Another week of catastrophic failures by the British state but look over there – at China!

The British Foreign Secretary threatened China today. Not with our moth-eaten coronavirus-riddled armed forces, of course; that would be way more than a bridge too far. 

The British government – which earlier defied the US over the role of Huawei in the country's 5G rollout – clearly threatened Beijing with... “No more business as usual.”

There will be a “deep-dive” review of Britain's relations with China. Or “national suicide,” as it could be described when a country is leaving the European Union and declaring economic war on the rest of the world at the same time.

The shallowest dive into this new pond-life, of course, reveals that like the fulminating fire and brimstone across the Atlantic it is sheer diversion from the cataclysmic failures of the Trump-Johnson axis. It is a child-like “look over there… look anywhere but here,” where we couldn't have done a worse job if we'd actually set out to exterminate a whole swathe of our population.

Boris's Britain will certainly end this crisis with one of the highest death tolls in the world. We have already overtaken Spain, and will certainly be European Champions in the League of Death.

At the beginning, British officials said that a death toll of 20,000 would be a “good result.” 

Remarkable enough. Current predictions put our death rate at over 60,000 before we're done.

Peons of praise, and even tin badges are proffered to a National Health Service starved by successive governments for 40 years with part-privatisation the cherry on the cake.

Unprecedented, unforeseeable, say ministers under fire (or what passes for it). But this is a lie, just like the promises of PPE – as I write British hospitals are "hours away" from running out of surgical gowns – like 100,000 tests a day (currently one fifth of that), and like the sub-Churchillian rhetoric that we “are all in this together” (those in flats with no gardens being chased off park-benches by the police are not “in it” with the Prime Minister convalescing amidst the rolling acres at his country home at Chequers). 

In October 2016, “Exercise Cygnus” was conducted by the NHS, the government and Britain's local authorities to war-game a response to a fictional flu-like virus coming from “East Asia.” The result was grimly predictable, the health service quickly overwhelmed. A catastrophe. The findings were never published, being “too terrifying” and even a “threat to national security.”

Precisely nothing was done. Just as nothing was done with the period of grace between the emergence of this real virus in Wuhan at the end of December and it hitting our shores with now devastating consequences.

China is not “to blame” for Covid-19. A naturally occurring virus mutation knows no national boundaries. To blame China is as fatuous as blaming Texas for the misnamed “Spanish Flu” pandemic 1918-22. It may be in any case that there are at least three different coronaviruses now raging in Asia, Europe and North America. China's notifications to the world, its mapping of the genome, and its huge relief effort overseas – together with its rapid near-elimination of the outbreak at home with far fewer deaths than Britain – is deserving of fame, not blame.

Britain needed all the friends it could find in the wake of this disaster, as a Great Depression follows the great depression of deaths on this scale. In rapid succession we have alienated the entire European Union, Russia and now China. God save us.

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