Wednesday 30 June 2021

What sort of England are we becoming?

I worry about what’s happening to us as a country. Brexit seems to have opened a door to a world that is hard to reconcile with the England I used to know, a door which may never be closed. At the England - Germany match yesterday, a section of the crowd was booing the German national anthem and also when the players from both sides took the knee. Baiting foreigners is becoming our national pastime.  We seem to be descending into a xenophobic rage.

Some people on Twitter were gloating about a German kid pictured on television crying, after her team lost. Some of the comments tweeted about her were too graphic to repeat on this post. News outlets are falling over themselves to report the 2-0 win that put us into the quarter finals as if it was VE day.

God help us if we win the whole tournament. My daughter was sitting outside in her back garden last night in a nearby village and said she knew England had scored because the pub and the whole village erupted.  It's a football match for heavens sake.

I note a few Brexiteers are even claiming it’s something to do with leaving the EU! Lord Moylan for and Andrew Bridgen, example.

But that was nothing compared to what happened to the Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty recently.

He was accosted by a couple of men while walking somewhere in London. They even filmed themselves assaulting him and posted it on line. The police say the men were ‘spoken to’ at the time and their names are known. I bet nothing comes of it though. 

You can see what happened here:

To which the ‘comedian’ Lee Hurst tweeted:

Hurst is said to be have been reported to Twitter for inciting violence. Note nearly 800 people 'liked' his tweet and almost 600 retweeted it.

Perhaps even worse, a few days ago, a crowd gathered outside his house with loudhailers and were chanting “traitor” and “murderer.” It’s hard to understand what these people were thinking about. Their anger was directed at a man doing his utmost to save as many lives as possible in a national pandemic.

None of them seemed to be socially distancing or wearing masks and I assume they were all extreme anti-vaxers. You would need to be slightly disturbed to want to go and protest outside his house, even if you were against vaccines. Who organised it?

Whitty's own father was killed by terrorists in Athens in 1984 while working for The British Council. I bet none of the protesters knew that.

All of this is, in my opinion, a result of Boris Johnson himself. He has at best been equivocal about Covid, treating it as an inconvenience rather than a killer. He has given out mixed messages right from the outset and made it known by his own example that he thought following rules was optional. The borders remained open to flights from India for far too long, test and trace is an expensive joke and I am not convinced everyone who should be isolating actually does.

We have the worst death toll in Europe, and yesterday we had more new cases than the rest of the EU put together.

While this is going on, Labour looks like losing the Batley and Spen by election, which you must assume means the electorate approves of what’s happening. The coarsening of public debate, the constant denigrating of foreigners and immigrants, the vitriol and hate seems to show that Brexit has put us on a dangerous road.

Leave voters are prepared to tolerate excesses in one area in order to get what they want in another. Those who would like immigration reduced are happy to see the economy tank, even if it affects them personally, while others, fishermen for example, would I am sure turn a blind eye to immigrants being treated more harshly provided they got back control of ‘our’ waters. It's an I'm alright Jack approach and that's the problem isn't it?

We have a Home Secretary who makes hardliners like Michael Howard look like a soft, moderate liberal.  Ms Patel is now talking of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing.  I am shocked at the very idea.

I wonder what it was like in Germany in 1930? We may soon find out.

Now, a bit of personal stuff. I have written this blog for about four years, publishing 2,541 posts in total (and a lot more drafted but never posted). But it takes time to research and type out and I am trying to do this with a lot of other things, too.  I am conscious of spending less and less time on each post and the quality is getting worse.

So, I don't intend to post every day from now on. I'll keep it going, and post when I can, but it won't be every day and it won't be at 9:00 am sharp.  Don't worry, I haven't given up. I haven't accepted Brexit and I never will.

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