I was in the process of marshalling my thoughts to say the same as Brendan O’Neill here, when I saw his article. He’s said things much more powerfully than I ever could. It’s a beautifully-written piece.
The Labour Party in the UK issued a tweet. I think they wanted to get some political capital from the difficulties those down for a party Tories are currently experiencing. If you’re not familiar with UK politics, in US terms the Labour Party are the equivalent of the Democrats. Kind of. The Tory party are the equivalent of the Republicans. Kind of.
The Tories have been naughty - having parties, inside, outside, in the broom closet, whilst the rest of us were fined for sitting alone on park benches, or for having a mate round for a session of GTA and a few pints. The rate of partying seems now to have been doubling every few days. Labour wanted to take advantage of this with their tweet.
The tweet they put out is an example of tone-deafness par excellence. It’s like thinking that a rutting Walrus sounds like Pavarotti. There was a famous example of this in the UK some time ago when the Chairman of Ratners, the jewellery chain, publicly stated his company’s products were crap. It didn’t work out too well. What was he thinking?
Mind you, we’re living in different times - the CEO of Pfizer effectively just said the same thing, our covid vaccine products are crap, and governments across the world still seem to be infatuated with the useless Goo.
I’m no stranger to opening my mouth and jumping in with both feet, after having shot myself in both the left and right foot. Then again, I’m not the CEO of a large company, or head of PR for a political party. Nor should I ever be. As my mum is fond of saying “if you had a brain, you’d be dangerous”.
What were the Labour party thinking? Here’s the tweet on the right here.
What’s strange here is that the Labour Party have been consistently arguing for even stronger restrictions. What’s incomprehensible here is that they thought this Tweet makes them look good.
I don’t know who Jenny is, I hope we never find out, but I think there’s a real NHS nurse behind this. This is a stark reminder of just how far we have fallen. Under the guise of “the greater good” this nurse did the wrong thing, the inhumane thing. She should have moved heaven and earth to get round the restrictions and to give this couple some moments for a dignified goodbye.
She allowed some vague future hypothetical harm to outweigh a real, immediate harm.
Hospitals have been on top of the table for “places to catch covid” throughout this - it’s very unlikely the addition of a few visitors, per patient, would have substantially improved their position in the league table. It could have been managed in a reasonably “covid safe™” way, if pandering to the covid-psychosis was important.
Billions spent on useless things like track and trace, masks, screens, gloves. Millions of man-hours of ingenuity (and with a nod to the current political climate, woman-hours, and non-binary-hours also) wasted on shit - and they couldn’t come up with a decent “safe” way to allow visitors to dying people?
The head of the Labour Party, Sir Fear Starmer, has done the equivalent of a Brandon shart - that uncomfortable moment when you realize that things really weren’t what you thought they were.
Or... and hear me out here... it meant exactly what they intended to mean.
"This is the kind of example of bravery we expect all of you to uphold. This nurse stared the depths of human suffering in the face and said, 'compassion has no place here. Cold compliance and enforcement of undemocratic rule is all that shall govern life. You shall not pass.'" She will be celebrated as a hero. Will you?
Was it ever about saving lives?
More likely it was about weaponizing fear to inject and imprison, I fear.