This Week - 25/10/2020
Monday and Tuesday were taken up with virtual meetings and the end of quarantine. On Wednesday I moved back home and spent the next few days alternating between sleeping, more meetings, and surfing social media.
The covid cough has pretty much gone now but I still feel really drained - alongside the usual post illness feeling of 'I want to reorganise the entire house and rearrange my life', right up to the moment I have to actually do it. So, yeah, instead I've spent way too much time on Twitter getting angry over politics.
Ben Bradley, Philip Davies, Selaine Saxby... How are these people in decision making positions??
In some ways I can sympathise with the regular Tory MPs who voted against FSM. In normal times they would expect public support for voting it down, their arguments about individual responsibility and dependency striking all the right chords. I wouldn't agree with them, sure, but many would. That's democracy. But this isn't normal times. So many more people are going to lose their jobs this winter.
Thousands more are likely to lose their lives. (I found out yesterday that someone who caught covid in our outbreak cluster of c. 20 has now died of it.)
And they've chosen the relatively tiny matter of FSM over Christmas to be the step too far. When public money has been thrown away in its billions on PPE companies that could never deliver, consultants for projects that were never going anywhere, and all manner of spurious expenses for things everyone else in the country is expected to fund out of their own pay packet.
Because they don't want kids to starve, obviously. They just don't want to pick up the tab for feeding them. They wanted overstretched local authorities to find the money from, well, they didn't care where and then claim it as their own victory when programmes were rolled out around the country.
That is happening. Every single part of it. But the damage to them reputationally may prove not to be worth it. It really does feel like this is going to be Johnson's 'milk snatcher' moment. Will it have any real impact? It's doubtful. It did nothing to put the breaks on Margaret Thatcher's career. But, then again, does anybody believe Margaret Thatcher would have waffled and wavered and incompetently blundered through this pandemic?
The lady was many things but she certainly wasn't lazy or stupid.
We might be in opposite worlds politically but I have always admired Thatcher's commitment and competency. When she set her mind to something, she got it done. One of my dirtiest secrets is that I went out and bought a glossy retrospective of her premiership - and I still have it. Then you look at Johnson. Maybe it would be okay if he had a front bench that made up for his failings. The truth is that they're almost universally terrible.
Over the last few months I have been seriously re-evaluating my stance on Welsh independence. I always felt like it would be economic suicide. But we're doing that with Brexit already. I thought the Senedd couldn't compete with the national political talent. But now I just look sadly at Johnson. I used to feel British. Now I... don't. If Britishness is denying facts, actively seeking isolationism, overlooking rank incompetence. Well. I don't want a part of it.
I remember watching those awful ads about how the police would come for fraudulent benefit claimants when I was a kid and feeling ashamed that my parents needed welfare. I remember getting into politics with the fiery passion of youth, hoping no other kid would ever be made to feel that about parents who were just trying to do their absolute best for them.
Now I just feel old and knackered and like things aren't even going to stagnate. They just keep getting worse with every new policy announcement. I don't know what the answer is. But at least I feel slightly better for having typed it all up...
Deal of the Week -
Song of the Week -
We Need To Talk - Waterparks
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