Quo Vadimus?
By Guy de la Bédoyère (‘Where are we going?’) It’s worth starting by reminding ourselves that the situation we are now would have been unimaginable even as late as last September. All the privations and sacrifices of the previous six months were weathered by the majority of the population on the basis of various promises and undertakings made by the Government and its scientific advisers. Far from getting better, as we all now know to our costs the crisis has become far worse and there seems to be no end in sight. Of course, at this stage blaming the Government or indeed anyone else for how we got here is pointless. It achieves nothing. Castigating Boris Johnson or Neil Ferguson now for the decisions made in 2020 is as futile as the efforts of Neil O’Brien and his friends to pin our present malaise on the shoulders of anyone who has dared to question how we reached this point. It’s a waste of energy and, more to the point, achieves nothing except to try and find a scapegoat for a natural disaster nobody and no government was ever going to be able to tackle without a hideous level of collateral damage. The truth is that the crisis was out of control long before anyone knew there was a crisis to ...