Boris Johnson’s government is like an abusive partner. One minute it is bringing you flowers, the next it’s punching you in the stomach.
So says LBC radio presenter Maajid Nawaz, just about the last decent mainstream media journalist left in Britain.
He’s referring in particular to the way Johnson’s administration keeps flip-flopping on the subject of vaccine passports.
As Victoria Friedman has reported for Breitbart, at the weekend Health Secretary Sajid Javid was saying the government would ‘not be going ahead with plans for vaccine passports.’
Some naive souls took the man at his word and claimed victory:
Others of us took a more cynical view.
Turns out that the cynics among us were right. Within a day of Javid’s announcement, another government minister was effectively contradicting it:
Work and Pensions Minister Thérèse Coffey had said in several interviews in her morning media rounds that, in fact, even if vaccine passports were postponed, the threat of them still remained if the government so wished to impose them.
“As Sajid Javid set out yesterday, although the formal decision is still to be made, but having reflected and looked at the details of the proposal that it’s not deemed necessary at this moment in time. But they haven’t been ruled out forever,” Ms Coffey told BBC Breakfast.
It ought to be clear by now that Boris Johnson’s government, like so many other governments around the world, is hell-bent on shackling and controlling its populace with vaccine passports. The only thing delaying it from doing so is that, just like an abusive partner, it fears that if it pushes too hard we might all run away from this cruel, vindictive and unequal relationship and seek solace in the arms of another.
I also sense in this flop-flopping the sinister influence of the government’s crack team of behavioural psychologists. If there were certainty on the introduction of vaccine passports, they surely recognise, it would be a focus for concerted public resistance – such as there has been in countries like France and Italy. By dangling the passports as a possibility but not a done deal, the government is keeping the populace unsettled, unsure, divided.
But let’s be under no illusions: vaccine passports are the government’s plan. It’s time we ended our relationship with this abusive partner. Before they can inflict any more damage.