Bunking off work because you are ‘ill’ is no longer feckless or irresponsible. In fact it’s your sacred duty.
This is the latest edict from the United Kingdom’s power-crazed Covid Commissar Matt Hancock, who thinks that rather than go to work when you’ve got a runny nose you should get yourself tested and stay at home.
According to the BBC, Health Secretary Hancock told MPs:
I want to have a change in the British way of doing things where ‘if in doubt, get a test’ doesn’t just refer to coronavirus but refers to any illness that you might have.
Why in Britain do we think it’s acceptable to soldier on and go into work if you have flu symptoms or a runny nose, thus making your colleagues ill?
Elsewhere in the article we learn the real reason for Hancock’s blandishments.
He also told MPs he would like to see the diagnostic capacity built for Covid used to test for other illnesses like flu once the pandemic had passed.
The UK now has the capacity to carry out over 500,000 tests a day, with new labs to be opened next year to double that number.
He said he wanted to see the “global-scale diagnostics capability” continued to be used.
“Afterwards we must use it, not just for coronavirus, but everything,” he told MPs.
In other words, using taxpayer’s money of course, Hancock has bet the farm on Covid-testing — and now wants to justify this massive white elephant by keeping the entire country on endless health alert, forever taking more and more tests, cementing the power of the NHS and making it an even more inescapable part of daily life.
At the cost of billions, Hancock is rejecting millennia of normal human behaviour, completely rewriting the rules of how to behave when you are ill. Up till now — unless you’re knocked sideways by a flu that leaves you bedridden — people have carried on working through illness for a number of sound reasons. These include resilience, not letting your colleagues down, fear of the boss or of losing your job, a general understanding that we all get ill now and again but that it’s really no big deal.
Now Hancock wants us to become rampant hypochondriacs forever dependent on the Medical-Industrial Complex.
Naturally the kind of people who hang out on the BBC website are all for it. The talk in the comments below is mostly of how outrageous it is that bosses should get cross when their employees throw a ‘sickie’.
But these are more likely than not public sector workers, who are more prone to be work-shy, and who have grown fat, lazy and complacent during the Coronavirus crisis. Unlike private-sector workers, who have taken a massive financial hit during the repeated lockdowns, public sector workers have escaped largely unscathed and would probably be happy to stay in lockdown forever.
This shocking chart shows the difference:
Perhaps what is most shocking, though, is to hear a senior MP from the Conservatives — the party of Margaret Thatcher and Norman ‘On Your Bike’ Tebbit — recommending behaviour so obviously destructive towards Britain’s future economic prospects.
Note, for example, how Hancock doesn’t even bother to distinguish between ‘flu-like symptoms’ — serious, if they really are ‘flu-like’ — and a ‘runny nose’ (which is harmless and which we all get once or twice a year, developing a degree of immunity to the various strains going round).
Hancock is giving carte blanche to any worker at any time to take a day or two off work. All they need do is claim to be feeling a bit ill and that they need to take a test. How can their employers possibly know if they’re slacking or taking the mickey, let alone take any preventative or discouraging action without running the risk of being sued.
It’s a recipe for industrial disaster, which will be especially hard on small businesses with fewer staff to share the load if employees take days off.
But this is entirely in keeping with the behaviour of a government — Boris Johnson’s useless Conservatives — which has shown no interest whatsoever in protecting small businesses or keeping the economy open. Indeed it’s starting to look as if killing small businesses — see The Great Reset — is actually part of the plan.
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