Has there ever been a more thoroughly depressing few weeks in Manx politics than we’ve seen as we entered 2022? A period which should have been filled with general hope and enthusiasm as we appear to be finally entering the end stage of the global pandemic. But as we watched certain events unfold this week we were reminded of the final performance of the Sex Pistols US tour at the Winterland in San Francisco where on January 14th 1978 a rather good live rendition of The Stooges No Fun was brought to an abrupt end by John Lydon asking the audience if they’d ever got the feeling they’d been cheated?
The Sex Pistols live at Winterland 1978:
And maybe there is a collective feeling of being cheated starting to take hold over the Manx public too as we read the various media reports from Dr Rosalind Ranson’s employment tribunal published this week. Cutting through the swathes of apparent false truths, the overt perception of ingrained and institutionalised bullying, and what appears to be a toxic culture of juvenile point-scoring and career one-upmanship that seems to have been exposed by the proceedings it does genuinely leave the casual observer with the impression that in the Isle of Man we’d rather shoot the messenger than face up to the harsh realities of decisions that have to be made by professionals on the ground in order to provide the most appropriate pandemic response.
Rather like the way the trenches of the Great War were run from Whitehall the tribunal reporting leaves most readers with the distinct impression that the troops on the ground were only there to play out the predetermined strategy of those hundreds of miles away in the War Office who were optimistically sticking big red pins in maps to make it look like progress was being made - not to feed back the reality of what was actually happening on the ground so that appropriate decisions could be made in real time.
The reports so far cannot be objectively read in a good light:
Manx Radio
Gef the Mongoose
Yet despite this our Chief Minister believes that the pandemic has brought out the best in our community.
Manx Radio
Which every reader of this blog should take as a personal validation of their own behaviour as members of the Island community because reading the reports from Dr Ranson’s tribunal the only objective conclusion that can be reached with hindsight is that it most certainly has not brought out the best behaviour at the very top of our public health system.
Yes Dr Ranson. No doubt its all been absolutely ..
As Ronald & Scott Asheton, David Alexander & Iggy Pop originally declared in 1969:
Maybe go out, maybe stay home
Maybe call Mom on the telephone [if she doesn’t block you]
Well come on
[It’s] No fun to be alone