Clap on Thursday, sunbathe on Friday.
That’s the way it will work, won’t it, as more and more people flout the lockdown?
They’ll argue they love the NHS then ignore the numbers, prioritise their own civil liberties and give the health services a bit more work to do.
The reality for me – and for millions of the UK’s black, Asian and mixed-race people – is that to break the lockdown is to play Russian roulette with our lives.
The Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre has found a third of people in intensive care with coronavirus are BAME –black, Asian and minority ethnic.
That’s more than double the 13% they represent of the UK population.
NHS England has said their data for the first 12,600 deaths from the virus reveals black people are losing their lives at nearly twice the rate of their proportion of the population.
Nobody knows why.
When you consider that the 21,000 people dead do not include those in care homes or in their own homes (the figure is said to be closer to 43,000), the BAME statistics could be even worse.
The defiant ones determined to enjoy their space in the sun insist the fears are exaggerated.
I wouldn’t like to bet my life on it.
You can keep your Trevor Phillips and his appointment by Public Health England (PHE) to investigate.
InfluencHers, a collective of 100 influential black women, has written to PHE to demand Phillips is replaced.
They quote – for starters – his 61-page essay ‘Race and Faith: The Deafening Silence’ which includes this line: “We need to embrace offence as the price we pay for a better, more vibrant, more modern society.”
Currently suspended by the Labour Party over allegations of Islamophobia, Phillips – the ex-Equality and Human Rights Commission chair – has form for dismissing the well-documented consequences of structural racism.
How can he do justice to the living and the immigrants among the NHS dead who had come out of retirement to save lives despite the societal inequalities that impacted the health service?
Phillips’ views reinforce those inequalities. Keep him in charge and, for many BAME people, the lockdown has to go on.
