“This is serious, and, yes, it’s understandable that people cry out to the government, but the real question is, is this serious enough to warrant putting most of our population into house imprisonment, wrecking our economy for an indefinite period, destroying businesses that honest and hardworking people have taken years to build up, saddling future generations with debt?”  Not my words, but those of Lord Sumption, sometime justice of the Supreme court.  They are chilling, not so much for the reason Lord S spoke them – he warned of the eruption of a ‘police state’ – as because they hint at the the mayhem that is to come, a world in which the economic interests of the wealthy trump well-being of the people.

A little over two weeks ago we were told something over 670,000 people in the UK were likely to die from the virus before the end of May, at an average rate of around 10,000 per day.  The latest estimate I have seen revises that number to 5,000; not 5,000 per day, but 5,000 total.  That is one Hell of a revision.    The fall may, in part, be attributed to the success of the lock-down, but that argument will only stretch so far.  To the man in the street – my street at any rate – it looks like the experts over-egged their pudding; or, to put it another way, got it wrong.

The economic and social costs of the lock-down are already stupendous.  The long term damage that will result if people come to believe that they can trust nobody but the politicians who lead them with candy-floss promises and simplistic solutions will be worse.   We have as prime minister a man totally unfit for office who, instead of appointing government ministers charged with bringing the country together and alleviating the  damage of Brexit,  has surrounded himself with a team of cringing curs snapping and snarling at all who stand in their way.  A man who will not stop  at lying, at bullying, at toadying to his “friends” of the far right.    If no judgement is allowed but his, if popular opinion is deemed as worthy, or as worthless, as the considered opinion of the expert doctors, judges and economists,  we are destined for economic and diplomatic oblivion.  From the glorious days of mighty Sovereignty we are destined to become no more than a run down Pound Land.