PETRI DISH KIDS : As the world waits for British leadership to see it through the Covid-19 crisis, many British people themselves are concerned with more domestic concerns, secure in the confidence that lesser countries will take lessons from where we go. They do not have Dom and Dum, and that is their own doing.
“The Commonwealth countries? All they have to do is learn from our example,” Tory MP A Lackey told LCD Views, “they’re putting up a good show of getting along without us, but that’s just playing to domestic audiences. What I am concerned about, what the government is concerned with is not appearances, but the awarding of contracts to big name corporate brands. What a perfect time to shift public funds back to where they belong. Did I say that? I mean, the health and welfare of children.”
To this end the Department for Education has been ordered to prepare schools to reopen, and begin readmitting British students to British schools.
There is absolutely no chance that this desperate attempt to keep up with the Joneses, on an international scale, will have to be revised. And further examples that managing a public health crisis like a PR emergency will see more plague pits dug.
The closing of a hospital in Somerset to new patients, because it’s stuffed to the gills with Covid-19, is not a warning.
“You can imagine the anxiety our European neighbours must be feeling,” Mr A Lackey said, “busily opening back up their communities, a little hastily, desperate to prove they don’t need our leadership. Why they would make a public health crisis about Brexit I am not sure. Managing well without us are you? Run along. Presumably it’s to do with the quality of education they receive? You get what you pay for.”
But we on this green and pleasant isle need worry not about what others are doing, we must look to our own children.
The fact that Finnish children start school much older, and top the world tables, is not an argument that a few months of school missed due to the plague can not be rectified over the years to come.
“We have to trust in the leadership of Boris and Dom,” Mr A Lackey reassures, his eye on a junior cabinet post, “any man clever enough to test his eyes by taking his four year old for a drive, wouldn’t take a greater chance with the children of people he doesn’t know. Back to school we go! Where the infection rate goes, nobody knows!”
We will soon find out if it was the right decision. Children. Your country needs you! Well, most of you. Whoever survives. But in the interim at least Boris Johnson can pretend he’s got everything under control.