Boris Has Failed Everyone But Most of All the Young

We need to learn to live with the coronavirus, instead of destroying the economy

On Wednesday, the PM was challenged by Keir Starmer to publish the evidence behind his 10pm pub closing time which came in to effect on the 24th of September. Can he? Of course he couldn’t. Because there isn’t any. In fact, closing pubs at 10pm may have made things worse.

While I can’t think of any benefits of closing early, I can think of four very obvious drawbacks.1. Everyone leaves at once, meaning more people crowding onto public transport. 2. The virus is not Cinderella and magically less infectious before 10pm. 3. People go out at 6pm, rather than 8pm. 4. They go back to crowded flats to continue drinking where they’re more likely to catch it.

It’s not just me either. The government’s own advisors have said that closing at 10pm won’t make any difference to the spread of the virus. This comes on top of the rule of six which also makes very little sense. By the time you read this God only knows what pointless restrictions will have been enacted. Life comes at you fast but this government’s decisions come at you at the speed of stupid.

Of course, shutting pubs at 10pm might not make any difference to the virus but it will damage the night time economy. As you probably know, I am a nightclub owner. The last six months have been brutal for my businesses. I reckon the 10pm announcement will cost me £750,000 (which is rather less than a hundredth of what the government spent on a PPE contract with… a confectionery company which describes itself as a wholesaler of “sugar and chocolate and sugar confectionery”)

Anyway, I would probably been OK with the first lockdown, had the the UK swiftly bought the spread under control and been able to boast Korea-like death rates. But no.

Instead, we have the worst of all possible worlds. We have had a very high level of deaths per capita and have done more damage to our economy that pretty much everyone else. It literally would have better if we’d done nothing at all. Look at Sweden. They have a death rate about 20 percent lower than ours and they didn’t lock down. The hit their economy took was comparatively modest. And, that’s it. Why? They trusted their population to be sensible – and their messaging was clear.

Now, we’re about to do it again. A messy half locked down compromise that does little to reduce the spread of the virus – and a lot to damage the economy. And will we use the next six months to sort of ourselves out? I doubt it very much.

While other countries have spent the last six months implementing massive testing and contract tracing, the UK seems to have paid billions to near-non-existent companies run by mates of Dom’s, elevated the hapless Dido Harding to a job she barely understands and spent a lot of time shouting “world beating” when the the reality is that the whole world has beaten us.

We are an international joke. Italians laugh at our dysfunctional politics and our sexually incontinent PM. Developing countries boast death rates less than one percent of ours. Germans shake their heads sadly, like do you when a once sensible friend starts taking crack. Still, there’s always Donald Trump’s America… It is surely no coincidence that both Trump and Boris, the dumb-as-a-stump duo both flaunted COVID advice, and both caught it.

OK, enough doom and gloom. What would I do with battered, world-beaten Britain? Would I lock down hard? No. That horse has bolted. I would go Swedish. Yup, me, a liberal-leftie making common cause with the liberal left country that is now the darling of the libertarian right. It’s the only sensible option. Here’s why.

First, COVID is not going away. It’s too late to lock down hard like Vietnam or trace everyone like Taiwan. Moreover, we have to assume a vaccine is still a long way off and there’s a good chance it won’t work for everyone. So, we need to learn live with the virus.

But there is plenty of good news here. We know that for most people the coronavirus is like nasty flu. We know that 50,000 excess deaths, while tragic, is not unprecedented. The winter of 2017/18 was a particularly bad one for deaths – and the excess was 50,100, the majority of which were down to flu. Did we lock the entire country down? No, we ran a few ads telling old people to get flu jabs.

Nor is this the whole story. We also that that 90 percent of the COVID deaths have been the over 65s (and 75 percent of them have been the over 75s). We know that more than half the COVID deaths took place in care homes (although we may never know quite how grim this figure is). Much of this down to poor quality, for profit homes, whose priorities are those of financiers, not patients and which are the fault of successive governments, not just the current one.

So, given that COVID casualties skew overwhelmingly old, why not isolate, say, anyone over 65 with health conditions and everyone over 75? I have heard several people of my parents’ generation say, “It’s ridiculous to ruin everyone’s lives for the sake of a few oldies.” I agree. People who are 70 by and large do not have to work and are much less likely to be out in bars, pubs and clubs. They lead far more sedate lives than 22 year olds. Locking down is easier for them.

I would add to this that many of those who were most likely to die of COVID have now died. They are not going to die again. We know this because excess deaths are actually now negative (that is, slightly less people are dying than would be expected at this time of year). If this sounds harsh and heartless, sorry. But when you’re talking about wrecking the economy and potentially putting millions out of work (which also results in excess deaths, depression and despair) you should run a cool, actuarial eye over things. Tough decisions needs to be made.

So why aren’t we going Swedish? The answer is the current Conservative government which is the worst I can remember, if not the worst UK government of all time.

I do not like Boris Johnson for all the usual reasons. But I thought he’d do better here - cometh the pandemic, cometh the man and all that. I thought he’d go Swedish as he’s naturally quite libertarian. And at first he sort of did. But then he got COVID – and of course, it hit him hard (not least because he was clinically obese at the time). As many have observed when bad things happens to Boris, they become real problems rather than abstracts.

So I think Boris is scared of dying. I get that. But he’s the PM, so too bad (if you want a fun, easy job, go back to being a newspaper columnist). Moreover, he’s a PM who used to think he was the heir to Churchill. Hahaha. I sometimes wonder if he still thinks this. Because he’s now the PM who makes Theresa May look really good. He makes Gordon Brown look like Churchill.

On top of being the worst PM since Eden (this may be a slur on Eden) he has also surrounded himself with a cabinet of useless sycophants selected only for their loyalty to the wretched, doomed Brexit project. Yes, they’re corrupt (as the PPE contracts show). But it’s no conspiracy – you a level of competence to run a conspiracy. It is just a government of none of the talents.

Which brings us to my final point. As the joke goes Britain is no country for young men (or women). Our useless, degraded ruling party is massively dependent on the votes of the over 65s. From triple locked pensions to unaffordable housing to leaving the EU, we live in a gerontocracy and are ruled by a jittery grey hand. What the right-wing wrinklies want, they get.

The government couldn’t care less about the young. And so, faced with virus, they are blithely destroying the social lives of the young along with educational opportunities and the parts of the economy the young are most likely to work in. Kids, they are literally sacrificing the best years of your lives, so… Well, so that their voters don’t have to isolate while the rest of us get on with it, even though many have them will have to isolate anyway. I know: it makes damn no sense at all.

In the good old days, forced to choose between elderly voters and the economy, the Tories might have struggled. But that was before Brexit. Now, they don’t give a shit. They’re not even the party of the rich anymore – or at least not the working rich. They serve reactionary retirees. They will trash the already weakened economy. They will destroy pubs, clubs, restaurants, theatres and cinemas. And they probably won’t even save many grannies.

I used to think that those of us in the middle of the Boomers and the young – the largely overlooked Generation X - could see both sides. But really I can’t. I’m with the kids all the way here. This government doesn’t represent you and it doesn’t represent me. They’re a Brexit death cult – and a breathtakingly incompetent one. My single great hope is that Boris is so very terrible he may manage to destroy a government with a majority of 80.

If I was 20 right now, I’d be at illegal raves and underground parties every week. I wouldn’t see breaking the law as a problem. This government deserves civil disobedience on a massive scale. They have failed all of us, but most of all they have failed the young.