Masked Bat Idiocy

Do you realise that this is probably the first time ever you're able to go into a bank wearing a mask and ask for money?

Saw this meme yesterday, which amused me.

I've seen articles in the Spectator and Telegraph bemoaning citizens' loss of freedoms due to the lockdown and berating the police for ensuring people obey the rules. We're talking about temporary rules that are designed to save people's lives, for God's sake. Rules that protect us from idiots who drive hundreds of miles to 'go for exercise'. Rules that stop people having mass BBQs where the infection can spread.

A salutary lesson can be learned from the 1918 Philadelphia Liberty Loans Parade, where not cancelling a parade during the Spanish Flu epidemic (which actually started in the USA), caused thousands of additional, unnecessary deaths.

These same publications, along with the Daily Mail and the Sun, maintained over the weekend that the Brexit deadline shouldn't be delayed, as if piling needless misery on top of unavoidable misery is good for the country. Essentially, hard Brexit is the ripping up of our largest ever trade deal, with nothing to replace it - someone please tell me how this makes sense? How can that be beneficial, except to the JRMs of this world, who see the ability to buy bankrupt stock at knock down prices and are pushing for a hard Brexit? Incidentally, this includes anyone who has been prudent enough to accumulate a pile of cash, like me. However, it's one thing to accept an opportunity that's presented and another to push for that opportunity with proven lies.

As for trading with the rest of the world (which we already do, if you hadn't heard); a trade deal with China will be off the table, what with sentiment now turning against China for a variety of reasons, and Trump seems set on sacrificing the USA's population in order to get re-elected, not that a word of what this narcissist says can ever be trusted. Have these people not read the government's own Brexit forecasts? Have they not read that 7m jobs could go in the pandemic alone? The one saving grace is that the Brexit misery will just appear as background noise in the greater devastation Covid is placing on people's finances.

This cartoon from the weekend's Observer makes the point succinctly.

You can bet your bottom dollar that the promise of infrastructure programmes Boris used to woo the northern Red Wall away from Labour won't be going ahead now - the very projects Dom Cummings was determined Boris had to follow through on. There simply won't be enough in the kitty after Covid. Making good on his promise to adequately fund the NHS, after years of ravaging it, will be a top priority for Boris in order to keep the hoi polloi quiet - and to prevent him being lynched.