LOCKDOWN, DON'T LOCKDOWN?

Somehow the narrative is still distorted.  People are rightly criticising the government for relaxing the lockdown.  But they talk about it in terms of it increasing the spread of the virus and consequently being a threat to people's health.  Those are important factors, but the implication is that the lockdown should continue.  There is something wrong with that assumption, and it is that the lockdown was correct in the first place.  I'm not suggesting there should or shouldn't be a 'lockdown', but it is clear the government's version of 'lockdown' was a complete shambles and a failure.

The idea of a lockdown is part of a bigger plan to test, trace, and isolate (amongst other responsible things).  It is also important, if you want to protect people, not to throw them in front of a bus to prevent them being run down by a bicycle.  Money, for some good reason, is a dirty word in our culture.  People actually need money to live.  It is too often banded about as some sort of superfluous gift from heaven.  But it is absolutely necessary, it is vital, to have money to live in the UK.  Cutting off someone's money supply, or revenue stream, can kill them.

For an individual it is better to take some risk to get money to live than to take no risk and no money and die.  Any lockdown should be planned to provide the resources necessary to survive.  A lockdown can't work successfully without that provision.  That is the equivalent of shovelling people into concentration camps, but in this case into their own homes as opposed to expensive 'concentration' camps.  What can then follow is the perception that the prisoners are expensive and non-productive.  A government that can execute an un-planned lockdown cannot conceive of how to fund it.  This inevitably leads to what the Third Reich called "the final solution".  It wasn't planned, but they had painted themselves into a corner.

The functionality of a lockdown is to mitigate the risk of a high death toll from the virus.  If it causes more death than it prevents then it is clearly a bad idea.  Continuing the lockdown, without the rest of the plan in place, is already proving to be more harmful than the problem it was supposed to mitigate.  The government seem to present an image of being almost hard done by, and elicit the most extraordinary sympathy from some of the least educated people in society.  They appear as if they are ordinary individuals who have been unfortunately presented with a very hard problem.  That is not reality.  The government is a massive organisation with almost unlimited resources to prepare, plan, and execute sophisticated social management.

It should now be clear that the government is populated almost entirely by ministers who were motivated to enter politics because of the rich pickings available.  When confronted with an urgent task they are like a drunk captain in charge of a ship in a storm.  In maritime law it is correct to relieve the captain of his command in those circumstances.  These politicians, motivated by wealth, have occupied their time rearranging laws to dilute their own responsibility and to make their job of acquiring wealth easier.  This is exemplified by how they undermined the fabric of the NHS to channel funds to offshore accounts.  They forgot to maintain the ship, and they casually ignored the navigation charts, whilst they revelled in the opulent benefits of the country's wealth and resources.  They are not looking after their 'customers'; they are robbing the bank.

The members of the current government simply do not have the available neurological pathways to conceive of a way to deal with this crisis for the benefit of all.  They are drunk on their own success, and are incapable of understanding that the way to have people remain at home is to fund that move.  Funding it correctly, so that they can test and trace and eliminate the largest part of the problem quickly, so that people can return to work, is simply not something they can think of.  Their first insane thought is "Who will pay for it?"  Really - that is how stupid they are.

The individuals perpetuating, and even fuelling, the crisis of this pandemic do not have to worry about the devastating consequences to the social condition of the UK.  They have plenty of resources to leave the wasteland or simply live in expensive gated communities protected by intelligent and weaponised aerial drones backed up by militarised private security forces.  Take a look at the favelas in Rio de Janeiro alongside the most opulent communities protected as described above.  Take a look at the city of Hebron and its disconnected society in the occupied West Bank of Palestine and how the poor and unwanted population are handled by the Israeli government and their forces.  Then ask why the British military and police are sent for training to Israel.

Any lockdown is only beneficially functional if it is part of a coherent plan.  Simply locking away the plebs whilst hoping that will stop the virus is completely unserviceable.  Given that the government are incapable of handling this crisis, other than to look after themselves, then perhaps another way to create a lockdown would be as a proactive and organised assault on the government.  A national strike maybe.  Somehow take action that is directed in such a way as to produce the necessary response from the government.  But, in truth, I don't see that happening.  The plutocrats have such powerful control over the medium of communication that they can, and do, distort any communication for their own benefit and to the detriment of the people who want to communicate.

I am a problem solver but I cannot solve this problem.  All I can do is keep examining it and attempting to understand some of the inherent issues and contradictions.  There is one fundamental reason I can't solve this problem, and that is because the solution has to be a collective endeavour.  But the public debate about 'lockdown' or 'don't lockdown' is obscuring the underlying problems that this government is creating, by incompetence or design, of not working effectively to mitigate the problem of the pandemic.