I flagged up last week that Mark Drakeford’s plan to keep the English infidels out of our beloved Wales was insane. I sit here, 30 yards from the border, ever alert to the danger of a plague-ridden scouser trying to swim across the River Dee and will be out shortly to plant anti personnel devices across my fields in line with Mr Drakeford’s diktat of last week. But now the wretched little man, suffering from a severe case of little man syndrome, has gone further.
This is an emergency. An unprecedented emergency, he tells us. So there will be new rules introduced at once to keep us safe. Oops, did I say at once? I mean to say that this is so critical that we will have new rules at 6 PM on Friday.
At that point, all non-essential shops will close as will churches and leisure facilities and households cannot mix either indoors or outdoors. Primary schools will re-open after half-term but most secondary school pupils must stay at home but not all. I hope that is clear. This firebreak is so decisive that it will stop the virus except for those kids going to school or folks going to essential shops. I think I am allowed to go to my father’s funeral, if the English have not banned that by then, because Mr Covid won’t be present there. And, of course, masks do not stop you catching or spreading the disease so you have to hope that when you are at an essential shop, the clown Drakeford has cleared it with Mr Covid that he is going to stay outside.
The whole plan is ludicrous. It may delay the spread of the virus but it is just a postponement. So we may well need another “fire break” to coincide with the next school holiday. Christmas, it was nice knowing you.
What it will do is send more businesses to the wall. What Drakeford and his colleagues fail to understand is that these lockdowns are not only creating financial challenges for small businesses but emotional ones as well. You have to be an optimist to be an entrepreneur. Gradually that optimism is being beaten out of us across Britain but especially here in Wales, lockdown by lockdown, daft new rule by daft new rule.
And this 17 day house arrest will mean more GP’s appointments missed, more cancer tests missed, more preventable deaths not prevented and for what? Here is the latest data from Wales:
Population – 3,120,000
Total in hospital with Covid – 442 (0.014%)
Total on ventilators – 32 (0.001%)
Deaths yesterday – 3 ( you do the maths but it is a lot of 0s)
At some stage when this is all over there will be an enquiry and Mark Drakeford will be found wanting. At some stage, folks here in Wales must surely demand that men in white jackets remove our First Minister and lock him, and his even more half-witted health minister, up somewhere where they can no longer inflict such monumental harm on the nation.
The 17 day lockdown takes in my father’s funeral and the birth of my next child (in England). To you Mr Drakeford I must say that I have no intention whatsoever of abiding by rules which are justified by no science, no data or by no common sense at all. You sir, are insane.