Asked on PMQs what on earth he'd been doing while tens of thousands of homes were being flooded across the country, Johnson the braggart retorted that among other things, he'd been busy "delivering 40 new hospitals".
    Never mind that he'd been sitting in the cosy comfort of his Kent mansion all along!  Never mind either that his "40 hospitals" have long been proved to only exist in his own vote-seeking rants!  That's what an overdose of ambition does to these people:  they just switch into another world, to avoid being faced with angry protesters!
    Meanwhile Johnson's crony, Home Secretary Priti Patel, was getting her kicks from organising her 3rd deportation charter flight since she got into office and boasting that, by doing so, she is "protecting" the population.
    And never mind that in the process, the Home Office has been denying the deportees their legal rights and breaking countless laws.  Never mind either that Patel's only objective in this is to be able to boast that she's "tough" on immigration.  But then of course, aren't these deportees just poor people - i.e., people who wealthy parasites like Johnson and Patel despise and hate, just as much as they despise and hate the rest of the working class?

They're turning the clock backwards

However, while these ministerial buffoons were posturing in their respective dream worlds, the world outside has been facing very real dangers.
    The odds are that few of those who lost their homes in the recent floods - and more will probably do so in coming weeks - will be convinced by Johnson's self-satisfied bragging.  All this boasting about the billions supposedly spent on flood defences, is no comfort for those who've been flooded and can't look forward to any compensation, because they couldn't afford (or couldn’t get) insurance, anyway!
    Even more ominous than this was the release of an official report about life expectancy - i.e., how long we can hope to live, on average.  For decades, life expectancy had been slowly increasing.  But this trend stopped after the 2008 financial crisis and it's gone into reverse since, especially among the poorest sections of the working class.
    To put this another way, British society has been going backwards over the past decade.  And this report leaves absolutely no doubt as to the causes of this trend: a decade of Tory cuts in social expenditure, the bosses' attacks on wages and conditions, the rise of in-work poverty and, more generally, of household poverty.
    This report shows that real take-home pay fell in only 5 of the world's 36 richest industrialised countries - and Britain was one of them, together with Greece, Mexico, Italy and Portugal!  Likewise, among the same 36 countries, only China and the US had a higher proportion of children living in poverty than Britain.  Here it is as much as 17.5%!  Against the backdrop of this rising poverty, the Tory cuts in social provisions and the NHS did the rest.

Getting rid of the profit virus

Yes, it is the capitalists' profit virus and the policies of their trustees in office, which have pulled Britain backwards!  And it hasn’t only infected Britain, even if it’s one of the worst-affected among rich countries.
    Of course today, there's another virus which is threatening the world.  By now, it is very likely that a worldwide pandemic of coronavirus (COVID19), will be declared by the World Health Organisation.  But given the chaos this virus is already generating in industrial production in China and beyond, and, more recently, on the planet's stock markets, governments all over the world will come under pressure from the capitalists themselves, to step up their efforts to contain this pandemic.  And they will, eventually.
    This is the big difference between the coronavirus and the profit virus.  The powers-that-be which rule this society - i.e., the representatives of the thin layer of ultra-rich capitalists who own the economy - will put the needed resources into fighting the coronavirus, because it threatens the profits of their capitalist masters.  But, of course, neither the bosses nor their capitalist masters will do anything that might make the profit virus less aggressive.  On the contrary, they will do whatever they can to increase its voraciousness against the working class and society as a whole.
    Like any other virus, the profit virus has a logic of its own: it sits in every industry and squeezes as much profit as possible out of workers' labour.  And it does this regardless of the fact that its greed might cause total collapse of the world economy, as it almost did in 2008.
    So, forget Johnson's "mumbo jumbo" about the "end of austerity" and "levelling up".  Only the working class can and will eradicate this profit virus.  And the time to organise ourselves and unite our ranks to fight it, is now!