventilator programme - there was some kind of communication error, apparently, and it definitely wasn't deliberate because to go cap-in-hand to the EU would make them look like idiots - and instead went to James Dyson, Brexiteer who recently started moving his operations into the EU. That isn't going very well, really. So. Everything that you would expect.

The NHS was already deliberately starved and depleted. It was already hurting, before Covid-19 reared its head. Our government's response was too slow - way too slow - and frankly absolutely callous. A combination of mismanagement and malice, as previously stated.

That is why Captain Tom has walked so far; that is why he has raised so much.

Do not forget.

Yes: it is heartwarming. Yes: it is brave. Yes: it is kind. But it is happening because of deliberate actions, undertaken by individuals who had the power to respond to this crisis long before it actually bit down.

Later, they will attempt to control the narrative.

Once it is over - once we are allowed out of our homes, and we are hugging in the street, and relieved it is over, and that the bodies aren't piling up any more - it will begin. The gaslighting. The spin. The rhetoric.

You will, of course, have the people that say it wasn't as bad as everyone said it would be, and that we worried over nothing. Because the measures undertaken prevented the worst possible result, the worst possible result apparently couldn't have happened. We all know at least one person like this. They also think that Y2K never happened, not because of the countless hours of unforgiving work that people put in to prevent the emergency, but because it wasn't going to happen anyway. Basic ignorance, but what can you do. They aren't going to be the real issue.

The real issue will come from those who know that they made decisions that killed tens of thousands and put the rest of us at risk - to protect their ideology, to protect their investments, to push their agenda. To make the money happy. To look like they were right all along. To grab what they can and get out before the axe comes down.

They will point at people like Captain Tom, and at the many other charitable donations that are being made, and they will say, with a straight face and with totally soulless eyes: This proves that the NHS doesn't work. This proves that it must be replaced. They will hope to erase themselves as the source of erosion, and paint themselves as the saviours of the nation, by selling out our healthcare to private companies that have been lining their pockets for decades.

Be ready. It will happen. It is, in part, already happening: Matt Hancock, current Health Secretary, literally blaming NHS staff for the lack of PPE that it is his department's job to provide. Very quick to point a finger there, Matt. Why, what have you been doing? What magic trick will you seek to perform, to prove that you know better, to prove that you can do this job?

Oh, you made a little badge for the social care sector.

A badge that they actually have to buy. They have to pay money to wear this poxy little badge that you have made. No equipment, no allocation of funds for protective gear or respirators, no pay rises, no actual recognition, no help, no hope. Just a badge, that you are charging them to wear.

I think that says it all.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.