An open letter to Boris Johnson

Dear Boris Johnson

We have a saying in Yorkshire, tha reaps what tha sows.

Which basically means if you laugh while someone reads out a list of people who have died because of your policies … if you deliberately underfund the NHS so rich people can have tax cuts … if you remove bursaries from poor students who want to become nurses … if you cheer at the news nurses are not going to get a pay rise in line with inflation … if you tell doctors and nurses to go back to where they came from because they are the wrong colour or they have a funny accent …

If you do nothing in a health crisis for over a month because you want to build herd immunity by killing off the old and vulnerable … if you refuse the offer of ventilators from Europe because of Brexit … if you refuse offers from UK ventilator manufacturers in favour of your mates who make vacuum cleaners and building site equipment … if you don’t follow your own guidelines about social distancing …

Then don’t expect any sympathy from me.

I don’t wish you dead, the same way you wanted to kill me and thousands of others like me when this all started. In fact I hope you survive and learn from all this, because it really doesn’t have to be this way.

We could tax the rich and help the poor. Stop wasting money on benefit sanctions and disability tests and give people back their dignity instead of forcing them into suicide. We could invest in education so future generations are better equipped to deal with something like this. We could nationalise key industries and use the profit they generate to increase pensions in line with the rest of the world and properly fund the NHS.

But I know you won’t. Because that would be communism.

Yours in desperation,

Marcus Blakeston

Sometime writer, constant drain on society.