‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it’, the great American novelist Upton Sinclair one said. We can update Upton for 2020. ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand the negative effects of lockdowns and draconian Covid restrictions when his salary won’t be adversely affected by them’.
Take MPs. They receive a basic annual salary of £81, 932 (it went up again in April), plus very generous allowances. They will get paid this amount, regardless of whether the economy is locked down again this autumn, regardless of the impact that ‘social distancing‘ and mandatory masks have had on business. So should we be at all surprised that MPs - of all parties - have backed government restrictions?
In a genuine democracy, you’d expect the ‘Opposition’ to be challenging the government’s power grab, wouldn't you. But instead Keir Starmer, who gets paid £144,649 as ’Leader of HM Opposition’ said last week: ‘We do support the measures that the government have put in place and we would urge the public to comply with the new rules...
I urge everybody to comply with the rules, not to try and find ways round them and there’s nothing between the Labour party and the government on this.’ As the old saying goes ‘Birds of a feather on extremely high superannuated salaries stick together’.
Imagine if the payment of MPs was adversely affected by the Covid ‘rules’. Would they be so united in favour of compliance? Of course not. There’d be no chance of the Coronavirus Act being renewed if it was their jobs and incomes on the line.
Likewise local councillors, pushing for local lockdowns, despite the tremendous harm they do to small and medium sized businesses in their area. Last week, Doncaster Council kyboshed the return of paying spectators to Doncaster races for the St Leger meeting after just one day. It cost the racetrack £250,000. But not the Mayor of Doncaster Ros Jones who didn’t want spectators to attend, or the town’s Director of Public Health. In July Rupert Suckling had said that a rate of infection above 20 per 100,000 would be a cause for concern, last week it was only 10.9. So why cancel? Again, it’s all very easy to shut something down if it’s not you who’s going to lose out financially.
The national Public health ‘advisers’ arguing for a continuation or even further tightening of the Covid restrictions also see no harm to their pockets. In July when Boris Johnson expressed hopes that ‘social distancing’ could be ended by Christmas- which definitely cheered a lot of people up- he was shot down almost immediately by the government‘s utterly grim Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty.
Whitty said that social distancing would have to continue ‘for a long period of time’. Would he quite so keen on it continuing ‘for a long period of time’ if he was the owner of a small café or restaurant or the proprietor of a coach holiday business? No matter how many enterprises go to the wall because of ’social distancing’ rules, no matter how many lives are ruined because people aren’t able to freely mix and mingle, no matter how many suicides the ‘New Abnormal’ of reduced social interaction brings, we can rest assured that Professor Chris Whitty will still be drawing a very high salary.
Then there’s the media loudmouths who have been trying to scare us senseless since March. Piers Morgan, presenter of ‘Good Morning Britain’, has terrified a nation in 2020, blasting people who haven’t followed government rules as ‘morons’ and relentlessly warning of a 'second wave', but of course, lockdowns and Covid-restrictions don’t affect his income - he is reportedly paid £1.1 million a year.
Again do we think people like Morgan and other media cheerleaders for draconian restrictions would be quite so pro if they swapped jobs with someone whose business, which they had spent a lifetime building up, was threatened with bankruptcy because of government restrictions?
Union leaders and officials too must not escape censure. They opposed the original easing of lockdown and people being allowed to go back to work even if they wanted to return. They have pushed for mandatory masks and other restrictions which are bad for business and have no proven positive health benefits.
But again, as millions are laid off, because of the lockdowns and restrictions they supported, they’ll still be ok, drawing their high salaries. In 2020 it has to be said that unions have let their members down badly.
This year has shown us that the great divide is not so much between ‘left’ or ‘right’, but between the privileged ‘Inside the Tent’ few who won’t be adversely affected by the continuation of Covid restrictions and never-ending lockdowns, and those whose lives will be destroyed by them. The problem is that the first category of people are the ones with the clout. The second category, the self-employed, the hospitality workers, the small racehorse trainers, the owners of SMEs, the elderly who fear a life of permanent isolation, and never being able to see their grandchildren again - the people for whom a second lockdown really would be disastrous - don’t have a voice in our system. There is a lot to be angry about in 2020 but one of the most scandalous things is this: the narrative is being shaped - and policies implemented - by those who won’t lose a penny or their jobs, if life never gets back to normal.
Follow Neil Clark @NeilClark66 and @MightyMagyar
