RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: The Bog Roll Bandits are back… don’t panic!
As far as I know we’re not looking at bringing in troops,’ the Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told LBC radio yesterday.
That’s a relief.
When the Government announced that all Covid restrictions were being lifted from Monday, nobody mentioned they would be replaced by the imposition of martial law.
But the way things are going, don’t be surprised if the tanks start rolling any day now.
Already the chairman of the Commons defence committee is calling for soldiers to take the place of delivery drivers forced to self-isolate by the pingdemic.
Supermarket shelves are being stripped bare again, because of a combination of supply shortages and the return of panic buying.
Yes, folks, the Bog Roll Bandits are back. Welcome to the Summer of Stupidity, Mark II.
Supermarket shelves are being stripped bare again, because of a combination of supply shortages and the return of panic buying
Listening to the news yesterday morning, I felt like Rip Van Winkle in reverse. I’d gone to sleep in July 2021 and woken up 16 months earlier.
Talk about back to the future.
Kwarteng was appealing to people not to start stockpiling everything from dried pasta to toilet paper. The Government might just as well have sent out Corporal Jones, from Dad’s Army, on the morning media round.
Don’t panic!
Kwasi’s plea went straight down the khazi. Across the country, shoppers were taking no chances. In Cambridge, supplies of bottled water ran dry. In Birmingham, the wine racks were empty.
In some Liverpool stores, you couldn’t buy sliced bread for love nor money. The Scousers do love their chip butties, don’t they?
At Morrisons, in Edinburgh, for some inexplicable reason, there was a run on male toiletries. I know they’re a fastidious lot in Edinburgh, but how much aftershave can any one man use? Perhaps they’re drinking the stuff.
Four days after the ‘irreversible’ return of what was supposed to be normal life, we find we are less free than we were last summer. The nightmare goes on, as the Government lurches from panic to paralysis.
Primary cause is the disastrous Test and Trace app, which has ordered 1.3million perfectly healthy people to self-isolate unnecessarily.
As far as I know we’re not looking at bringing in troops,’ the Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told LBC radio yesterday. That’s a relief
As a result, virtually every sector of the economy is suffering from chronic staff shortages. Already struggling businesses have been forced to close and everything from rubbish collection to transport services has been severely disrupted.
Ordering people who have been double-jabbed to quarantine is madness. Yet ministers stick stubbornly to their insistence that nothing will change until August 16. Instead they tinker with exemptions in a pathetic attempt to mitigate the worst excesses of their insane policy.
Test and Trace is lockdown by any other name, a disgraceful infringement of civil liberties by a so-called Conservative government.
It is also wide open to abuse from chancers and lead-swingers. Here’s a ‘for instance’.
Mail reader Natalie Patterson writes from Louth, Lincolnshire, where she saw a woman wandering from shop to shop along the High Street scanning the QR code on the doors with her mobile phone. Like a cautious roulette player covering the waterfront, she was trying to increase her chances of getting pinged. And it paid off, in spades.
At B&Q, where the woman repeated the exercise, Natalie overheard her telling a friend: ‘It’s brilliant, I’ve only worked seven days in the past 10 weeks!’
None of this needed to happen. Test and Trace should have been made obsolete by Britain’s successful vaccination programme. But, as I wrote on Tuesday, having blown the thick end of £40 billion on the technology, they were always going to use it.
Ominously, yesterday Kwarteng was refusing to guarantee that the pingdemic would end in August. ‘The science’ is already warning that lockdown will have to be reimposed before the end of the summer. Far from being irreversible, our illusory so-called freedom looks like being short-lived.
Don’t be surprised when masks and social distancing make a comeback with a vengeance within weeks, not months, along with the introduction of vaccine passports.
Boris has bottled it, yet again. Having nailed his colours to the freedom mast, he’s been frantically backpedalling.
It’s not just Test and Trace, the Government’s stop/start ‘traffic light’ system for foreign travel is a complete and utter shambles, too. The holiday plans of millions have been thrown into uncertainty and disarray.
Even if you do manage to get away, there’s the looming threat that, at the drop of a hat, you will have to cut short your stay or quarantine when you come home.
Thanks to staff shortages caused by Test and Trace and byzantine bureaucracy at the border, navigating your way through an airport requires deep reserves of patience and fortitude, even if you’re double-jabbed and documented in triplicate.
Rather than flying into Heathrow, you’d be better off heading for Calais and hiring a dinghy. In the time it takes to get through immigration and customs, you could have floated across the Channel, wandered on to the beach in Kent and been halfway home up the M2 in the back of a lorry.
(Incidentally, why have we sent an aircraft carrier and two patrol ships to the South China Sea when they would be more usefully deployed off Dungeness?)
Today, the restaurant sector is still in crisis because of Test and Trace, and it’s almost as if the Government is deliberately throwing obstacles in the way of foreign travel to intimidate us into staying home. Just because you’re paranoid and all that…
Britain is an international laughing-stock, and not just because of our complete inability to fashion a coherent response to the migrant crisis. Try looking at the UK from across the pond. A few days ago, President Joe Biden was talking enthusiastically about reopening transatlantic air travel.
Forget about that any time soon. Congress has taken one glance at the chaos in Britain and told him: ‘No way, Jose.’
Who can blame them? All they see is a Prime Minister, double-jabbed and with antibodies up the wazoo, cowering in the attic in splendid isolation.
The Health Secretary, the Chancellor and the Leader of the Opposition are all having to quarantine. In the House of Commons, a smattering of MPs sit six feet apart and continue to wear masks.
Every day, hundreds of thousands of healthy Brits are put under house arrest. And all this in a country which supposedly led the world in administering vaccines. Right now, it’s March 2020 all over again.
This time last year, when vaccines were still six months away, foreign holidays were far easier. The Chancellor was actually paying us to eat out, through his Money For Nothing And Your Chips For Free scheme.
Today, the restaurant sector is still in crisis because of Test and Trace, and it’s almost as if the Government is deliberately throwing obstacles in the way of foreign travel to intimidate us into staying home. Just because you’re paranoid and all that…
This time last year, the travel industry was already teetering on the brink. Heathrow had made thousands redundant and both BA and Virgin had pulled out of Gatwick.
Airline bosses warned that unless they were cleared for take-off they faced bankruptcy and extinction.
That any British airline has survived the ensuing 12 months is a miracle, but it can’t last. London’s international hub status is under serious threat.
So much for a glorious post-Brexit ‘global Britain’. The UK remains largely closed for business.
This time next year, Rodney, we could be debt trillionaires and still stuck in lockdown limbo.
After 16 months of hardship, house arrest and self-sacrifice, the freedom we were promised has turned out to be a chimera.
It’s déjà vu all over again. But, don’t panic, the Government isn’t looking to bring in the troops, as far as we know. Stuff this for a game of soldiers.
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