British Soldiers Go Over The Top at the battle of the Somme. Courtesy of Imperial War Museum for non commercial use.
As we have reached day 135 in the current Covid 19 crisis we are seeing the unravelling of the lockdown. People are told to stay safe, wear a mask. Stay in your bubble to stop the spread of the virus, then told to go to the pub, eat out and go back to work! The latest missteps of our government in combating the virus, stay safe, the economy needs you spend money again, so don’t stay safe because we need you to gather in number in pubs, restaurants and retail, just stay safe?
The government wants to smash the virus and get the economy running again. This reminds me of the First World War when brave men were sent “over the top” to attack the Hun at the Somme. Tens of thousands of brave men lost their lives because British Army Generals used them as cannon fodder to break the Huns resolve. We the British people are being sent “over the top” to fight a killer that we can’t see, hear or taste, a killer that so far has killed 65,000 of our fellow citizens and shows no signs yet of ending it killing spree.
Yes, we have all become the cannon fodder for the Conservative Party that insists we pay the price for their incompetence, their hatred for the ordinary working class of the country. Their main concern is their Billionaire and Millionaire friends who donate to the party and effectively are running the country whilst the Prime Minister is absent without leave. The Conservatives are being propped up by an increasingly incompetent, sterile, right-wing enablers from the Labour Party, led by a vacuous individual who has no policies, no compassion for the neediest in our society and no direction in what he wants to achieve. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party Shadow Cabinet has the intellectual capacity of a brick, bricks are useful to build homes, Shadow Cabinet bricks build privilege and a wall between them and their electorate.
Make no mistake, what we are seeing now is the destruction of a democracy that has been ongoing since the 1970’s yet still had a semblance of one up to the millennium. We see more and more links to big business, oligarchs that run our press and television with an impunity most criminals can only dream of. They’re called “The New Establishment” unlike The Establishment, they don’t care about this country nor the individuals that live in it, they care only for themselves, their greed and those who work for them to ensure the gravy train stays on the tracks.
What will those old soldiers long in their graves, fighting for a country and of a cause that they and their families believed in? They paid the ultimate price, a price our professional politicians seemed ready to pay for someone else’s. family to pay the price whilst they play war games with real people. The politicians that stood up wanting war in Syria, they wanted to give Russia a bloody nose, their baying for blood as where prepared to send brave men and women from our armed forces into battle against a foe who had done us no harm. These narcissists, psychopaths and ne’re-do-wells from the Conservatives, Labour Right and Liberal Democrats, red faced, frothing at the mouth, drunk on both alcohol and privilege still want us to go “over the top” so we can defeat our invisible foe, Covid 19. No, No, No! It is time for The New Establishment to take responsibility for the mess you have made, this is on you!