Lessons won’t be learned…

Here are just a few of the lessons that won’t be learned from the Coronavirus by any significant porportion of the government, the politicians, the media and the general public:

1. What public trust once existed in the government, institutions and media has been burned to death, the ashes wrapped in an EU flag then burned again over the last 4 or so years. Understandably, when something big comes along that is an actual problem, no-one believes a word you say, and that could cause consternation, confusion, cognitive dissonance, panic and plenty of other more serious stuff that ought to be avoidable given any modicum of institutional trust.
2. When the media run around with their hair on fire over every footling piece-of-shit non-issue to keep the presses rolling, they have nowhere to go when something actually serious comes up. The coverage around Coronavirus has been hilarious in the extreme. The Telegraph’s coverage has been making an episode of The Muppets look like a vignette from the Gulag Archipelago.
3. We need borders. Borders are the only thing that can contain and control the spread of anything that threatens to go pandemic. With no internal borders in the Schengen area, the EU has no way to stop it spreading from Athens to Zeeland. That’s about 1700 miles. Or Andalucia to Sillamäe, that’s an orthogonal 2700 miles. The free-movement zone is not small.
4.  Second and third world countries are most likely to be a nexus of pandemic, and are worst placed to control and contain any such outbreak. As such, the people from those countries need to be prevented from entering the west freely. Conversely, if Europe was a nexus of pox epidemic, China would close their doors to us in less time it’d take us to book a plane ticket.

   Literally (Hitler) as I was typing that:

   

5. Global just-in-time supply chains present an enormous and obvious vulnerability. We need to maintain productive capacity within our borders for anything we could not last without for 6-12 months. Similarly, the globalised flow of capital makes it impossible to insulate yourself from the impact of something happening on the other side of the planet. We need a far more distributed model, with each nation (or suitably sized bloc as applicable) being capable of self-sufficiency and insulation from global events.

More to follow if the brain unfreezes after  necessary Friday sedation…

AJ

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