The madness of #ToryGenocide

The hashtag #torygenocide was trending on Twitter all day Sunday. This is because seemingly rational people have got it into their heads that Boris Johnson is using the Covid-19 outbreak to orchestrate a social cull in the UK. There is a debate over the wisdom of the strategy the government has been advised to take by the chief scientific adviser. Robert Peston asks a question about testing that, if I’m honest, makes me wonder about the wisdom of how we’re going about this. Still, I am not a scientist. I don’t know whether Downing Street has taken the right or the wrong approach. I’m happy for others to have that debate.

This is not that. This is not a scholarly exchange on the merits of ‘herd immunity’ or social distancing. This is the proposition that the Prime Minister is so wicked, sadistic and Machiavellian that he is, per the internationally recognised definition of genocide, acting ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ by, inter alia, ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’.

Let me be clear: if you believe this, you are a loon.