Failure Johnson MUST Get This Right - Or It’s Lockdown Four

Being sick of lockdown isn’t a feeling that is exclusively reserved for anti-lockdown Right Said Fred fans. 

I miss going round a friends house for coffee. I miss getting involved in volunteering. I miss visiting friends and family, dotted around Plague Island. I miss driving to Asda without wondering if I’ll get pulled by an over-enthusiastic police officer. 

The things we used to take for granted seem like a distant memory after eleven long months and three half-hearted lockdowns - the most recent being the most shambolic of them all. 

Be in no doubt, the light on the horizon is brighter than yesterday, but we’re not there yet, and if we think we are, a fourth lockdown goes from a possibility to an inevitability. 

My qualifications? None. I am as much an epidemiologist as Keir Starmer is a socialist. What I know about virology could be listed on a postage stamp. 

But that doesn’t rule me out from having an opinion, looking at the previous failures of the last eleven months, and pointing out the blindingly obvious. 

The government has got very little right, from lockdown timings to confused public messaging and from the reopening of schools to spending £12 billion on a test and trace contact system that remains the laughing stock of the civilised world. 

So why would you have any faith in them to get the ‘return to normality’ right? I haven’t, and if you have, I’m afraid you have either not been paying attention, or you are the Labour leadership. 

The devastation of the last eleven months cannot be solved in days and weeks. It is necessary to go gently and slowly. We need to take baby steps. Progress, not perfection, is what we should be asking of ourselves. Even baby steps mean you are still moving forwards. 

A handful of Tory MPs are banging on the Prime Minister's door, demanding an end to the current restrictions. Many of them are the same headbangers that sold you the lie about taking back control and free sovereignty for the many, so there’s no point paying any attention to them - and that includes you, Boris Johnson, because if you haven’t “learnt the lessons” by now, we will end up with a fourth national lockdown. 

Johnson must listen to the medical professionals that are warning him of the danger of screwing it up. Our hospitals are still under immense pressure, and they simply will not be able to cope with another wave of the deadly virus. 

Who do you listen to? 

The medical professionals and the scientists? Or do you listen to a backbench MP that doesn’t give a shit whether you are dead or alive, as long as they get to wave their silly little flag and masturbate furiously to the Last Night of The Proms? 

Hmmm, it’s a toughie. 

The NHS vaccine rollout is far from perfect, but it is happening - that’s what I mean about progress over perfection. Compare it to the Serco test and trace system - the one that had you booking a 500 mile round trip to get a test for your poorly child - and the vaccine roll out looks like our greatest national achievement since the creation of the National Health Service. 

We’re living at the mercy of the pain, and the fear of the unknown. We cannot go on like this. It is in all of our interests for the vaccination rollout to be a success. 

We all think and talk about our physical health when we talk about Covid, but we spend very little time talking about the impact of lockdowns on our mental health, unless the haunted pogo stick, Gavin Williamson, wants to use it as a reason to underline the importance of getting “poor and vulnerable”children back to school as quickly as possible. 

That’s the same children they promised to supply a tablet or laptop, so remote learning was possible - but just reclassified them in the same bracket as the children of key workers - so they have to go to school instead. Well done to the local authorities, charities and community groups that stepped up to fill the gaping void left by Her Majesty’s government. 

That’s also the same poor and vulnerable children they had to be forced into feeding by a nice young lad named Marcus Rashford. My husband is a lifelong Liverpool fan - who are massive rivals of Rashford’s team, Manchester United - and even he thinks Rashford is an absolutely brilliant human being. 

And let’s not forget, these are the same poor and vulnerable children that were sent food parcels that resembled the leftovers of something you would feed to pigs down on the farm. 

The only positive to come from the utterly shameful episode was the highlighting of why activism is so important. The lovely Roadside Mum completely changed the narrative with her relentless campaign to expose the inadequate, meagre scraps of food being supplied on behalf of the government. One woman and her quest to put right an obvious wrong served the government a bloody nose, and she’ll have my eternal respect for that. 

One thing I will ask about gormless Gavin Williamson, if he was as concerned about the welfare of poor and vulnerable children as he claims to be and if he was *that* concerned about them getting a decent dinner, why did the Poundshop Frank Spencer vote to cut benefits on FIFTY ONE occasions? 

See, one mention of Williamson and I go right off on one. In any other line of work he would be long gone. But he’s a former Tory whip, so he knows the wrongdoings of many of his colleagues, which ensures he will be somewhere near the top of government for as long as he wants to be, to the demonstrable detriment of the British people. 

Do you think he sold many fireplaces? 

Moving on from Williamson, I sincerely hope the government put the needs of mental health sufferers at the top of their agenda. The isolating and the loneliness isn’t a new thing by any means, but for many it has added another layer of darkness and anxiety in what can often feel like a fucking awful world to live in. 

Instead of hiring a bloody ludicrous ‘free-speech champion’, put your resources into hiring a mental health champion, because there isn’t a vaccine for mental illness. We’ll need more than one. 

1 in 4 people will experience a mental health problem of some kind each year in England.

1 in 6 people report experiencing a common mental health problem (like anxiety and depression) in any given week in England. 

As I said, we need more than one, we will need an army of mental health champions, because if we don’t give the same attention to PTSD, panic disorder, BPD, phobias, depression, OCD and bipolar disorder as we give to diabetes, heart disease and a wide range of life-ending illnesses, we will have failed. 

At this moment in time, we are failing miserably. What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, and more unashamed conversation - a national conversation. 

When my chance to get vaccinated arrives, I’ll be there, because I want to do the things that we used to do. I’m dying to have a cuppa with some of you guys, you know who you are, but I know you agree with making sure we can walk before we try to run, and if we can’t walk we have to make sure we can stand. One step at a time, one jab is one small step towards that cup of tea, the second jab arrives and you can almost see the chocolate hobnobs on the horizon. 

Let’s get this right. Progress, not perfection. 

You cannot trust the government to get anything right. The evidence is out there for all to see. 

While the middle-classes were getting £10 off at Beefeater, the upper-classes were, and still are, cashing in on huge contracts for the supply of PPE. But what about the rest of us? 

The extra £20 a week for those in receipt of Universal Credit is set to end in April, plunging another 420,000 children into poverty. Others in receipt of legacy benefits such as ESA haven’t seen an additional penny, and these are sick and disabled people, often the ones to carry the burden of the cuts. 

We have to get this right. A further 799 Covid deaths have been announced today. Now isn’t the time for the better-off to boast about their holiday plans, and it’s certainly not a time to listen to the likes of Farage and Fox, Reclaim, Reform, whatever they’re called. Pointless attention whores that would attend the opening of an envelope. 

Now is the time to ensure we don’t have to sleepwalk into a fourth lockdown. 

Now is the time to ensure we protect the physical and mental wellbeing of the millions and millions of people affected by the deadly virus. 

Now is the time for the Labour Party to abandon any deluded visions of the supposed saviour Mandelson, and embrace the only saviour. 

And that is socialism. 

Take care one and all, this is not the end and it is not the beginning, but we’re getting there. 

Rachael x

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