Just when you thought that things couldn’t possibly get any worse in a universe in which Boris Johnson is Prime Minister, Donald Trump is the president of the USA, billionaire Richard Branson is demanding that you and I bail him out, Madonna tells us that the coronavirus is a great equaliser as she sits in a bathtub filled with rose petals, and Gemma Collins’ celebrity is an actual thing, the world got worse. This is what we get for living in a society which rewards stupid vacuous people with their own reality TV shows. They end up getting elected and giving us health advice. Now we have the intelligence vacuum that is a Cheeto coloured game show host leading the most powerful country in the world and openly wondering whether it’s a good idea to inject yourself with bleach.
If you had told me five years ago that Boris Johnson would be Prime Minister, we’d be out of the EU, and Donald Trump would be president of the USA advising people of the health benefits of drinking Cillit Bang as a cure for a virus that’s killing thousands of people around the world every day, I might very well have considered making myself a disinfectant cocktail.
Today Nicola Sturgeon had to make a public statement warning people that ingesting disinfectant was a really really stupid idea. This is because during his press conference last night Donald Trump suggested that since disinfectant can destroy the coronavirus within a minute, then perhaps it might be a good idea to inject disinfectant into people to cure them. It would certainly cure them, it would cure them of living. That’s yer actual President of yer actual USA there, suggesting that mainlining toilet duck might be a good idea. To which the world can only reply – sure thing Don, you try it first.
A journalist for an anti-independence newspaper retweeted Nicola Sturgeon’s remarks about the idiocy of drinking bleach, and said that on this subject she was speaking for all of Scotland. There are many things about which there is disagreement in Scotland, but you’d like to think that the stupidity of drinking bleach was not one of them. Sadly you would be wrong. As soon as the journalist had tweeted, there was a response from a particularly staunch union flag waver that Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish “Nationalist” party did not speak for him and his family. How dare Thatessempee tell a true blue Brit not to drink dettol. He’ll bloody well drink dettol if he wants to, and he’ll do it standing on top of the White Cliffs of Dover while singing a Vera Lynn song. That’s what WW2 was all about you know. So there you go, a British nationalist drinking bleach to own the Nats. It didn’t take long to get from coronavirus will kill off hopes of independence, to drinking Cillit Bang will show those Nats what’s what. The world’s stupidity has consumed itself and is now working its way up its own colon, where it will meet bleach on its way down.
To be fair to the Britnat zoomers of social media, there’s plenty of stupidity from politicians to inspire them. Today a suspiciously bleached looking Jackson Carlaw released a wee video online in which he demanded that the lockdown in Scotland should only be ended at the same time as in the rest of the UK. This came in response to the tentative suggestions from Nicola Sturgeon about a possible exit strategy from the lockdown in Scotland, with a phased loosening of restrictions, and the publication of a very welcome document from the Scottish Government setting out the conditions that would be required in order to loosen the current restrictions. This is in marked contrast to the Westminster Government, which has so far refused to publish any detailed information about its plans for an exit strategy, or indeed about that scientific information upon which it’s constantly claiming to base its decisions.
The Scottish Government very clearly recognises that we can only loosen the lockdown once the rate of infections has declined sufficiently, and once there’s a system in place to ensure that the contacts of those who do become infected can be traced, tested, and quarantined. This is very different from the UK Government, which explicitly abandoned efforts to contain the virus in mid-March. The document, and the careful statement from Nicola Sturgeon, both point to a very welcome divergence by the Scottish Government from the discredited herd immunity strategy which the British Government is now desperately trying to pretend never happened at all.
However in the interests of not being different from the rest of the UK, the Scottish Conservative branch office manager Surname Surname thinks that the lockdown in Scotland should end at a time when it’s not necessarily in Scotland’s best interests to do so. There are two logical possibilities from Jackson Carlaw’s suggestion – given that he appears to have no clear idea himself on an exit strategy for Scotland and wants us to wait for a UK wide strategy decided by Westminster. Either he’s willing to open Scotland up because Westminster has decided to loosen lockdown restrictions in England even though the health advice for Scotland is that it’s not safe, or he’s perfectly prepared to risk jobs and livelihoods because the advice is that it’s safe for limited reopenings in Scotland even though it might not be safe elsewhere. And all for the sake of remaining in lockstep with Matt Hancock and proving a spurious political point.
This is not the solidarity of the four nations of the UK, this is a suicide pact. Because you can bet your last bottle of dettol that the Conservatives in London will not delay the ending of the lockdown across the entire UK just because the public health officials in Scotland say that Scotland might not be ready. We know this Conservative government and we know that the best interests of Scotland do not figure high on its list of priorities. In fact it doesn’t figure at all. This is a Conservative government which will end the current lockdown when it judges that it’s best for the Conservatives to do so.
Surname Surname’s suggestion is way up there in the dumb suggestions league with the Mayor of Las Vegas saying that she’d like the casinos to reopen, and then the ones where there was the greatest number of infections could be closed down again. It’s just a stupid stupid idea, and most voters in Scotland – at least those who don’t have union flags in their avatars on social media – will conclude that it’s a stupid stupid idea and that Surname Surname is not prioritising the best interests of the people of Scotland. While any sensible person understands that it’s a dreadful idea to drink bleach or disinfectant, there are still plenty of British nationalist politicians who want Scotland to keep drinking the red white and blue Kool-Aid.
And finally, because we could all do with some cheering up during these difficult times…
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