Clap Fascism received a long-awaited slap in the chops yesterday when somebody told a woman named Jade that, because she doesn’t go outside and clap, she should spend a day on the frontline as a nurse and find out what it’s like.

Jade found their reaction quite funny when she let it be known that she is in fact a nurse.

She then articulated her views. She doesn’t find the clapping bad. Just that there are more effective ways to support the national health machine and its people.

Ooh, what a predicament. The virtue-signallers will want to slaughter a dissident. But they can’t because the naysayer is actually walking the walk in precisely the manner that they don’t. So, the matter has been left there, apart from the pretty robust support emanating from the common-sense underground (and it truly does feel like some kind of wartime resistance).

An alternative rationale for the happy-clapping cult has emerged, though. That it also reflects a terrified nation who voted in a succession of Governments that have continually underfunded the NHS meets to clap away their collective guilt.

And there I was, thinking that it was all about virtue-signalling slacktivists.

This interpretation does fit like a glove for all the fake Labour cheerleaders who spout their comfortable chaise longue Social Democracy, blissfully distant from – and deliciously ignorant of – New Labour’s equally lamentable NHS failures.

Still, one person’s transparent and inept pretence is another person’s entertainment.

Either way, with the Captain Claptastics, it’s mainly about dishonesty. We could all be so much better than this. The claps are however becoming shorter, though. Is this an exit strategy kicking in?

If it is, then the clappers are not alone. The government is teething the window-ledge in a gnash-fest for a four-legged, sideways bail-out. They have now trumpeted that it is our civic duty to not use public transport.

Hang on a minute.

A short while ago, it was the law that we could not leave our homes without a reasonable excuse and those who did were getting their tickets punched by the Old Bill.

Now, with public transport – which is necessarily more hazardous owing to its close design and essentiality than simply stepping out for some fresh air – it is simply our civic duty to avoid it.

That’s one hell of a shift and an illogical one at that. It certainly isn’t following science. It’s following political expediency. It’s the next turd on the Stay Alert curl-out.

This is a Government in retreat and gagging for a get-out. Any spike in deaths will be down to the irresponsible behaviour of citizens. That will be the direction of the post-fact narrative. A full-service massage of historical fact is already underway.

And there I was, thinking that governments have the greatest civic responsibility of all.

So, if you’re not already clapped-out, you are likely still high on the supply of the NHS legend and whatever distractionary guff under which the Government can stick its bellows. By the time your life has been sucked into a fiscal sinkhole, the discourse that you yourself were to blame will already have been embedded in the nation’s psyche.

Stand by for the shitstorm. The worst news on the economy is still in the post.

Just don’t shoot the messenger.