By: Chris Morrison

20th April 2020

Want to understand why so many seem relaxed about the Government’s increasingly ludicrous mass house arrest scheme? Check out how many public sector workers are being furloughed, let alone being made redundant. Then surf the tsunami of funny money being poured into the pockets of many average wage employees.

The sun is shining, the birds are singing, what’s not to like for surprisingly large numbers of people? If you believe the Guardian or listen to the BBC you might have felt for some time that the State is much better at organising everything. The Guardian’s resident fount of self-importance Polly Toynbee recently wrote that there was now a “genuinely solid case” for a universal basic income. In other words, there is a genuinely solid case for handing out free money!!

On Toynbee planet the filthy lucre is stolen by the wicked “capitalists”. It is the job of social justice warriors, motivated only by concern for their fellow humans, to remove them of their ill -gotten gains and redistribute to those most deserving – as identified of course by P Toynbee and similar selfless right-minded people.

Of course the brunt of the 35% forecast drop in the second quarter national cake will not be felt by the public sector. Barely a few crumbs in fact. The 35% cull will fall on those who create the wealth and real jobs, supply the goods and pay the taxes to the State.

The devastation is real and growing at a frightening pace. Jobs, future livelihoods and taxable wealth are being destroyed before our very eyes. The weaker restaurant chains such as Carluccio’s have already gone while in fashion retail Oasis and Warehouse are following Debenhams to the breaker’s yard. In the travel business, Virgin Atlantic wants £500m to keep going, while travel firms beg for £4bn from the state to pay back some of their holiday refunds.

Everyone is demanding protection from someone, renters from landlords, landlords from banks, lenders from the state. Assets that took years to build up are being destroyed overnight. Unlike the wise virgins, savers are being royally screwed. There are no safe havens in this carnage. Dividends are being cut and cancelled by many of the reliable past payers while bond funds are only as safe as the ability of the borrower to continue paying interest.

The real tragedy of this financial crash will be played out in the small and medium private company sector.  There are nearly six million SME companies employing up to 49 people and they account for 60% of all employment and half the turnover in the private sector. Many of these companies operate on tight margins relying on a constant flow of customers to pay wages, rents, suppliers and of course taxes for the NHS. Weeks of inactivity will harm the customer base and wreak havoc throughout the entire feeding chain.

Of course it doesn’t help that many in the public sector read the ignorant drivel pumped out daily by the Guardian and often replicated by the BBC, but the lack of understanding of how a modern service economy works is breath-taking. And the ignorance stretches all the way to the top. Shutting the productive economy down for a further three weeks and refusing to give any indication when the horror show will be eased is arrogance of breath-taking proportions.

But then the Government has all the answers, or thinks it does, courtesy of state employees like Professor Neil Ferguson and his Garbage in, Gospel out half a million will die medical model. More “settled” wisdom from state-funded “scientists” derived from similar GIGO climate models means we also have to give up he most efficient fuel we have that has transformed our world over the last 100 years.

Whatever the penury these state-funded, Big Man, I’m the expert buffoons inflict on the rest of us, you can be sure they will always be gainfully and fully employed looking forward to gold-plated pensions. Certainly that will be so if they work for bodies like the NHS – a byword for socialist inefficiency where 17,000 hospital beds were cut over the last decade at a time when real funding actually grew.

But of course, all the pain is necessary and worthwhile. We are faced with another highly infectious plague from the East that turns the skin black with gangrene, kills one in three people and attacks indiscriminately the young and old, the well and infirm.

Sorry, scrub that last paragraph. I was getting carried away reading my old history essay on the Black Death and bubonic plague and its effect on Britain in the 14th century. Obviously faced with danger of that level we needed to shut down the ale houses, restrict inter-county carriage cart services and stay in our own hovels for the duration.

What we are actually faced with is a virus, one of many corona types, that seems to severely attack mostly the very old and infirm. The young, by all accounts, often barely notice it when they are infected. Immunity seems widespread, possibly already partly gained by infection from other corona viruses. It’s a nasty little bug but many eminent epidemiologists suggest the actual death rate is little higher than seasonal flu.

For instance Professor Johan Giesecke, the first chief scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, believes Covid 19 is similar to flu “and it was the novelty of the disease that scared people”. The correct policy is to protect the old and frail only.

Dr John Lee, a recently retired professor of pathology, points to the “unreliable” Covid-19 statistics from around the world and questions the models that rely on them. Speaking to Spiked Online, he took the view that Pandora’s box is open and the virus will spread throughout the population, whether we lockdown or not.

So why is this critical debate that affects all our lives and future prosperity not heard in much of the mainstream media. Dr Lee again – without comment!

“I suppose that depends on what media you are looking at. It seems to me that there are two types of media: there is the investigative-journalism type media that tries to find out whether the facts and interpretations of stories are really true. And then there is the less critical type of media which essentially illustrates a story that it thinks it already knows”.

Meanwhile we battle on with the much in demand citizen house arrest policy.  We can but laugh, before we cry, at some of the idiocies of the situation. Here in the Morrison fastness in Wimbledon the pet shops are doing a roaring trade. The mutt has to eat after all. Our local establishment is also offering the usual “parlour” facilities so Buster gets a regular shampoo, cut and set while the Master is left cultivating his Conan the Barbarian look.

Don’t forget: Sit, Stay – well done, here’s your treat from the State.

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