Covid-19 Heroes and Villains

It’s been a while.  I last posted a blog here, back in June 2018 and since then have managed to contain my utterings to 120 and then 240 characters but..  That just isn’t enough.

What follows mostly applies to the UK but I suppose some will resonate in other countries.

Like so many other people, I have been in ‘lockdown’ since the middle of March.  I am a Type 2 diabetic (my own fault) and so have been at home since March 17.  If the sometimes ‘echo chamber’ that is Twitter, is anything to go by, then most people in the UK, outside of London and certain communities and self-imposed ghettos, have observed the rules on social distancing. 

Our police have sometimes been over-zealous in interpreting the laws and thereby opening themselves to ridicule – exactly what is wrong with going for a walk in the wide-open spaces of a National Park?  There continues to be a danger that support for the restrictions will diminish, when people see Londoners gathering en-masse, along with police and other emergency services personnel on Westminster Bridge, sometimes accompanied by the Met Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick (a Common Purpose appointment) or when they see churches and temples following the closure rules but mosques not. 

We’ll see how this pans out as we likely continue in some kind of lockdown for a while longer.  I sense that outside of London, people will follow the rules not because they’re a government diktat but simply because family and community mean so much more in the less metropolitan towns and villages.

Likewise I expect the weekly ‘clap for carers’ will continue as people genuinely want to show appreciation for ALL those who serve our local communities – be they nurses, doctors, police, fire fighters, refuse collectors, military personnel, shop workers or delivery drivers. 

I do wish though, that there was a way for this exercise to not be a ‘clap for the NHS’.  I certainly don’t clap for that organization. 

If you’re an NHS Procurement ‘Manager’ or Supply Chain executive – resign now.  If you’re an NHS trustee or Executive manager or director, resign now.  I certainly do NOT clap for you.  You have failed. 

There’s lots of ways to say that but that’s what it boils down to – complete and utter failure.  You haven’t done your job.  You have left us exposed to empty storerooms and warehouses and supply chains that simply don’t work.  You have exposed us to a supply situation where we depend upon throwaway PPE – I have absolutely no doubt that every one of these PC clowns will also be signed-up members of the Green lobby and regularly try to lecture the general public on the need to protect the planet by paying extra taxes and going back to a pre-industrial existence!

NHS Executives have failed in their duty.  They have been bailed out by the Government and the military but these Executives failed – they must resign or be fired.  Oh, and no special ‘Golden handshakes’, no pensions fully paid-up and sweet-heart redundancy-type severance payments.  They should just simply go.  I’ve said they should resign and if they had any sense of dignity, they would but, if they don’t, they should ALL be fired.  They have failed and must go.

Covid-19 has not all been about villains though. 

What’s that saying about ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’?  Well in the UK, we have had such men. 

Of course there’s Boris Johnson, our PM.  That Monday night, when it was announced he had been taken into intensive care – I can’t explain why but it felt so personal and like it was affecting a close member of my family.  Seeing him now on the road to recovery is like an analogy for the UK – we are starting to come out of this.  It is a journey and we don’t know how long it will take and we do know that there will be bumps long the way (2^nd and 3^rd wave, etc.) but we have turned the corner.

Matt Hancock (apparently connected to the Eyam Hancock’s – look it up!) our Health Secretary and Rishi Sunak, our Chancellor have stepped-up and performed well.  By this I mean, they’ve considered what the country needs and delivered it.  They haven’t gone about pointing fingers and laying blame – they’ve just got on and done their best.  As have their teams and many other Government ministers.

It’s hardly worth mentioning the military – for them it was ‘just another day at the office’.  Every day, in every way they serve.  “Need a Nightingale Hospital built in days?  Okay step aside, give us a few electricians and plumbers and we’ll get it done” No fuss, no histrionics, just delivery – pure and simple.  And yet….  We’d have been in grave danger had they not stepped up and did their job – I am in no doubt that their work in logistics is what has led to PPE supplies getting delivered.  I hope that doesn’t sound like I take the military for granted.  I take every opportunity to thank them for their service and I recommend you do too.

Back to villains though – the media!  With a couple of exceptions, what an absolute shower.  If the daily press briefings ended after the official statements, I would have all I need.  The inane questions, the search for a ‘gotcha’ moment has exposed the absolute weakness and anti-Government and anti-British sentiments of the media.  I appreciate that as we exit the worst of the Covid-19 crisis, the Government will have its hands full, but the ending of the TV Tax has to be very high on the agenda.  There is no way, people should be forced to pay for such Leftist bile, day in, day out. 

I’m not going to give the media villains the ‘oxygen of publicity’.  You know who they are!  Basic integrity and decency would oblige them to resign and enter a period of deep self-reflection but since when have ‘journalists’ had either integrity or decency?

The Labour Party are a mixture of heroes and villains.  Jon Ashworth the Shadow Health Secretary has performed well, on the whole, focusing on solutions rather than picking holes and pointing fingers.  The new Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer hasn’t done so well.  On the surface slightly supportive but then attacks the lockdown strategy and wants to know what the exit strategy is, and all the while brings forward nothing constructive to say or offer.

This place probably isn’t the best place to say what I think about the SNP.  However, if there was a political villain in chief, then Nicola Sturgeon would get the prize.  She attends secret COBRA meetings and then immediately blabs about the outcome – I shouldn’t be surprised, she has a habit of breaking confidences.  She has constantly sought to make political capital out of the crisis and to seek to differentiate the response in Scotland from that of England. 

Unfortunately, this has back-fired as the response of NHS Scotland, for which the Scottish Executive is responsible, has been woefully inadequate – even worse than that of NHS England.  I say unfortunate not out of any love for the SNP, but because the victims of their incompetence are the people of Scotland, especially those in care homes. 

The SNP have also failed to share out the funds sent from England in support of businesses and communities.  They have ‘form’ on this and so maybe it’s time for Westminster to bypass the Holyrood farce and manage these help programmes, directly.

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There are of course, other heroes.  People like Captain Tom Moore, who has raised more than £33 million and all those individuals up and down the country who are doing their bit, in their local communities, including the more than 750,000 volunteers in England who signed-up to help in just two or three days. 

At the end of the day, the real heroes have been the British people – not all of them, but the overwhelming majority – who have looked at the situation, listened to the experts and decided, we’re going to get through this.  We’ve faced adversity before and we have overcome.

As a great man said.  Tomorrow will be a good day.

Stay Home, save lives.

Policing and Numbers

900

Numbers can be important.

Remember that number.  900

One has to be aware that stories on Twitter gain a life and currency all of their own.  The same can be said, at least in part, by reports on MSM such as the BBC, SkyNews and ITV News and of course, when you add-in the potential of #FakeNews, it can be hard to believe anything that is reported, these days.

But 900.

Today’s news stories are full of the horrific tale of 90 year-old Iris Warner. She was apparently beaten, while in her bed, by someone who broke into her North London home.  The injuries she suffered are terrifyingly graphic – awful bruising on the face and limbs,  Simply awful.  The Metropolitan Police are investigating.

900.

We heard the story the other day, of a Polish immigrant lady of 100 years, who was attacked, while on her way to church, had her neck broken and has now died.  I suppose the death cannot be directly attributed to the attack but I can only begin to imagine the fear and the effect it had on that woman.  It must have been incredibly hard to have the will to live after surviving the Nazis, to then suffer so, in ‘peaceful’ Britain.

We have also heard from Cressida Dick, London’s Commissioner of Police – the head of the Metropolitan Police.  At a time, when we hear almost daily reports of stabbings and shootings, across London, when more than 60 people have been murdered, already this year, and, for a short time, the murder rate in London, was greater than in New York,  Ms Dick has said that London’s murder rates are ‘not that bad’.  She seemed to suggest that, since the murder rate, in 2006, was 250, for the whole year, that the reduction we are seeing now is something to be applauded.  Dare she say that to the families of the victims? 

Incidentally, for history buffs, 2006 was when London’s Mayor was another ‘right-on’ Labour extremist called Ken Livingstone, just as today it is Sadiq Khan.  So much easier to waffle-on about gender-free toilets and other issues or on Brexit, over which the London Mayor has no mandate whatsoever, than to actually do the job for which you were elected!

900

London’s violent crime wave – and do not for one minute think it is anything else – is down to three factors.

Immigrant gangs that are competing for supremacy and control of London’s trade in illegal drugs.

Metropolitan Police that are led by Common Purpose politically inspired chiefs who are more concerned with the media image of the police and forever posturing and virtue signaling and driving for ever increasing funding, than with actually fighting crime.

Politicians of all political hues who place the civil liberties of criminals above those of the general population.

900

Doesn’t it amaze you, how the police can find the funds to re-paint their cars to celebrate Gay Pride and steward marches that promote virulent anti-Semitism but can’t actually patrol the streets?

How do you feel, when politicians, who have armed police guarding them, preach about the need for tolerance and how ‘stop and search’ is so wrong?

That number, 900.  That is the number of Metropolitan Police that are assigned to desks to monitor the internet for hate crime.  How ‘hate crime’ is defined is between the Police and the Crown Prosecution Service.  You must remember the CPS – they’re the ones who have been so politically motivated to pursue and punish rapists that they regularly don’t fulfill their statutory duty to hand over to the defence, any information that might aid the defence – got to get those convictions, at any cost! 

But those 900 police – sitting in front of computer screens and looking for ‘offensive’ words which someone might claim ‘hurt’ them.  I’d venture to suggest that a knife inserted into the abdomen or acid splashed into the face are somewhat more hurtful than a word or two in a Tweet. That’s the trouble with seeing through the idiocy of political correctness.

I was going to write about a number other than 900. 

I was going to write about the number 72.  That’s the ‘alleged’ number of victims of the Grenfell Tower fire.  I say ’alleged’ because it now seems that some of those of whom it was claimed they died in the fire, and for whom their families have made compensation claims, didn’t actually exist or live in Grenfell Tower.  The number of false claims, by people who abuse the overwhelming sense of human solidarity that was shown after the fire, is sickening.  I have lost count of that number but it’s in double digits, I believe.

I suggest that having those 900 police on the streets instead of behind a desk might deter some gang member from committing murder. 

I suggest that having police target ‘stop and search’ and dramatically increase its deployment might save lives and certainly wouldn’t unduly hamper the lives of most law-abiding citizens.  Indeed, many would say, if it took guns and knives off of the streets of our cities, then the occasional inconvenience is a price worth paying.

The ‘inconvenience’ of stop and search could be minimized if the police acted based on profiling of criminals.  That 70 year-old nun or the 100 year-old woman on her way to church, probably isn’t ‘packing’ but that wanna-be gangsta might be. 

I suggest that the police have a policy of relentlessly pursuing those moped-riding thugs that are terrorizing the streets.  Currently the police hold-off of full throttle pursuit (and the criminals know this) because the police are concerned about potential traffic accidents.

Of course to do this, would require resources.  So how about taking those 900 police – and that is just London – and putting them out on the street?  How about getting police off of Twitter and onto the streets – a visible deterrent to real crime instead of seeking out people who think ‘wrong’.

I would try to suggest that politicians change and ditch their PC obsession but looking at the anti-democratic activities of so many politicians, around Brexit,  one is fast coming to the conclusion that there are very few democratic politicians around these days and that for democracy to survive, a whole new political paradigm shift is needed.  But that’s another blog!

Naturally, I also suggest that Sadiq Khan resign or be impeached or somehow be legally removed from office and that Cressida Dick be fired.  Indeed, based on comments from other top police leaders, I’d suggest that all Police Chiefs and their deputies should be fired and that one requirement for their successor is that they weren’t fast tracked into the job.

Two other numbers to contemplate, when you hear people say that we need these 900 Metropolitan Police to combat right-wing extremism on Twitter.  34 and 1.  34 is the number of innocent people killed last year, in the UK, in terror attacks perpetrated in the name of the religion we cannot name.  1 is the murder of an innocent victim, some say, racist-inspired, outside Finsbury Park mosque.  

To me though, that makes one number 35 - 35 innocent victims, who, for all of the attention of the internet watchers, weren't given the protection they deserve.  Just like Iris Warner wasn't and neither was Zofija Kaczan - that's the name of that 100 year old victim.