Testing times

I have to say that I'm ending the day relieved.  Last night we heard the news that the Randox Health Grand National was not going to be happening.  I digested this overnight and came to the conclusion that, unless I was missing something, it made no sense for it to be unfeasible/unacceptable to hold the National and yet for the meetings at Chepstow, Lingfield, Newcastle and Wolverhampton to be going ahead the same day.  It just didn't add up, and the only conclusion was that racing here would be brought to a halt sooner rather than later.  So at least the news this afternoon that there would be no racing in Great Britain until (at least) the start of May ended the uncertainty and made it all make sense.

Looking at the bigger picture, I'm 100% behind the BHA's decision to suspend racing.  The government has handled things so badly, notwithstanding that three weeks ago Johnston was telling us that the country is "very, very well prepared" for things.  So it is good that it is starting to make up for lost time.  The professional forecasts are that Britain's corona-virus death toll would be somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 if we did nothing, which is what the government was doing (bar exhorting us to wash our hands).  So it's great that the government has finally grasped the nettle.  Better late than never.

Basically, the biggest plank in the government's tactics to hinder the spread of the virus is to restrict movement of people wherever feasible, ie wherever it isn't essential.  That makes perfect sense and we all have to adhere to this dictum.  And continuing to hold race-meetings would fly totally in the face of that.  It's annoying, but trying to lessen the likely death toll, and making sure that there isn't too sudden a glut of serious illness to overwhelm the chronically under-funded and under-staffed NHS, has to be the main priority.  And it behoves us all to do what we can do to help achieve this.

Yes, it creates problems, but racing certainly isn't at the top of the pile in that respect.  Unless the government very swiftly follows up today's promise of £330 billion with action to distribute the cash, there are shortly going to be millions of Britons losing their jobs or their businesses, or both.  Nearly every pub, club, restaurant, hotel, catering company, cinema, theatre and travel agency will go to the wall.  Plenty of shops too.  All airlines and all train companies will go bust without government bail-outs.  With so much less money circulating and the stock exchange having collapsed, a frighteningly large proportion of the population will be poorer. 

On the subject of money circulating, one of the interesting side-lights of this crisis is that it has provided the final proof that theory behind 'austerity' was totally wrong.  I used to scratch my head about the term 'austerity' because when we were in the midst of 'austerity', I used to drive around the country and see no signs of austerity.  I would see chaos, squalor, poverty - but not austerity (unless both I and the OED misunderstand the meaning of the word 'austere', which has nothing to do with poverty).  But, leaving aside the fact that we were using the wrong term, the theory was that one would help the economy by slowing down the circulation of money.  That is currently being demonstrated to be 100% wrong.

And on the subject of words being misused, incidentally, I'm still scratching my head about the government's story that we've moved from 'Contain' to 'Delay', ie from preventing corona-virus from spreading to trying to slow down its spreading.  We're obviously currently in the 'Delay' phase, but previously were we really in a phase of preventing it from spreading?  Were we hell!  We were in a phase of doing nothing to affect its spreading.  But I'm going off at a tangent.  We might have a government which doesn't understand the English language ('austerity', 'contain'...) but at least now we have, finally, a government that is now trying to address the problem.  It's 100% right that the BHA has got behind the government in its efforts, and I'm 100% behind the BHA on this one.  I hope that we all are.