Shortly after the election Yorkshire and much of the rest of the country was hit by dramatic floods. Extreme weather hit farmers, homeowners, and businesses and did millions of pounds of damage. Events that insurance companies expect to happen once in a hundred years have hit some local towns like Hebden Bridge four times in a decade. This is not normal and extreme weather is expected to get worse for another fifty years.
Then in obscure and horrible wildlife markets in China a virus moved between species. Humanity has been stripping forests and taking every last Pangolin and previously remote species of bat across the planet to sell in wet food markets for the dinner parties of rich officials. The result of this cruel and thoughtless exploitation of the natural world is that a virus has jumped species and we are now confined to our homes worrying about the health of our friends and families. The damage to our economy could take decades to sort out.
The response to this crisis has varied between governments. China, Germany, South Korea and Singapore have taken rapid and effective action. The USA and the UK dithered and delayed for too long. One in every thousand people in the UK was allowed to gather from across the country at the Cheltenham races when the virus was already spreading within the population and some of them will have taken the virus back across the country. The government said it was OK for the event to take place because controls were not yet necessary.
Even now planes are arriving every day in the UK from New York, Italy and Spain and the occupants are being ushered onto airport transit buses, mingling in baggage halls and then getting onto tubes and trains without so much as a temperature check or requirements for immediate local isolation. Since the virus almost certainly arrived in the UK via a plane this is astonishingly lax.
When it comes to supporting people financially through this crisis the government has made a genuinely impressive effort to devote truly astonishing amounts of resources to helping people. It is unfortunate that it has done so in complex ways that have put huge numbers of people and businesses through immense stress. The Green Party advocated a simple citizens income paid to every person in the country as a quick, simple and fair way to getting help where it is needed. This method is being used in Spain. In the UK millions are battling with the bureaucracy of a clumsy and slow universal credit system or struggling to reclaim tax payments.
The reason for the poor leadership our country has experienced during this crisis is very simple. Every single person in the government who showed the least tendency towards independent thought or the ability to question leadership was purged. Even Julian Smith, the MP that voters in Skipton and Ripon elected, was sacked despite demonstrating considerable ability in getting the Northern Ireland assembly back into action.
Anyone who has ever run an organisation knows that if you sack all those who ask awkward questions then sooner or later you end up with a collection of grey yes men and women running the show. We have been left leaderless and vulnerable at a time of great danger because people at the very top of the country have chosen to break the rules that the rest of us are following. Like not shaking hands.
It remains vital that we all get behind the fantastic national effort being made by our nurses, our shop workers, our delivery drivers, our bin collectors and our doctors. It is to our national shame that we have sent these brave people in to do battle under equipped because of decades of running down vital facilities in the NHS. This is not the product of bad luck. It is the product of bad government.
If I sound angry then it is because I am. People are dying because our relationship with the environment has broken down and because of failures of government. It has been an extraordinarily stressful four months. We will emerge from this but we must learn the lesson.
We depend on each other. Strong mutually supportive communities are vital. The solution to every problem is not the competition of individuals. The strength of our community is what gets us through a crisis and we need to foster that strength once the immediate crisis has been weathered.