WESTMINSTER (Labour Buzz) - Very quietly overnight, Matt Hancock announced new lockdown restrictions for people in the North of England, adding for good measure that, if anyone was looking for someone to blame, they should look in the mirror.
Hancock snuck the announcement out on Twitter last night telling people that by the time they work up they wouldn’t be allowed to have visitors in their home or garden unless of course that garden was attached to a pub.
In other words, if you’re planning a barbecue today and hope to have friends over, you’re about to break the law unless you all pile over to your local which will be full with lots of other people doing exactly the same thing.
Clear? No? Good.
To add insult into injury the announcement was made on the eve of Eid al-Adha so it’s just about plausible the announcement is just part of the government’s ongoing attempts to troll the Muslim community.
Hancock was quick to defend his last minute and somewhat muddled decision insisting that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the rules were ‘crystal clear’. On Sky News that the biggest risk of transmission is with people in their homes.
“The evidence shows that the biggest risk in terms of the spread of this virus across this area is a household transmission,” he said, “when people are going to see each other in each others’ homes … and also visiting friends and relatives.”
Not, in other words, when cramming into a restaurant or pub.
Aside from the confusion of the messaging and the fact that many public officials only heard about the change on television, it was the reason Hancock is giving for the move which requires close attention. Lockdown was coming back, he said because people were not adhering to social distancing.
In other words, this is your fault.
This has been and will continue to be a common feature of government messaging throughout this crisis. So far, they’ve tried to blame protestors, scientists, beachgoers, doctors, nurses, care workers. It was only a matter of time before they widened it out to the entire population as a whole.
This is, remember, comes from a Government which went into lockdown too late, told people to carry on shaking hands, pursued herd immunity even after studies showed it could kill hundreds of thousands of people, released infected patients into care homes, failed to implement testing, failed to buy PPE and pushed the country into opening up with infection rates still high.
And we didn’t even mention Barnard Castle, Dominic Cummings or eye tests of any kind.
It’s a government that has presided over the massive success of having one of the highest death rates in the world. At various stages, the UK has had the highest deaths per head of the population across the world.
To Boris Johnson, this constitutes a ‘massive success’, by which he means that even if the league table is for deaths, you should still try to be at the top of it.
The problem for this Government is that reality, in the form of the pandemic, has hit them hard in the face. Their failings can be seen with each new case and each new death. As a new piece of legal action currently being crowdfunded suggests, their actions can be seen as criminally negligent.
Claiming that everything which has happened so far constitutes a massive success is beginning to look ever more deluded. In such a situation they are left with only one plausible alternative: whether it’s nurses, doctors, scientists or the public, or Keir Starmer not being supportive enough, try to blame everybody apart from yourself.
(Written by Tom Cropper, Edited by Klaudia Fior)