Exit strategy confusion - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

At least we can all die laughing

Published: 11 May 2020

The media may be slating Boris Johnson this morning over his obscurantist speech the day before, but I for one found it intensely amusing. I haven’t laughed so much in years. If I’d have been wearing false teeth at the time, I would most likely still be looking for them.

I am not altogether sure what is most amusing, Boris attempting to provide us with a catch-all solution when there is not one, or Joe (and Joanna) Public betting everything on an answer tailor-made for them and then being disappointed when they did not get it. Perhaps Boris should have filmed his address to the nation with Sooty’s magic wand in his hand, and then we would all feel better.

UK Coronavirus Confusion Strategy

Who was it who sang “Do you know where you’re going to, do you like the things that life is showing you?”

Is it the media, not our politicians, that have led us up the garden path and into the maze into which we now find ourselves? Consider the following headlines and out-takes from online news reports over the last two months:

Derbyshire Police force was heavily criticised for using a drone to “shame” people walking with members of their household in the Peak District. (27 March 2020)
[What a terrible thing for the police to do. But aren’t they supposed to be enforcing the isolating rules?]

Coronavirus lockdown likened to ‘police state’ by former Supreme Court judge (30 March 2020)
[So, does that mean that lockdown is unnecessary, bad, to be avoided? Was the Supreme Court established by Tony Blair?]

UK police warned against ‘overreach’ in use of virus lockdown powers (30 March 2020)
[Police should enforce lockdown rules, but they haven’t got the power to do so?]

Keir Starmer calls for ministers to set out plans to end lockdown (15 April 2020)
[Lockdown should end]

Coronavirus: Labour calls for lockdown exit strategy this week (15 April 2020)
[Labour wants an ‘exit strategy’]

‘Blair and Brown never missed Cobra meetings (19 April 2020)
[And? ~ Ahh, so perhaps it’s a positive thing that Boris has missed some of them?]

Coronavirus: Which are you? Britons are reacting to lockdown in one of three ways (27 April 2020)
[Hoorah! It’s just a game]

Fearful Britons oppose lifting lockdown (2 May 2020)
[But many people are opposed to lockdown, aren’t they?]

Coronavirus: UK to bring in two-week quarantine for air passengers (9 May 2020)
[Why are people still flying into the UK? Why wasn’t this done earlier? Why are we in lockdown when people are still flooding in from other countries?]

I’m losing my teenage years (9 May 2020)
[And?]

‘Recipe for chaos’: union leaders sound warning over return to work (10 May)
[But I thought lockdown was tantamount to a police state and should it not be ended? And hasn’t the Labour party called for an end to it?]

Doctors and police warn of new coronavirus wave as UK lockdown weakens (10 May)
[But I thought people wanted out of lockdown, as does the Labour party?]

Boris Johnson suggests coronavirus lockdown will be loosened on Monday (6 May)
[That should please Labour as they want an ‘exit strategy’ and want lockdown to end, don’t they?]

Boris Johnson’s lockdown release condemned as divisive, confusing and vague (10 May)
[It didn’t please Labour. If they have an exit strategy, perhaps they should tell Boris]

BBC’s Marr stuns Ashworth after blaming Labour for lockdown chaos ‘Take responsibility!’ (11 May 2020)
[Truth is stranger than fiction]

And this is without citing the plethora of news stories about strange new symptoms …

UK Coronavirus Confusion Strategy

So, here we are in the Coronavirus Maze and we just do not know how to get out of it.

Economists, scientists, healthcare professionals, business consortiums, psychiatrists, ‘experts’, MPs, all scampering this way and that looking for the exit and the strategy that goes with it. But the most confused, and we could argue the perpetrators of confusion, seem to lie with certain ladies and gentlemen of the press. Does the confusion lie in a desperate almost hysterical pursuit of political point-scoring: which way and how can Boris and Boris’s government be discredited and the current crisis used to pave the way for Labour’s resurgence?

An extremely cynical friend of mine, who has always voted Liberal Democrats, opined, “Perhaps it would be better if a Labour government was in power. We might be on the edge of the precipice waiting for the final push, but at least if we go over we would meet our end with Labour right behind us, after all they have been pushing that way for years.”