Thursday 4 March 2021

Johnson is consistent!

ohnson May well be, as Philip Collins asserts, a "character who is hard to characterise", but that does not necessarily make him "hard to oppose" (The Public Square, 26 February). A prime minister claiming to be a "one-nation" Conservative, intent on "levelling up", is an easy target when enacting such policies would enrage most of the party`s members and donors, and doom them to failure. History has shown us, from Disraeli to May,, that Tory claims to be on the side of the working people and against "burning injustices" are simply political rhetoric! Stephen Bush`s suggestion that Johnson`s "most consistent attribute is inconsistency" misses an important thread running through his administration (Boris Johnson`s great gamble, 26 February). Sending children back to school gradually would have meant following the lead of the Welsh and Scottish administrations, just as having all teaching staff vaccinated at half-term an acknowledgement that Starmer had driven the decision. In the pandemic`s early stages the WHO strongly suggested that testing was the way forward, only for Johnson`s insistence on the UK`s "exceptionalism" leading to obfuscation and delays. Johnson`s proposals have to be of English origin and not copies of methods used in other countries, or ones proposed by Starmer. The quarantine scheme has to be different from the one used successfully in Australia, and naturally ends up half-baked and unlikely to prove effective. The decisions are all political, designed to show Tory ideas better than Labour`s and England`s solutions more effective than those of all other countries. A death rate per capita worse than that of the US does not appear to be as significant for Johnson as the next election!

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