<redacted > you red nosed <redacted >

So, England has decided that despite rapidly rising infection rates of a more dangerous version of the virus, they will take the classic approach to difficult problems of pretending they don’t exist.

All restrictions will be removed. All of them. Because, in a phrase that I have come to associate with the most chronically stupid amongst us, we have to ‘Learn to live with the virus’.

This has the dual benefit of being both manifestly true and yet utterly meaningless.

We are clearly going to have to ‘learn to live’ with climate change, but that doesn’t mean pretending it doesn’t exist. It means taking urgent action to stop making the problem worse, while also putting in place a range of measures to adapt the way we live with the new situation. We will need flood defences; we will need to think more carefully about where we build and how we build; we will need to adapt to a warmer, wetter climate; some places that have never needed air conditioning before will need it urgently, and measures to avoid tropical diseases will become necessary in places you would never imagine. This will be expensive, but the alternative is people drowning or being cooked in their homes.

To a less dramatic level Covid has to be the same; mask wearing going on for a lot longer, and full reopening delayed until the vaccine programme is winning against the virus rather than losing. But we have a huge cohort of Tory MPs who would still fail the Jelly Baby test in adulthood, so stuff that.

England is screwed, and because Hadrian’s wall is not up to much these days, so are we.