How We Will Exit From Lockdown

I’ve stopped having to do with the news. I’ve stopped reading the speculations and the pontifications of grey public health bureaucrats getting their moment in the limelight, and who know as little about the economy as they do about fuel injection. I am fed up with the media behaving like a propaganda machine for a virus, the NHS and their own hysteria.

The pundits are assuming that the Unwind will be sensible and intended to get us back to earning and spending. It will be nothing of the sort.

The #UnwindFarce will be an exercise in face-saving public-health theatrics. None of it will make sense, and it will be incoherent. It will be there to pretend to maintain the falsehoods that got us here in the first place: that SARS-Cov-2 is a deadly virus that could have swamped the NHS and killed the entire population, and that closing cafes and theatres, forbidding public protests and fining people for sitting in parks was a proportionate response. Everyone will know it is nonsense, everyone will pretend it isn’t.

So we will be living with irritating idiocies for at least the rest of the year, and hearing the voices of public health people threatening another lockdown for the 2020/21 flu season. Because morale.

What the Coronachampions won’t give up is Social Distancing. But the rules will be mind-bogglingly silly. Shops will have limits on the number of people who can be inside, but not lifts in office blocks. Small companies and call centres will be able to return to their premises, but large companies will have to wait until autumn. Children will be able to go to school, but their parents will have to stand six feet apart outside the school gates. Doctors won’t see anyone in their surgeries, and visitors to A&E will have to wear masks and gloves. Six-foot separation at sports stadiums; theatres and cinemas must provide an empty seat to one’s left, right, front and behind; hairdressers and barbers will have to wear gloves and masks. You can have a massage, but she will have to wear gloves. However, buses, tubes and trains will be full, because who is going to enforce it and how? Cafes and restaurants will have to have six feet between tables, but not between two people dining at the same table. Pubs and bars can have so many people per square metre (half a person).

You get the idea. Silly. Obstructive. Intruding. Mask-wearing virtue-signalling twerps walking around and scowling at people who get near them on public transport, or asking in loud voices if you will social distance and not sit next to them on the bus. Randomly-enforced and inconsistent fines, and in place for months and months, until we all start ignoring it.

The Government will spend billions propping up businesses that cannot survive under its ridiculous rules, because everyone will know it’s the Government’s fault. But that won’t make the initial decision wrong. We will be inconvenienced and threatened with more #VirusKidnapping for at least another two years.

And everyone who doesn’t Politically Distance themselves from the whole #UnwindFarce by about July will lose their seat at the next election. Just like Brexit.