Friday, 1 May 2020

Targets Missed, Indeed

Here it is, Boris Johnson's own tweet promising to test 100,000 people per day by the end of April. It is still only 73,000 people, so the Government has failed to meet its own target.

People in poor areas, quite a few of which vote Conservative these days, are twice as likely to die as people in rich areas are. BAME people are far more likely to die than white people are. And men are more likely to die than women are. But the Official Opposition could not care less.

Likewise, this year's shift to teacher assessment is unlikely to be wholly reversed. Yet working-class pupils are twice as likely to be predicted an E grade, while black pupils' grades are staggeringly under-predicted, with only 39 per cent of predictions turning out to have been correct. Boys are also ill-served.

13 years of Labour Government did nothing to improve any of this. Quite the reverse, in fact. The people who make these mistakes are the backbone of the Labour Party's membership, and their children are the direct beneficiaries of the present system.

It therefore came as no surprise that this week, Labour said literally nothing in response to an outing for that fairly regular one-day wonder, a call for the return of National Service. But then, it was a Conservative Government that abolished it.

Ask people about National Service. They will tell you. They will tell you about serving as Privates under public schoolboys of their own age who were on short commissions, and who had either come straight from organised drunken vandalism and violence, sometimes complete with uniforms and membership lists, or who were going straight on to them, or both.

These days, Labour cannot find a reason to oppose the possible restoration of all of that. In fact, the last Labour Government came close to effecting such a restoration on more than one occasion. Mercifully, the professional military top brass will always have close enough ties to the Conservative Party to stop it. But so much for Labour.

So much for Labour, indeed. The mishandling of Covid-19 by this Government means that the United Kingdom is well on its way to having the highest number of deaths in Europe, and the second highest in the world. This may very well have been the case for quite some time, since the Government has been counting the number of deaths in such a way as to exclude at least half of them.

Yet Keir Starmer, who is paid to be the Leader of the Opposition, actively congratulates the Government on its conduct. He does so while calling for an exit strategy from the lockdown in order to favour his donors, and if the plebs died, then the plebs would die. No doubt our deaths would contribute to herd immunity.

For all practical purposes, the office of Leader of the Opposition is vacant. But we plebeians must and will have our tribunes. Anyone ought to be acknowledged as such who had by 31st May secured the signatures of at least 100,000 parliamentary electors, including at least 100 in each of the 650 constituencies. Media that so acknowledged would deserve to be supported in every way necessary. Other media would not.

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