I’m going to take you back in time briefly, to about 1990. I’m eight, sitting in a classroom (3A), and it’s 9am. About twenty of us sit
still, in total silence, waiting for our class teacher – Mrs Heater – to come
in and start the day after morning assembly.
Five minutes tick away, then ten…and still no teacher
arrives. Then on the fifteen minute mark, almost on the dot – I was marking the
time with my new Mickey Mouse watch – havoc lets rip: the first I know something
is up is when a projectile whistles right by my ear. Then, rapidly, chaos ensues
classroom-wide: desks are overturned and transformed into barricades, general shouting
and screaming erupts and small bands of eight year olds launch themselves,
berserker-like, at other eight year olds, armed with pens and supported by
indirect rubber band artillery fire.
We were quite a repressed lot – this was a prep school – and
we’d never been left unattended in a classroom before: several years’ worth of
pent up chaos-demand was consequently unleashed, instantaneously.
I sat in the middle of the maelstrom, diligently going
through my latest textbook and ignoring the chaos around me – then, Mrs Heater
arrives back: the prep-school version of the military police are summoned (senior
school prefects) – and we are locked down, man. Gulag time.
I was at that point suddenly hit by a terrifying thought:
one day, all the grown-ups will be gone (I was in the "learning about mortality" stage), and we – my generation, the kids
around me - will be in charge and… it’s going to be like this every day, isn’t
it? It’ll be chaos. And no one will come
back to restore order.
This is one of my strongest memories from school: and…well,
it turns out, three decades later - I was f*****g right, wasn’t it? All the
grown-ups have gone. No one in charge has the vaguest idea what they’re doing.
I reckon we’re about one minute off hitting the 9:15am post-assembly time – and
the maelstrom is about to hit.
To bring you back to the present: listening to Boris Johnson’s
speech yesterday, I was hit by the same feeling: this chap has no clue what he’s
doing, at all, has he? But it’s not just him: no one else has either. No one on
the radio, or phoning in to the radio, probably no one even listening to the f*****g radio - no one at all has the faintest idea.
I’m not just talking about the totally, obviously, completely bananas topical things, like the 10pm curfew. Or people sitting in cars on their own wearing masks.*
I don’t just mean those things: I mean, objectively insane things, things the government are saying, in actual public, apparently in earnest. For example, take Boris announcing yesterday that the government is introducing 5 per cent mortgage deposits for first-time buyers to transform “generation rent” into “generation buy”.
(Incidentally, ten years ago – almost to the day – the
headline from the then PM’s speech was “we plan to turn Generation Rent into
Generation Buy” – how’d that go, then, Dave? But
I digress.)
There’s the fact that he said that, and the fact that, in
recent months, all mortgages for buyers with a 5% deposit have *completely* evaporated:
there are now NONE. The number of 90% LTV mortgages has also decreased from 800
or so to a handful…which are shortly, probably, to be withdrawn completely too.
And the fact that banks today have said, in response to this
plan, in short: “no”.
They actually gave a longer, more detailed answer, which was:
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.”
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
said today, when asked, that they have no plans on how this will work, no
detail on the scheme and no idea on a timeframe on when it would, theoretically,
launch.
So: the key-note of his speech, the man in charge of our
country, was to announce exactly the opposite of what is actually happening.
He could have stood up and said: “my government are
introducing more jelly into the UK” at the same time as actively destroying all
UK-jelly, and no one would’ve blinked.
Having said that: giving him the benefit of the doubt, is there any evidence, at all - even shaky evidence, I’ll take that - that if subsidised 95% mortgages were widely introduced (despite the fact that they're not) that they would increase homeownership in any way, rather than just drive prices up higher and handing yet further profits to the monopoly housebuilders, and - ultimately - reduce home ownership?
I refer you to the banks’ longer answer
above.
So, I think I might give up on even listening to the radio,
or the news, or trying to contain my fury at the insanity dribbling from the
mouths of the berserker-mentality children supposedly in charge of this utter
sh*tshow. This isn’t really a political point, by the way, I’m just singling
out the person who’s meant to be in charge: we’re all now inhabitants of Golding’s
Coral Island.
It’s time to ignore them, focus on the textbook in front of
me, and do my best to dodge the indirect rubber-band artillery fire.
We are where we are. It’s 9:14am. Chaos is coming.
Mrs Heater isn’t coming back.
If I were you, I’d get your desk barricade ready.
*Or quarantining entire populations of completely healthy people for the first time in history, completely destroying our economy and millions of people's lives in the process for no apparent benefit, with no empirical real-world evidence lockdowns actually reduce the spread of the virus and plenty to the contrary, and in any case, no appreciable risk posed by COVID to anyone remotely healthy under the age of 80...ok, ok, I know none of you agree with me on this - and to be fair, it is a completely unprecedented epidemic (if you ignore previous epidemics), so that's not my beef here. Even if the ONS have already shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, that more people have and will die as a result of the lockdown than would've died from COVID, which oddly received zero coverage, and Prof Ferguson predicted 85,000 people would die from COVID in Sweden and 6,000 did and in 2005 he predicted 200 million people would die from bird flu and 282 people did and yet we still take his predictions seriously and don't mind that we have destroyed the country's future because of them...and if you think this has all been completely rational and appropriate and the economy has nothing to do with people's lives and we must protect the NHS by locking down for three weeks and flatten the sombrero sorry I meant six months and then suddenly actually no we didn't mean that we meant extend ineffectual restrictions for another six fucking months and maybe forever until your business is completely destroyed and until the vaccine arrives which might take years and actually might not arrive at all or even work and we should definitely not lift these insane restrictions until a vaccine arrives, then whatever. That's just my opinion. You have yours, I have mine. And I am right.
