All By Myself (Eric Carmen)

It's New Year and my final day of COVID self-isolation. I hope that the butterfly that will emerge tomorrow from the cocoon in which I have been confined for the last ten days will care more for enjoying the world than scolding it. But that's tomorrow. Today I will scold.

Next week it will be eleven years (Icons passim) since I lambasted David Cameron's Behavioural Insight Team. It is difficult to believe I know, but my warning wasn't heeded.

Cameron's lunatic innovation lives on in the Independent Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B).

On 22 March 2020, this shower came up with Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures.

It quite clearly says:

A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened... The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent.

This is advice to bully and intimidate the public. It was plainly taken on board, but it is not a legitimate function of government. They work for us. We don't work for them.

On 13 May 1940, in his first speech since becoming prime minister, Winston Churchill said:

"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat". We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.

An adult addressing adults.

When the government no longer trusts the people the inevitable result is that the people will lose trust in the government. I still trust the people. Friends and neighbours have delivered, often unbidden though always gratefully received, everything I could possibly need and more while I have been locked up. From national and local government I got exactly nothing.