1 + 1 = BANANA

I read a teasing piece about poor Diane Abbott this week. I find now as Labour party regimes change that I miss her good heartedness and her arithmetical loopiness. She once missed out some noughts in describing how much a proposed recruitment of police officers would cost annually allowing her interviewer to splutter:

“So you’re going to pay them just £300 a year each?!”

The piece I refer to said:

“Diane Abbott says she has symptoms of Covid eleventy eight.”

We are living in arithmetically lunatic times. Imperial College who’ve been in the forefront of mathematical modelling for Coronavirus, overruling the government experts and winning the  battle for data salience have come out with a variety of numbers.

Their estimates that really hit the headlines with a bang were 500,000 would die unless the strategy changed; then  20,000 would die if it did change and now that  2,000 might die adding that was because the strategy they’d urged was working.

Let’s put this into perspective. Annual deaths in the UK are some 550,000 of which some 17,000 on average are from ‘normal’ flu.

If the current catastrophe is less devastating than ‘normal’ flu by that margin why am I incarcerated, forced by fear to drink my wine supply as rapidly as I can. What a ghastly epitaph this would be: “He left most of the wine he had untouched. His last words ‘bring me a very large bottle of claret’ were unheeded as he was judged delirious.”

Delirious?  I was furious.

But arithmetical insanity reaches new depths when it comes to money. Our new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak (a winner if ever saw one) pulled off an astonishing coup in delivering a budget, an update a few days later and then a further two updates with numbers as I recall of borrowings from £12 billion to £200 billion to £500 billion to “Infinity billion”.

He was trumped by the American President a few days later with a two trillion dollar bail-out for America and a demand that the country got back to work by Easter.

Biden is still ahead in the polls but the results are volatile and Trump keeps on slipping closer or, more likely old Jo will slip behind. If he wins he’ll be 78 – I’m younger than that and regarded as “at risk” and if the truth be known probably gaga – “fetch me my claret nurse”.

Not to be outdone China will doubtless come up with a quadrillion bail-out next.

A quadrillion looks like this; 1,000,000,000,000,000

Yes guys it’s roll-over Saturday.

In the UK, for laudable reasons,  we are taking on unbelievable debt. But do we realise what follow?
Well someone soon  has to pay for all this, and that someone is you and me. On my shaky calculations (I’m in the Diane Abbott league arithmetically) we’ll need to find just over £23,000 per working person in the UK to pay that off.

Arithmetic? We are heading for capital ‘A’ austerity again. Capisci?