Tuesday, 14 September 2021
Boris: The police state is far from over
Boris Johnson will today warn that the pandemic is 'far from over' as he unveils his 'winter plan' - admitting that another lockdown cannot by completely ruled out.
The PM is set to flesh out his strategy in a press conference this afternoon, after Health Secretary Sajid Javid has given the outline to MPs in a statement.
He will insist that vaccines can be the main defence against the disease, with boosters for the over-50s and jabs for under-16s starting soon.
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7 comments:
It's about time he nationalised the pharma industry, then they wouldn't invent more covids and the variants would stop around Epsilon, or Greta, Eater, Clapper, Landrova or whatever...
He can't rule out another lockdown, but if he plays his cards right he doesn't really need one. He just needs the threat of one, and the means to establish it: a deferential population, a system of tracking people, complacency around recording data, and swathes of "experts" who claim to know what's good for us.
I'm not defending the Police State, I suspect we have been sliding down some such path for a while now. My quibble is that it is not a Police State for the sake of imposing authoritarian government but a Police State as a natural consequence of so many people leading interrelated lives in a technologically advanced (but fragile) society.
Just as 'the Police State' imposed road traffic laws once traffic density was high enough, our UK population is highly urbanised (approx 84%) and that density also requires more control if everything iss to hang together.
Look at the sorry state the USA is in. The densely populated coastal areas are (broadly) Democrat and the less densely populated farming/herding/resource extraction areas are (broadly) Republican. And F Joe Biden is trying to impose Democrat polices on people who resist 'the Police State'.
Scrobs - I suspect we are in for some really deadly flu variants with scary names next. Landrova could be one of them but Greta would be more scary.
Sam - yes, now he has the tune embedded he can play variants of it to create much the same reactions. I imagine psychologists have their fingerprints on his whole approach now.
DJ - I'm sure you are right and this is why a paternalistic police state may well be an inevitable consequence of our interrelated lives. Almost everywhere there is a kind of fake independence where people are persuaded to 'be yourself' in ways which are merely fashionable and not independent of anything.
DJ " a Police State as a natural consequence of so many people leading interrelated lives in a technologically advanced (but fragile) society."
I'm not so sure. It is the complexity of modern life that causes totalitarianism to fail (though only after causing a great deal of ruin). A single point of control is a single point of failure.
djc - it may be possible to envisage an optimistic scenario where the whole thing is both sustainable and benign if no single point of failure arises.
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