From time to time these days, I come across people suggesting that we should stop criticising the government. They insist that, given the pandemic is global, now is not the time to pile the usual scrutiny on the government, or at least we should tone it down. The Tories are doing their best, they say, so the usual political adversarialism ought to be suspended.

Would someone please explain to  me how that is not the very epitome of naiveté. Hell, it could even be  it’s definition. Now more than ever we need  to hold the government to account. Yes, the crisis  is a global one, but different countries’ governments have responded to it in different ways; you only need to look at the vastly differing mortality figures to see  the results of that. Those figures show that, due  to the UK government’s slow reaction and belligerence, we are one of the worst hit  countries in Europe (although  not as bad as the land of Detol-drinking numpties across the Atlantic). Surely someone must be held to account for that, and the buck stops with the Tories.

Now is not the time to be taken in by the cult of personality the Tory p’tahks are trying to create around Bojo – just the opposite. I get very frustrated when I see people trying to defend these idiots from criticism, dotingly likening Johnson to Churchill  or whatever. So many people have now died as a direct result of the decisions that  arsehole and his government have made, they need to be brought to book. Not to do so, to turn a blind eye to their gross failings and sickening incompetence, would mean  giving them free rain to do as they please: pushing forward their right-wing, neoliberal agenda, wearing away at state funded institutions like the  NHS while  some of the most vulnerable people in society are left to die.

I for one refuse to do that: I refuse to stop calling the government  out as the embarrassing deplorable mess it is.