The Hour has come! Where’s the Man?

“Cometh the hour cometh the man.”

I’m not much given to quoting from the bible, it is prone to contradicting itself, and, in any case, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to suppose that just because some emergency arises there is any mechanism by which “the man” should automatically, miraculously and serendipitously appear. Today, with the arrival of a deadly pandemic that has infected the entire inhabited world “the Hour” is definitely here, so where’s “the Man”? Is “the Man” Boris Johnson?

If you, as a non-aviation specialist, get on a plane, go up to the cockpit and tell the pilot to “pull that lever”, “press that button” and  “flip that switch”, the likelihood is that you and everyone else on the plane will crash and burn. We all have to defer to specialists when we do not have the expertise ourselves, but during the coronavirus crisis, it seems that Johnson’s hands were pulling the levers. Political correspondent Mikey Smith on the Daily Mirror website claims that Johnson and his ministers:

“…were told in July that the worst case was avoidable – if their advice was followed. They urged ministers not to rush to reopen schools and universities, not to plan a relaxation over Christmas and to keep people working from home wherever possible. But in each case, Mr Johnson’s government ignored the advice – and in each case had to perform u-turns as transmission rates rose.”

What was driving this policy of science denial? In the sitcom, Only Fools and horses, Derek Trotter’s misplaced “This time next year we’ll be millionaires” optimism is a source of one of the series most effective comic tropes. Unfortunately, Boris Johnson’s famous “Dell Boy” optimism is rather less funny, when the figures show that this country has the worst death rate in Europe, and one of the worst in the entire world. Johnson’s lever pulling may well have cost the lives of tens of thousands of British people.

It may, however, be too simplistic to claim that that the failure is down to the individual peccadillos of one person. It could be argued that there is a more sinister underlying mentality infecting the cabal of failure that is currently running our country. Johnson might well have been restrained by the good and sensible advice of more restrained and wiser colleagues. He wasn’t, so why not?

The political system in this country is founded on the concept of winners and losers. The fact that this government sees itself as the winners of the last election, in their minds, gives them complete entitlement. They have the right to fly the plane and to hell with anyone who tries to tell them which way to go. And the “right” direction for them is set out in Conservative Party ideology that favours free market economics, individual freedom and most of all serving the god of the economy.

Politics is not a game. The primary role of political parties ought to be to serve the country, not to win the political equivalent of the FA Cup, especially when we are presented with a corrupt political system that, in the last election, gave the winning party a grotesquely large majority when it only won 47% of the vote. To put this another way, most people in the country did not vote for the Tories but ended up with them in charge anyway. One can only hope that the public will finally see sense, and agree to get rid of competitive elitism and reform a voting system that is geared towards political medal winning instead of what is best for the county.