Brave New World

Where are we now? 02/03/2021

A year ago today Boris Johnson attended his first COBRA (Civil Contingencies) meeting to discuss the threat of COVID 19, having missed the previous five meetings. A year ago yesterday Johnson and his girlfriend Carrie Symonds announced their engagement and her pregnancy. This personal news is perhaps the last demonstration our Prime Minister could give of frivolous dead cat news before the impact of the global pandemic was unavoidable. As I write this, we have just experienced a glorious spell of spring sunshine, chilly but cloudless and reminiscent of the eerily perfect weather the UK enjoyed for two months from the start of the first lockdown in mid March. This recent spell marked the end for many the most tedious, gut-wrenching, gloomy, scary winter any of us can remember. After an additional 80,000 COVID deaths in the UK, occurring from November and peaking at 1,500 a day in January, the announcement of a roadmap completely ending of lockdown restrictions culminating in late June has combined with the serotonin of the first strength of spring sun to lighten everyone’s mood.

What a year it has been. As I haven’t posted anything in a while, and my writing skills are rusty- to put it kindly- I am not about to provide a chapter and verse review of the year. I may in subsequent posts. There are a number of societal factors, such as income inequality, the digital divide, and the role of ethnicity in the pandemic I would like to deal with separately. Similarly, other political factors- such as the dissolution of the British identity and the inevitable break up of the UK, have been accelerated by COVID, which I’d like to analyse. Brexit, the politicisation of central banks, and the return of inflation- issues and trends that were well on their way before the pandemic- will also be covered separately. Almost nothing in society has been unscathed by COVID. Now that, god willing, the immediate health crisis looks to be ending the collateral damage and permanent change in society will become is increasingly apparent. How will we respond? Are the 2020s a decade of much needed hope and recovery. I hope so, as the last decade has not been one of the best- the last five have been a complete horror show. The darkest hour precedes the dawn? I used that sentence back in May and look where it got me.