Don’t worry: it’s all under control
I love everything about the story in the Times this week about the swine flu epidemic raging so far out of control that the government has given up its outstanding work containing it.
I use the word ‘outstanding’ because I think that’s the word they’d use. And The Centrist is nothing if not supportive.
According to the Times, Health Secretary Andy Burnham says it’s all going to plan. (By the way, did you ever wonder how his background qualifies him for this job? Well, he’s got a degree in English from Cambridge, and he’s a keen cricketer and an MP. What more health experience do you want during a deadly pandemic?)
Mr Burnham said: ‘Our approach has focused on containing the spread and working with the local NHS to identify cases, isolate them as quickly as possible, treat them with antivirals and treat those around them and offer prophylactic treatment to those around them. This is very resource-intensive, but it has been highly successful.’
Yes, the government’s containment plan worked so well that Mr Burnham’s quote was in a news article entitled: ‘Swine flu spreads so rapidly it cannot be contained’.
The same article noted: ‘The number of confirmed cases in Scotland increased by 111 yesterday — the largest one-day rise since the outbreak began.’
If that’s containment working well, I’d hate to see it working badly.
I can see why they’re stopping it.
A personal story
Let’s take a closer look at the government’s containment policy.
I’ll start with a personal example: a friend’s school in north London called for help after the vast majority of its students didn’t show show up last week - all were home with fevers. In my friend’s five-year-old’s class, 20 of the 25 students were ill.
The government swooped in. Those with the highest fevers were tested for swine flu. They tested positive.
The school was closed. Parents were told to pick up Tamiflu at the school, and were given no other advice about what to do. My friend went back to work, her daughter went out to play with friends. The government does not recommend not doing this, by the way. They recommend nothing if you are not personally exhibiting symptoms, even if you have been exposed to the virus in an up-close-and-personal way.
In its early stages, swine flu has such mild symptoms you could mistake it for hay fever or a cold. But during that time you will be spreading the flu to potentially vulnerable people.
This might go some way toward explaining why the government’s containment policy didn’t work. Or rather, why it worked so spectacularly well that swine flu is now raging out of control.
There’s more, though.
My friend wasn’t particularly worried about the whole thing, but she wanted her daughter swabbed just to reassure her that she did not have flu. But the health authorities refused to do it. They told her no further swabbing was happening at her school. Even those whose children had mild symptoms were told they could not be tested.
So out of, say, 100 children at her child’s school who probably contracted swine flu, only a handful were added to the government’s chart of verified cases, because the government refused to test the rest of them.
Now, the government’s numbers show that around 3,000 people have had swine flu in the UK so far.
But if you extrapolate the situation at my friend’s school out to a national level – if the government is only swabbing a fraction of those exposed to the virus country-wide, in other words – it’s possible, even likely, that 10,000 people or more have already had this disease.
Save yourselves
I suggest all readers take a look at how other governments are handling the outbreak, because I’ll tell you what the government won’t: this epidemic is going to knock us all on our arses this autumn. We could be left with empty offices, closed shops, a decimated workforce.
Other governments are urging their populations to stockpile enough food to feed their families for at least two weeks in case stores are closed if the staff become ill, or in case they themselves become ill suddenly. If you contract swine flu and you have to go to the store for bread, you will spread the virus. Just ilke that.
Other governments ask parents to self-quarantine for seven days if their child’s school is closed because of swine flu – in case their child has the flu but has not yet shown symptoms.
Other governments are taking this seriously.
As far as I can tell, the British government’s entire swine flu plan is Tamiflu. Don’t worry, they keep saying, we have Tamiflu.
Tamiflu has a mild palliative effect in some cases if given in the first day or two of the virus.
That’s all we got, people.
And the NHS seems to be hinting that we don’t actually have that much of it.
If you stop and think about it – if you, for example, read the Wikipedia page about the swine flu epidemic of 1918 – that should scare the hell out of you.
But the government, well, it’s got it all under control. You can tell that by way in which the virus is spreading like wildfire.
No need to worry.
They’re still stupid
Back in the 1990s, I came across an article in Spin magazine with the best lede I’d ever read.
The article was about prisons in the deep South in America reintroducing the concept of chain gangs as additional punishment and humiliation. Groups of prisoners chained together wearing comedy striped pajamas were forced to clean litter and break rocks on public roads.
The writer (whose name sadly eludes me) wrote that the use of the chain gangs was a message from the South to the rest of the country. And that message was: ‘We’re still here. We’re still stupid. Fuck you.’
Chaos theory
Watching the selection of John Bercow as Speaker of Parliament yesterday reminded me of that fantastic introduction to an article about ignorance, ineptitude, petty governmental ladder climbing, and the kind of tin-pot-dictator-envy that seems to be a bizarre hallmark of our modern democracy.
As I listened to duplicitous Labour MPs lying shockingly to the cameras and the voters of Britain, smirking as they did so (seriously, why does the Labour party allow Diane Abbott to ever go on television when she’s such a good advertisement for any other political party?), I actually felt nauseous.
After the last few months, how can it be that they’re not taking any of this seriously? How foolish are they?
Parliament is regarded with contempt by a vast majority of the country at this point. Those who work in government are ashamed to admit that to those who do not. I have never in all of my life seen a western government held in such low regard by its citizenry. I cannot imagine how they expect to lead a country that increasingly refuses to follow.
And if they cannot lead, then there is no legitimate government, and that – as anybody who remembers the 1970s will tell you – means chaos.
But otherwise, everything’s fine
The idea that, after the last few weeks, Labour would be so callous as to choose a speaker solely because he would upset the Conservatives is breathtaking.
At a time when Parliament is this close to not existing as we have known it, they’re still playing games of British bulldog with our government.
Let’s just reassess where we are right now. We are engaged in two wars – neither of which we show signs of winning. North Korea is perfecting its nuclear catapult. Iran is enraging extremists Muslim groups – who already weren’t too fond of us – against us. We are in the midst of the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression – and despite what the Prime Minister might say we as a nation are culpable in that crisis. Every single member of Parliament has been in some way tarnished by a corruption scandal on a scale none of us has ever witnessed in our lives. And throughout it all the Prime Minister has appeared to be out of his depth, terrified and at sea.
Nightmare
This is a nightmare situation. And the election of the Speaker could have been a first step towards waking us up from this horrible dream.
Instead, the selection of John Bercow for petty political purposes perpetuates the horror. And the smiling lies of the Labour and (some) Lib Dem MPs on the news last night means that they either do not understand or do not care how angry we are, and how sad, and how tremendously awful this situation is.
After hundreds of years of democracy, through wars and deprivation, from Cromwell to now, how is it possible that this feckless lot have managed to undo so much good, and leave us in such a desperate situation?
But they have, haven’t they? And the message Labour and Lib Dem MPs sent to voters last night was the same one those southern prison wardens sent to America 15 years ago.
‘We’re still here. We’re still stupid. Fuck you.’
We’re just not that into you, Gordon
The Centrist has been listening to the speech Gordon Brown made today to what appeared to be his best friends in the world, although the BBC calls them ‘party activists.’ Whatever that means.
Mr Brown went on at some length about how he could not possibly resign now because, as he explained it, we need him. We really, really need him.
According to the BBC:
‘Mr Brown went on: ”What would people think of a Labour government faced with an economic crisis… if we ever walked away from them at a time of need? We are sticking with them and working with them.”‘
If he ‘ever’ walked away? Is Labour planning to stay in power in the UK forever?
He keeps saying things like that.
’I will not walk away’ he said on Friday, as if that would make the country feel better.
The mind boggles
There is so much wrong with this statement, that the mind boggles.
- He’s not ‘faced with’ an economic crisis. As the chancellor for 10 years he built this crisis up from nothing. Did anybody else ever hear him mention America’s financial practices before the British property market bubble burst? No? Me neither. Through lack of regulation, short-term thinking, and poor practices, he made this.
- No political party gets to decide when to leave. As much as he’d like to stay and help, most of the voting population has strongly indicated that they’d prefer a different fireman in this emergency. And in a democracy the voters decide who is in charge.
Why does the Labour party at the moment seem to consider democracy to be optional? Leaders of the party keep explaining why an election is unnecessary. I’ve never heard anything like these verbal political contortions in my life.
Please leave us alone
Let me ask you something. Did you ever, when you were a teenager, have one of those boy- or girl-stalkers? You know the kind: they asked you out (or maybe you asked them), and you went out once, but there was no there there. So you decided… nah.
But they kept calling, and coming around, clinging to your sleeve in the hallway, gazing at you lovingly, refusing to accept that the feeling was not returned. Begging, even.
And there would come a horrible moment when you thought, ‘I’m actually going to have to be mean to this person to make them go away.’ Even worse, maybe you found yourself wanting to be mean to them, because they were so needy, or so wrong about you and what you felt.
That’s what Gordon Brown (and by association, Labour) reminds me of now. He thinks we love him. Or at least, he thinks we need him. We know we don’t. We keep telling him this, but he won’t believe us.
Gordon Brown is stalking us
We might have to be mean to him to make him understand that, when you get right down to it, we’re just not that into him.
