The Tories and the old

It's hard to follow the thinking of the Tory. Yer average Tory (male, middle-class, white, semi-educated and utterly ignorant about the rest of the population outside his own wee corner of the Home Counties) seems to think he belongs to a superior race of people, who are always right and know what's best for the rest of us. It seems Tories are so superior they never get sick. They also don't have old people.

The cynic in me says the Tories rarely have to worry about their elderly because they sell their wee bungalows in Surrey for vast sums and pap them off to nice wee country cottages in Perthshire or rural Wales, where they live out their lives at the expense of the local tax payers, with free social care, a good health service, free transport and low council tax. And where spend their free time telling the natives how to do things properly.

And yet the Tory elderly go right on voting Tory, even when it's clear the superior Tory politicians and their hangers-on in the press have little use for them. Here's a comment by a journalist (I use the word loosely) on the Telegraph, the home of Torydom:

This is one of several similar comments I've seen in the last couple of weeks. The Tories seem to have little time for anyone who isn't 'economically active'. That, I gather, means hedge fund managers

and financiers, not boring people like nurses, teachers, doctors, ambulance drivers, mechanics,  gas fitters - you know, the people who actually make the country run. A farmer to the Tories is one who gets other people to do the work on the land, just as a fisherman is one who owns a fishing licence rather than the guys who work on the boats. These are just members of the servant class, useful in their way because they can be hoiked out of retirement when they're needed to save the country from the Coronavirus - or flooding. It has obviously escaped the notice of Tory politicians that to work in any of these jobs you need to be qualified and in quite a few cases you have to be able to prove that you are a fit person to work with the young, vulnerable and elderly. This is in the hope that the population can be protected from the likes of Savill, a very good friend to the Tories. 

If the present Tory government - and here's hoping they're only around for a short time or they will drive the UK to destruction in a morass of debt - had a handle on what's happening with the Coronavirus, Nadine Dorries would not be a health minister.

They wouldn't be allowed to tell us that life (meaning economic life) must go on, so that planes from Italy keep on landing at Heathrow long after the Italians have placed their entire country on lockdown. 

And they wouldn't go on faffing about thinking you can combat a world-wide plague with platitudes like - and I'm quoting the actual Prime Minister here - 'We must take it on the chin.' Whose chin, Boris? The Coronavirus will have to travel a bit to find Boris Johnson's chin, hidden away as it is in a 'grace and favour' country mansion somewhere in the Home Counties. 

I'm trying hard not to laugh at Nadine Dorries's situation. Nadine's a plook but she must know where a lot of bodies are buried to hang on to the job she has, given how dim she is. But if Nadine has the Coronavirus, we can only hope all the people she's been in touch in the incubation period are being tested and isolated too. That might include the entire Tory cabinet. It would be a relief to know they are in quarantine if only because it will reduce the damage they can do to everyone else.