Jam tomorrow?

Throughout the whole Covid thing I have been a sceptic. Medical affairs have never interested me anyway and I always zone out whenever such things are discussed. Cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s… the maladies of the age hold little fascination for me and I pretty much take my chances; I don’t go out of my way to invite illness and I do as I am advised whenever – which is rarely - I am afflicted.

But for some, health is a lifelong crusade and the NHS and its reaction to epidemics has always been a political game for a significant number of the population. Many parents, I observe, have become so used to the recent idea that freedom from all illness is some sort of human right, that some abrogate all responsibility to educate their charges, relying instead on the machinery of state to fix everything. Others are so consumed by the spectre of future guilt that government funded prophylactics are rejected out of hand.

This is not to belittle parental concern, more to set up the thesis that there is no single right answer; as with all matters human: “Yes, we are all individuals”. I have never thought the Covid threat particularly serious, having survived similar infections on many, regular, occasions. And as for the implications that it is a sinister killer disease unleashed to decimate the population, well, they’re going to have to do better than that. A current counter-rumour is that is just a re-branding of seasonal illnesses – hay fever, influenza, etc – in order to instil alarm and fear. To what end, I ask?

But anyway, we have far bigger threats than Covid – immigration from the third world is set to overwhelm the welfare systems of Europe, systems which are already creaking at the seams trying to cater just for their own citizens. And governments are cocking a deaf un at entreaties from those same concerned citizens, afraid that their rights are to be reduced to mere subsistence after centuries of progress. Import the third world, get the third world, they say and it certainly seems to be happening in every major city.

As a direct result, the general breakdown of law and order stretches the authorities who, once again, seem powerless to control the proliferation of knife and gun crime at street level. Meanwhile, we are told, organised crime such as drug and people trafficking, modern-day slavery and fraud are reaching epidemic proportions of their own. And what is demanded of us? Tolerance for ‘different cultural sensitivities’.

And then there is climate alarmism, driving governments to adopt policies which will prove ruinously expensive for the vast majority. When personal transport is unaffordable and public transport is a knife-crime lottery, when low level work is exclusively the province of the slavers and many high-end jobs are off-shored and devalued, what then? Where will we be in a few winters’ time, when people are unable to feed their families and heat their homes and go to work?

It is hard, when you consider such things to not conclude that our governments hate us. But I fear it is worse than that. If the government truly hated us it would be all too apparent and the seeds of revolution would surely be shown. Instead of a visceral loathing I believe the ruling classes quietly despise us, as obstacles to reaching their idealistic goals.

As a result, it is all too tempting to simply leave us out of the equation. Western governments seem to have ‘evolved’ from management to management advisers. They have taken the man out of management and replaced it with algorithms that have no regard for humanity. Long ago, the time and motion men took the reward out of skilled craftsmanship; now they are extracting the joy out of life itself. Jam tomorrow? Even that hope has gone.