Applause which is spontaneous is worthwhile. A one-off show of gratitude for health service staff, arising from the people (not from government initiative), would be fine and good. A regimented weekly 8 o'clock North-Korea style show of appreciation for 'our NHS' is another matter. It is all the more distasteful given the current situation. We are under house arrest. We have shut up the country for something that is comparable to a severe influenza outbreak of a kind for which there is precedent in recent history. We have plunged ourselves into a recession. We have lost much of our liberty. We have clearly developed the precedent and are developing the infrastructure for tyranny. We are depriving many of the old of their final months by confining them to their homes; and we are depriving many more of the old of their dwindling number of healthy months, where they are still able to travel and enjoy life; this lockdown may hasten their health decline, and mean their few more years on this earth may be of a much inferior quality.
And what do we do? We don't debate. We don't hold government and advisers to account. We barely even quietly question. We cannot participate in most kinds of free public political action. Moreover, we cannot even attend church, not even to pray privately. Instead, we go out every week at 8 o'clock, one of the few sanctioned times we are allowed to leave our homes, and we applaud. We applaud ourselves, we applaud our society, we applaud our institutions, none of whom deserve it. And if someone doesn't join they are a Bad Person, liable even to be named and shamed by their aspiring state-informant neighbours. If we were actually grateful for our health workers and shop workers and delivery drivers we would not be doing something so vain as applauding. A more appropriate response might be stomping, or even a stern silence, and an impassioned cry for a fair wage, an end to the wage-cutting conditions-lowering immigration still going on now, a call for an end to chain shops, no more buying from Amazon which people selfishly continue to do unnecessarily, it has to involve people not merely demanding that the 'government take action', but that consumers change their behaviour.
And if you really care about the conditions and pay of these workers, you would not support this lockdown, which will quite probably usher in an era of worse healthcare, spending cuts, lower standard of living, wage cuts, cuts to welfare, cuts to culture, cuts to local government. Most of us will be poorer. And some will be poorer than they ever imagined. I hope it will not be me; I hope that I am well enough insulated from it. But when one reads the stories of those in the Great Depression, one realises how quickly a modest middle-class prosperity, which seemed, barring a few bumps, to be a certainty, becomes a distant dream in a new horrifying reality.
This is what may become of us. We are told, smugly, that we live in an information age. Yet what good has it done us?! This crisis has shown how useless access to information is if no one is curious enough to use it. Now you can easily find all sorts of stats and opinions. Yet people are not interested. The wealth of knowledge is of no interest to them. They simply listen to the Boris Jong-son's People's Government and his comrades around the developed world. They don't seek out evidence, they don't question. They simply accept: governments say a lockdown will save us, they accept it. Nay, they applaud it! In other contexts this might be called jingoism. The stifling and shaming of dissent (on the rare occasions it is publicly expressed), the thoughtless march to a 'war on COVID', the regimentation of daily life, the loss of liberty. Over a disease which, as the wise Professor Johan Giesecke has said, is a mild disease, comparable to past severe flus, with an actual death rate of around 0.1%. Regardless of what countries have done in response, their actions seemed to have had little effect on the total number of deaths. Let us stop applauding and instead dissent. Call for debate, call for parliament to return, and call for an end to this mad policy of lockdown.
