It’s come to this.

There is a narrow way out of this, if the govt grasps it.

We’ve had one of the worst coronavirus responses in the world, and we have to get out of this. There is a narrow path out, but only if the govt shows sufficient ambition.

We need to double down, even tighten, this lockdown. We need to take a supportive rather than a punitive approach to it, providing economic support to incentivise and facilitate cooperation, and deliver a Test Trace Isolate system that actually functions.

Vaccinations are the closest thing we have to a panacea, but they aren’t a magic wand. They take time, might not last, might be complicated by variants. With vaccines alone, we may need further lockdowns over the next few winters, unless we take the following strategy.

We must triple our vaccine rollout, recruiting every arm of state and civil organisations that can help, including recruiting more volunteers, something Labour and trade unions are pushing for with Let’s Vaccinate Britain.

The key is, let’s get this rate as low as possible, staying locked down as long as it takes, so we may be in a position to implement ZERO COVID come summer when it simmers down. We may have missed the boat on this, and the variants may have got out too much (thanks to govt complacency last year allowing them to), but we have to try, and it’s the clearest path out of this mess.

This govt is ideological, cruel, inept, and otherwise useless. But we have to make this work, and we can’t get rid of them. Therefore, we all want them to succeed, for the sake of all our communities.

An inept government is an empty space, an open question, something we can fill with substance and ideas, things that seem the evade them. Let’s build a pressure campaign for a strategy of deep suppression, followed by ZERO COVID. This is the fastest way to get schooling, the economy, and life, back to normal and least disrupted.

Does the Johnson govt have the ambition to turn this around, and do something truly world beating?