Author: Harry Paterson

Incredibly, Dominic Cummings and his charge, Boris Johnson, the putative Prime Minister, still have their defenders. My own MP here in Broxtowe, Darren Henry, slavishly trotted out the party line he’d been given following a Zoom conference for backbench grunts yesterday. As anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the gutless, near-invisible and entirely useless Henry might imagine, he fell unquestioningly into line behind Cummings. As instructed by his party capos. If an independent thought ever found its way into the seemingly infinite chasm that exists between Henry’s ears it would surely die of loneliness. Emily Maitlis he is not. Which is not a particularly high bar.

Readers may recall the temporarily embarrassed Newsnight host enthusiastically leading a charge against Jeremy Corbyn, set against a mocked-up background of the Kremlin; all lurid reds and agitprop imagery, in an infamous episode of the BBC’s current affairs program. Ridiculously, even the cap Corbyn had sported in the image had been altered to emphasise its Lenin-like qualities. To no one’s surprise, such treatment of the Leader of the Opposition breached no BBC impartiality rules. Unlike Maitlis’s opening monologue addressing the Cummings affair, which drew the fire of the government and resulted in her replacement by the, one presumes, Tory-approved Katie Razzall.

So far so predictable. Less understandable, however, are the strident defenders of Cummings amongst the wider public. As if we should all just uncomplainingly accept this ongoing clown car-crash of hubris, criminal negligence and staggering incompetence. It is, apparently, time to move on.

Any democracy worth a damn, even the tawdry, patronage-ridden, class-dominated embarrassment that is Britain, needs a questioning and fearless press to speak truth to power and hold governments to account.

That anyone could be indignant at the toothless, Tory-dominated public relations courtiers that pass for real journalists in this servile nation is just another mark of how low we’ve sunk; how little we value ourselves and how eagerly we kiss the boots that kick us.

It isn’t the job of real journalists to uncritically relay government press releases. It isn’t their job to be sycophantic cheerleaders for the establishment. It is their job to unflinchingly tell the truth to the public. That a rare example of a British broadcast journalist doing just that can excite such ire is an appalling indictment of us all. We are kittens led by donkeys. The furious public backlash against Cummings and Johnson, however, points to our capacity to become lions. Given the next four years will see the establishment seek to recoup their recent losses and balance the books on the backs of the rest of us, that feline metamorphosis now assumes even greater urgency.

I’ve just watched a report on Sky about the current PPE scandal. I watched doctors and nurses cutting up binbags and other assorted crap to fashion their own.

I cannot even imagine the sheer guts, the humanity, the selflessness of these people.

Imagine going to work, exposed, unprotected and risking your life to save many of those responsible for voting you into this horrowshow in the first place.

Watching patients die, watching your colleagues die, clocking off spent and shattered, wondering if you now have a Corona time-bomb ticking away inside you.

And then being told the time to discuss a wage you can actually live on is not now; being patronised on the correct use of the PPE you don’t have by a Tory Health Secretary even worse than Jeremy Hunt; watching the media fawn over a Prime Minister whose staggering hubris and incompetence led to his own infection after he and his mates cheered when they blocked your payrise.

Watching your foreign-born colleagues hounded and bullied from the country they thought was home by empathy-free racists masquerading as a government.

And still you turn up to work. Still you do your duty. Day after day, shift after shift.

I don’t know how you do it. I really don’t. I only know that this nasty little rock doesn’t deserve you.

Eventually, Boris Johnson resumes ‘work.’

Thanks to him and his fellow Eton Rifle eugenicists, UK’s death toll is the highest in Europe.

No need for all that mass testing, contact tracing and quarantine nonsense. We’re British. We know better.

Urged on by Sir Kier Starmer an ‘Exit Strategy’ is formulated; we’re all forced back to work early to die for The Economy.

Starmer continues to be ‘constructive’ and act ‘in the national interest.’ i.e. he doesn’t call for a public enquiry, he doesn’t demand Johnson and Hancock’s resignations but he is ‘deeply sad’ so many have died. So that’s OK.

Johnson introduces Austerity V2 to recoup his mates’ losses for them. Rachel Reeves thinks the measures don’t go far enough.

The bootlickers vote the Tories back in for a second term.

Austerity V2 kills another couple of hundred thousand people.

Bootlickers go ‘ah but how much worse would it have been with Corbyn in charge?’ There are some racist non-sequiturs about Diane Abbott, flags and assorted drivel.

Hundreds of thousands leave the Labour Party, it reduces to an England-only rump of middle-management centrists.

Unemployment, homelessness and poverty reach even greater levels.

The NHS continues its Tory-driven death spiral. Salami-slicing privitisation continues apace.

The servile electorate, face down, eagerly lapping Etonian shoe-leather, pauses only to denounce opposition voices as ‘traitors’ ‘communists’ & ‘snowflakes.’

Repeat to fade.

If you want a vision of the future, picture a Union Jack-boot stamping on the face of an NHS nurse. Forever.

Welcome to The Great British Death Cult.

Clapping for the NHS on our street was… interesting. I was thinking of my daughter and her fella, NHS nurses, risking their lives to save others. While choking on the rage and contempt induced by Tory-voting neighbours having the brass neck to join in. These people are morally and materially responsible for the NHS sagging on its knees and my daughter, Lorna, and her partner, Ben, facing increased danger, stress and exhaustion. If any of them were struck down Lorna and Ben would give them 100%. Because they’ve got humanity to spare. Me? Take a wild guess…

Next week, stay the hell inside.

And then there was the Prime Minister. A Conservative Prime Minister. Clapping on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street. On the same day that his government had rejected an opportunity to quickly procure desperately needed ventilators. Because it didn’t fit with their anti-E.U. dogma and denied one of their nom-dom backers the opportunity to make a few quid. An act of brazen and shameless hypocrisy, breathtaking even by the standards of the Conservative Party. These are the people who cheered and jeered and celebrated when nurses were denied a pay rise; whose previous leader, Theresa May, sneered at a desperate nurse “There is no magic money-tree.” Well, as we’ve seen, when it comes to helping the rich there is a veritable orchard at the back of 10 Downing Street. The money is there. It’s always there. The only thing required is the moral will to spend it for the benefit of us all. NHS staff, however, can wear bin-bags and risk death in lieu of the correct PPE. It makes you proud to be British, doesn’t it?

And then there are the sanctimonious fools who tell us that we shouldn’t make the NHS political. The NHS is political and always will be because it is the battlefield on which two radically opposed ideologies fight. The Tories despise the NHS; they hate it. They voted against its creation every step of the way and it’s why they’ve sliced-and-diced and privatised and underfunded it at every opportunity since. Because it is an affront to everything that is fundamental to the Tory party; that everything, even our very lives, should only ever be an opportunity for someone to make a profit.

It was created and should be defended ferociously for the simple moral truth that the right to be alive should not be allocated according to the depth of people’s pockets. It’s the most meaningless and stupid thing to say it shouldn’t be politicised. Yes, the Tories would love that, wouldn’t they? To reduce the NHS to purely a question of affordability; to strip it of its totemic power as a signpost to an entirely different way for humanity to organise itself; common ownership based on the needs of the many, not the profit of a few.

Sadly, England is stuffed with spiteful and terminally stupid forelock-tuggers. People who, consistently at every opportunity, prefer to bite the hand that feeds them but lick the boots that kick them. If Boris Johnson wrapped COVID-19 in a Union Jack, England’s bootlickers would slurp it up off a toilet seat in Wuhan fishmarket faster than they’d vote for taxing their beloved masters properly to fund the NHS.

So clap all you like, Tory stooges. Indulge in your insincere virtue-signalling and your shallow and meaningless public displays but let’s leave the last word to Ben, a community nurse from Nottingham: “Appreciate the applause but if we could all vote for a political party that properly funds the NHS that would be an even better show of appreciation…”