I AM no great lover of horror movies, even of a comic variety.
However, I make an exception for Simon Pegg’s brilliant Shaun Of The Dead. In this classic of the genre Shaun (Simon) blunders about with his ne’er-do-well pal Ed for the first half of the film, oblivious to the zombie apocalypse developing all around them.
I now think that Boris Johnson and his hapless Health Secretary would have been pitch perfect in these leading roles. Indeed Sajid Javid who bears more than a passing resemblance to a puppet in Sylvia and Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds, is one of nature’s natural sidekicks.
If Boris had been allowed to make his “victory speech” for “freedom day” on Monday (instead of self-isolating at Chequers) then he could have started it in the vein of his real life historical mentor, Winston Churchill.
“This is not the end or even the beginning of the end ... ” but it might well be if we leave these clowns in charge for a moment longer. The speech should have begun “Never in the field of human/viral conflict have so many been placed at such risk by so few.”
Consider the position. Infection rates are rising fast in England and there is growing evidence that the new hyper-infectious variants are punching their way through at least some of the vaccines. In any event one-third of the adult population is still unprotected, more and more younger people are ending up in hospital and half a million plus are being “pinged” out of work this week.
Thus the policy response is obvious. Pack 60,000 into Wembley, 15,000 into the Wimbledon Centre Court, 30,000 a day at The Open and (the daddy of them all) 140,000 to watch Lewis Hamilton run his great foreign rival off the track at the British Grand Prix.
Just in case the above super-spreading sporting extravaganza does not succeed in getting the herd more immune, then move on to relax all remaining restrictions and open the nightclubs so that people can bop until they drop.
On Monday night I saw a pleasure boat on the River Thames stuffed to the gunnels with young people raucously celebrating “Freedom Day”. As Horace Walpole once observed about Londoners in another context “Today they are ringing the bells. Soon they will be wringing their hands.”
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If this were not so potentially tragic then it would be seriously funny. There is only one outcome to this horror script: sickness, suffering and death for the many and not just the few.
And before we twiddle our masks in Scotland in self-congratulation about not electing these lunatics then consider these FACTS.
The T in the Scottish Government’s above acronym stands for two, ie two metres of social distancing. As part of Scotland’s zero sum game this has been reduced to one. Why should this be? Why are we relaxing regulation into the teeth of a pandemic?
Has the virus become less transmissible? No just the opposite. Are we safe from another wave? No we are having a brief respite compared to England, basically because our schools are on holiday. Are we ahead in vaccinations? No we are marginally behind England and a distance behind Wales.
This week we have received the bizarre advice from the JCVI not to vaccinate all young people in secondary schools with vaccines which have been already adjudged safe for young adults and are now being offered to schoolchildren in Germany, Israel and America. There is sustained evidence that schools are a key vector for the virus, hence the decline in the Scottish rates of infection on our summer holidays while the English figures continue to rise. We are less than one month away from the Scottish schools going back with no solutions on how to halt the viral transmission in the classroom and prevent further disruption to our children’s education.
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Scotland should not be paying even lip service into following the script of these dangerous Westminster buffoons. Dominic Cummings may be unpopular but does anyone really doubt the veracity of his description of the chaotic decision making in Downing Street. The “four-nations” approach is bunkum as long as they are in charge. Their very own horror movie will not be comic nor will there be a happy ending.
Shaun of the Dead was part of a trilogy. The third film in the series was entitled The World’s End.
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