Blood Money

An article in today's Guardian claims that, “Governments in at least 25 countries are employing vast programmes for mobile data tracking, apps to record personal contact with others, CCTV networks equipped with facial recognition, permission schemes to go outside and drones to enforce social isolation regimes. The methods have opened lucrative new markets for companies that extract, sell, and analyse private data. One of the world’s foremost experts on mobile phone surveillance said the pandemic had created a '9/11 on steroids' that could lead to grave abuses of power.”

 

Meanwhile Sir Jeremy Farrar, a senior government scientific adviser, has told the BBC we in the UK are likely to be among the European countries worst affected by COVID-19.

 

Business Secretary Alok Sharma shrugged this comment off and said that countries were simply on "different trajectories".

 

The Boris Johnson trajectory is one that allows for the highest Coronavirus death rates in Europe, ignores advice from the WHO, is unable to supply PPE’s to hospitals and care homes, tolerates an underwhelming supply of ventilators and presides over an NHS which has been overwhelmed with tax-dodging privateers.

 

Meanwhile an effective Labour Party opposition led by the ‘deposed’ Jeremy Corbyn has a machinery controlled by those who have openly called for his lynching and who are happy with the turn of events.

 

As a 75 year old with a medical history which puts me into ‘high priority’ (according to a a friendly caller yesterday from the British Heart Foundation, ‘very high priority’) this leaves me with the thought that I join those who are expendable and are real and potential victims of a plan to make way for more of those “lucrative new markets”.