People joined a digital protest today to express outrage at the Prime Minister’s reactions to a range of issues from Brexit to the crisis in Afghanistan, but the main focus was on the COVID-19 pandemic.
At 7pm, #JohnsonOut was trending with 54K tweets as the number 1 in the UK, staying in the first place for hours.
Tweets tagged with #JohnsonOut show people concerned that when Boris Johnson said “we did everything that we could to minimise suffering and minimise loss of life in this country” in January this year, he was not accurate.
Some also worry that children will not be safe on their return to schools, as the delta variant seems to be causing a surge in cases of children admitted to hospitals with Covid and schools are set to open with what some parents feel are insufficient protective measures (for example, children are unlikely to be able to social distance).
“Human life is the most precious thing. The duty of a government is to protect its citizens. It’s clear, based on the numbers, the government, in particular the PM, has failed miserably,” said Phil Myers, 68, from London, who had the idea to start the digital protest as “a responsible way to protest in the middle of a pandemic”.
Today, UK government reports 155,465 “deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate” and Myers and many others feel that many of these could have been avoided.
“It was abundantly clear to everyone that Covid posed a real threat. Johnson’s response? He went on holiday,” said Myers, referring to beginning of the pandemic in early 2020, when Johnson was on holiday with his partner and missed five meetings of the government’s emergency committee.
Myers “decided that #JOHNSONOUT was a call to arms, an instruction” and now wants “to see a government who value decency,” and he feels the protest was a success – the hashtag remained the number one trend on Twitter for hours today and only stopped trending late in the evening.
