The UK is being hit by A, B, C.

As a Guardian reader pointed out a couple of days ago, the UK is being subjected to A, B and C:

Austerity - over 10 years of government cuts to recoup some of the money lost through the financial crisis of 2008, when they had to spend oodles of dosh rescuing the banks.

Brexit - it's nearly 4 years since the vote in June 2016 and, since then, the UK has slipped from being the 5th largest economy in the world to being the 7th largest (India is ranked 5th and France [another EU country] is in 6th place). And as for a deal... What deal? And yet Brexiters said it was going to be "one of the easiest in human history". And finally, we also have...

Coronavirus - a few months of this and all of a sudden, the government has found a 'magic money tree' and is supposedly going to support the economy by providing all sorts of grants and loans to keep companies and hence the economy going. Who is going to pay for it in the end, though? Take a look at what happened in 2008. It won't be the rich.

The virus has been a godsend to the Conservative party: they have a great excuse not to negotiate any further. They want a 'hard Brexit' and they are on course to have just that in January 2021.

If the government can't, at present, while it is still in the EU, enjoying all the benefits of the EU, sort out the lack of PPE, get enough ventilators, carry out a sufficient number of tests for them to be meaningful, and organise the picking of crops on UK farms, how on earth is it going to cope in January?

Brexiters claim that they are in the best country in the world and can cope with everything with their so-called 'Dunkirk spirit' (failing to appreciate that Dunkirk was a retreat, a withdrawal, an evacuation of troops and not a battle in which the enemy was defeated).

The present situation doesn't bode well for the future.


P.S. I'm just back from a quick early Sunday morning walk before I settle down to kick two texts into shape and before I start to do that, I checked some readers' comments on The Guardian website. I came across this quote cited by one of them and, yes, he really did say that:

Napoleon Bonaparte — 'In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.'