Tuesday 20 July 2021

His acts betrayed, "If you die, you die."

Using old cow sense

Generally, one would not have time for Dominic Cummings, the once chief adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson on questions of character, integrity, honesty, or discretion. Yet, I must as I have learnt for a long time from a preacher of old, he wrote, “Have as much sense as an old cow, eat the hay and leave the bailing wire.”

What this nugget of wisdom has taught me is people who one would normally not like or entertain does not mean they do not have ideas, expressions, views, or opinions of things that one might find interesting. The person or personality might be unlikeable and odious, without redeeming factors, yet do not have to condemn outright, and completely ostracised from gaining one’s attention.

By their actions and words

You assess the viewpoint and by your determination decide in the information without necessarily making it about the person. It is for the same reason that I am interested in what Dominic Cummings has to say about how the government of Boris Johnson faced and handled the pandemic. He was in the room when the decisions were made. It is very likely that from what we know of Boris Johnson and some other sources, things can be corroborated too.

On the 12th of March 2020, Boris Johnson said, “I must level with you, level with the British public, more families, and many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.” There is no other context that could be read into this than to say that he was of the mind that people should be sacrificed to the pandemic rather than act decisively to save lives.

Blog: Thought Picnic: The vulnerable to be martyred to the Coronavirus in the UK

They cared nothing for us

The snippet from Dominic Cummings’ interview suggests the Prime Minister was of the mind, the pandemic essentially killed those over 80, the parents, the grandparents, the great-grandparents and relations, in that age bracket, the loved ones that were expendable to keep the economy going. We were as we had known before to be Guineapigs in a quest for herd immunity in a time where there was no vaccine. To the vulnerable it was a heartless statement, “If you die, you die.” [BBC News: Covid: Boris Johnson resisted autumn lockdown as only over-80s dying - Dominic Cummings]

Everything the government has done seems to have followed this lodestar, the late lockdowns, the poor testing regimes, the gambling between options until there was no other option after which the virus had taken hold within communities.

Indeed, there will be much to learn from Dominic Cummings this evening, I just wonder if enough people would see how criminally negligent and culpable our government was in allowing the pandemic to cut a swathe of tragedy and death through the populace and how hollow their talking point of taking the "necessary action to protect lives and livelihoods, guided by the best scientific advice" is, because it was anything but that.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments are accepted if in context are polite and hopefully without expletives and should show a name, anonymous, would not do. Thanks.