Is the government about to get cold feet?

According to reports in the Guardian, the government may be coming to terms with the fact that most of the public oppose this cavalier attitude to unlocking, and it’s beginning to worry them.

According to the Guardian today, at the upper echelons of government there is a growing acknowledgment that the British public isn’t on the same page as them when it comes to “unlock as fast as possible” which now seems to be their hell for leather strategy. The government has thrown caution to the wind, but the public is still for the most part very much cautious. Johnson will speak on Monday to confirm the government is going ahead with the July 19th unlocking, and according to these reports it is expected he’ll have a much more measured message, and will be preaching caution.

Politically and from a public health standpoint this makes sense. The Tories are looking reckless, and the data on what the public think is pretty overwhelming, so while the substance of their unlocking should be identical, it looks as if they’re adapting their tone so they don’t find their rhetorical approach to this dramatically out of step with the wider public mood. As these reports in the Guardian say, the public is very nervous about the approach the government is taking, so Johnson is going to urge us all to “be responsible”, in other words still pinning it all on us, no collective guidance, just the acknowledgment it’s on us to not fuck this whole thing up. Tory ideology strikes again.

In this report it says “Two Whitehall sources told the Guardian that ministers had been spooked by internal polling. One said the data showed just 10% of the public support the policy of scrapping all restrictions at once, while another said substantially more people believed the government was moving too quickly than at the last reopening step on 17 May. These accounts were denied by No 10” which makes all this pretty well make sense, as does this: “Several sources said the most likely outcome of Monday’s deliberations was for the government to press ahead with 19 July but tone down the “freedom day” rhetoric. One said it “would be political suicide” to U-turn”.

In other words, this is all still useless, and the government are still doing the COVID equivalent of a nationwide chicken pox party, with all the onus on us. The fact they’re saying it’s on us to be responsible means if this goes wrong, and a new variant develops that can make its way around the vaccines, or if masses of our young people are debilitated with long COVID or some other undiscovered impact of mass COVID transmission on a scale we haven’t seen yet but the government is now willing to accept because there won’t be prior levels of deaths, then they can blame the “Covidiots”, and that narrative will be lapped up by both the media and the opposition.

I think those (often anti-government, anti-Brexit liberal types) who go around on social media posting about how thick the public are, and the great mob of “Covidiots” would bare reminding that by doing so, not only are they buying into the full stock of Tory ideology when it comes to pandemic management, making this about individual judgements and responsibility not collective solidarity, but they’re also ready making a false narrative that rising infection rates are because of a thick, anti-lockdown public that only exists in their imaginations rather than the people at the top of government they claim to oppose, but are creating the exact narrative they want for them among the liberal opinion makers of this country.

If the government was really interested in looking again and doing something to keep us safe as we unlock, rather than just save their PR, they would keep mask rules in place, and warn the public things like social distancing may be needed over the Winter; and take responsibility for letting the variant in that will make that the case, all to line the pockets of their donors and to safeguard short term profits. We’re on a bad course, and lining the deck chairs on the Titanic won’t undo the mistakes that have been made, and the mistakes that are being made, by our uniquely self defeating, tone deaf government.