Corona exhaustion -- back to 'Europe'?

I think lots of people are getting fed up with the saturation of the news by the latest simple statistics,endless nagging about ventilators/testing/catching up with South Korea etc ad naus.E Maitlis was well on form on Newsnight last night saying her viewers [all three of them] had demanded [over dinner] to know why testing levels had not achieved the targets set by the Government last week. 

The underlying and rather sinister theme of the contributions -- that testing of NHS staff is primarily designed to get them back to work instead of skiving at home claiming to be ill -- was never challenged, or even noticed. Maitlis had her facts -- numbers a week ago and numbers now -- and she insisted that contributors agree there had been a miserable failure of Johnson's Government. I am an assiduous viewer of this ranting and bossy person for research purposes, at the expense of my wellbeing, because she is a living embodiment of npb anxieties and hatreds. But even I switched off as she kept butting in with her ill-judged complaints while various hilarously variably lit self-isolators tried to explain, usually in vain.

I thought of Newsnight when I read Toynbee's latest attempt to 'save' the BBC.

The Graun might be getting covid fatigue too, although it is still a tentative segue away by legendary figure R Behr:

The scale of the coronavirus crisis exposes how pointless the Brexit cause is [frightful English!]

Brexiteers’ war on imaginary threats now looks parochial and self-indulgent – history may judge them harshly

...as a post-viral convalescence strategy, the UK’s Brexit trajectory is absurd. Johnson’s best-case scenario – a “Canada-style” deal – promises only shock to a debilitated system....A few more weeks of lockdown and Brexit hardliners might be persuaded to rubber-stamp a second year of transition, given that the first one will be lost to sickness....Covid-19 has already ravaged conservative orthodoxy, provoking economic intervention on a scale unimagined by any chancellor in recent history. Fiscal discipline is gone, while the new state bossiness about private behaviour makes libertarian Tories squirm. Euroscepticism has not yet been compromised in the same way, but that doesn’t mean it is immune.

There's hope for the old Kit-Kat scheme -- BRINO plus smarmy spin and technical mystifications.

Johnson’s electoral mandate was to get Brexit done, mainly so that sweaty European debates might be relegated back to their pre-referendum position on the political fringes [oh dear --he really still doesn't get it does he]  If the prime minister now decided that the small print needed amendment I doubt there would be uproar [Behr has been so accurate all along in his predictions abot Brexit!]

And there is always romanticism again:

The virus will also be a shared trauma that might, as in the past, cultivate the sense of common destiny that underpins collaborative European politics...

The thing called “Europe” that has dominated British politics in recent years is a creature of the Eurosceptic imagination, with only cartoon resemblance to the real EU, animated by exaggeration of powers held in Brussels and paranoia about the way they are wielded. Now that the nation faces a truly frightening menace it should be obvious that EU membership never belonged in that category.

Eurosceptics will claim vindication if coronavirus plunges the EU into an existential crisis, but history might also judge them harshly. They waged a generation-long battle against imaginary threats, claiming victory on the eve of meeting a real one [? BRINO again?]. Coronavirus has not just bumped Brexit down the political agenda, it makes the whole project look parochial and self-indulgent

 Elsewhere though:

Coronavirus is now contaminating Europe's democracy

Viktor Orbán is using the pandemic to seize more power. This backsliding could permanently change the face of the EU

 As a first impulse, suspending the Schengen border-free zone after years of free movement is understandable...Closing national borders during the pandemic may have been a rational health response, but the longer term political consequences become more troubling when we look at the order in which European governments began to reimpose frontiers...[Post-communist] countries should theoretically...have been the last, not the first, to close their borders in 2020. One of the reasons for this is that “returning to Europe” brought on the one hand modernisation and prosperity, but on the other a profound cost. 

One outcome of Schengen has been the mass emigration of well-educated workers...Whenthe UK announced new recruitment for the NHS of doctors from the EU, the understanding in Poland was that Britain’s target was not France or Germany but farther east....In Poland, according to official OECD and Eurostat data, the number of practicing physicians per 1,000 inhabitants is only 2.4 

In Hungary Viktor Orbán has been allowed to rule by decree during this state of emergency without any clear time limit and special measures include jail terms for spreading misinformation....In Poland, the government changed the electoral law overnight to make sure the 10 May presidential elections go ahead, hoping that the only candidate able to organise a campaign is the current president, Andrzej Duda... in Slovakia, citizens are expressing worries that the special measures introduced by the government will give it uncontrolled access to personal information.

Behr really should read his own newspaper.