Coronavirus Spirit Wartime Britain - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

Dad’s Army by Roger Corman

Published: 20 March 2020

I was sat here looking at and listening to a Boris Johnson coronavirus briefing video courtesy of Stun media and was struck by how similar in language and tone his address was to a script from Dad’s Army. There was something immediately quaint, old-fashioned, vaguely pompous, wonderfully ineffectual and really quite reassuring in its anachronistic nature. I thought, who is it who is writing the British government’s speeches? They must be relatives of David Croft and Jimmy Perry.

Compounding this image of retrospective Britain with Its ‘Back to the Wall’ are escalating media analogies that seek to couch our 21^st century plight in the bulldog-spirited language of Captain Mainwaring. Be honest, now, Boris would make an excellent Captain Mainwaring. In fact, he does!

But here, sadly, is where all similarities end. For, in spite of the media hype, ‘Britain in times of national emergency’, ‘never since World War II have we been faced with a crisis of this magnitude’ and talk of ‘wartime rationing’ and ‘putting things on a wartime footing’, at a time when the establishment should be working together, working for the common good, fighting the enemy like a ‘well-oiled war machine’, the Opposition and its crony media seem exclusively focused on political gain.

I know all this stuff about the opposition party’s main role being to question the government of the day and hold them accountable, but there is holding them accountable and grabbing them by the balls.

It is understandable that in our hour of need we should attempt to evoke the indomitable spirit of wartime Britain. Consider this extract from a Reuters article*:

Britain has called for a national effort to tackle coronavirus similar to the one which helped it survive the Second World War

“Our generation has never been tested like this,” Hancock wrote in the Sunday Telegraph. “Our grandparents were, during the Second World War, when our cities were bombed during the Blitz.

“Today our generation is facing its own test, fighting a very real and new disease. We must fight the disease to protect life.”

This desire to fall back upon the genuine community spirit that bolstered morale on the home front and infused the British civilian population with survivalist stoicism during WWII is understandable; ask any 1940s’ event enthusiast, living history group or re-enactor and they will tell you why ~ it was our finest hour ~ but if we are going to do it, we ought to do it properly, and to do it properly not only do we need a united front politically but the full co-operation and alignment of the media.

Sensationalist, overdramatised, sleazy, reaction-seeking, we have been brought up with and expect this sort of shite-mongering nonsense from the tabloids, and we have learnt to dismiss and trash it (they should never have disallowed the use of newsprint as something to wrap our chips in, ahhh well, come the bog roll shortage). We expect these comic strips to assault our equanimity with panic-seeking headlines of ‘killer bugs ‘and the numbers of dead ‘soaring’ — they need people to click on their online sites to convince their advertisers that they have wasted their money wisely (I should know, I worked in advertising-based publishing!), but even with its inexorable shift to the pit of the penny dreadfuls, the dumbing down and partisan bias, surely we should be able to expect something better from our so-called quality media.

UK Media Headlines Coronavirus

Consider the following headlines, which were compiled from two UK left-leaning online newsfeeds over a 24-hour period:

‘I’m losing faith in the leadership’: an NHS doctor’s story

At this most desperate hour, Britain desperately needs better than Boris Johnson

The government is sending mixed messages. Johnson’s coronavirus briefings may make things worse

Boris Johnson is struggling to inspire trust on coronavirus

As this crisis engulfs UK business, Sunak’s ‘whatever it takes’ is falling far short

There is more, but I am sure you get the picture.

We could be churlish at this point and thank our lucky stars that we have old Boris at the helm. Just imagine what it would be like if the other lot had won the election. The first lockdown would have been at Number 10 and the second in the House of Commons as such vital questions to do with equality issues surrounding coronavirus were thrashed out

It is bad enough that it is blatantly ageist, but is it sexist, is it inciting racial and religious hatred, are there any LGBT issues to be delicately skirted (is that the right word?), and what about Rights?! ~should we really force people to have the sense to self-isolate and not buy a mountain of bog rolls? Would anything and everything passed in the House of Commons be blocked in the House of Lords and would rich individuals with vested interests stymie the process of government by launching legal challenges in a suspiciously biased Supreme Court?

The answer is probably not.

However, most would agree (and this is evident from the change of political fortunes in the UK, Europe and America) that Liberalism is on its way out.

Lost adherents need to be brought back into the electoral fold (baahhh, get the analogy?), and to do this it is necessary ~ they think it is necessary ~ to embark upon a war of attrition against the government ~ specifically against Johnson ~ similar in vitriol and relentlessness to that waged by the Liberal establishment against Trump: attack, discredit, belittle.

In the midst of dismay, we should feel pity: Trump, BREXIT, the EU in meltdown, the abject failure of socially engineered Britain, there is nowhere to hide, nowhere to go. What’s the expression ~ shit or bust?

I am not a conspiracy theorist. If I was, I would suspect my retired scientist friend and his junior biochemistry set far more than I would a cartel of vanquished idealogues. But the fact remains that in —what is the expression?— times of national emergency, party politics need to be placed on hold. As for the partisan media, manipulating, plotting, and scheming, expending energy on how to put the government in a bad light in order to wrest the seat of power for the unelected and unelectable ‘when all of this is over’ is at best ineffectual and at worst morally divisive. People are scared; people are dying. They deserve better.

Reference
[Accessed 15 March 2020]
* https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain/britain-set-to-isolate-over-70s-as-coronavirus-deaths-rise-to-35-idUSKBN2120DG

Postscript:
[Accessed 19 March 2020]

An article that the The Independent and The Guardian can learn from?
https://www.itv.com/news/2020-03-19/uk-very-close-coronavirus-test-to-reveal-who-has-had-covid-19-with-no-symptoms/

A headline from RT news recently, which, even in these dire times, managed to put a smile on my face, albeit with a ‘gallows humour’ shadow:
Religious procession in Russia against Coronavirus is CANCELED due to Coronavirus
https://www.rt.com/russia/482946-coronavirus-religious-procession-canceled/