A Lockdown Sceptics reader called Keith Anderson has taken issue with my note on the election result. He thinks I was being too pessimistic.
In respect of Tory success in the local elections/by-election, the fact that people choose the lesser of two evils in no way means they endorse or support the same – in this case they were faced with opting between the Conservative lockdown party, or the Labour would-have-been-a-worse lockdown party!
As for the failure of anti-lockdown parties and candidates to make headway, to the mind of most, to elect someone to combat something that’s going to end in a month anyway holds little attraction – better to vote for a brand they understand and has stated positions on other ongoing/future issues whilst, tactically, preventing the other, more lamentable set of cretins/phoneys from taking control by splitting the vote.
In short, we used to live in a two-party state. That now has become a one-party state by dint of hollow/woke opposition.
Another reader and occasional contributor, who wishes to remain anonymous, is more gloomy.
I think the problem is lack of opposition and media monoculture. Lockdowns are contentious in U.S. politics. Ron DeSantis is going to run in 2024 on his anti-lockdown policies and their success in Florida, for example. And large percentages of the population are awake to their dangers. But most importantly opposition is basically ingrained on one side of the isle.
I think this is telling us that political and media monoculture in the U.K. is becoming downright dangerous. To the extent that democracy works it relies on competition. There’s none of that now. So it doesn’t work. I really hope something shifts, or we’re in for a troubled decade or two.
The article also produced some good comments below the line, such as this one from Stephensceptic:
The populations of western countries are getting what they have asked for. It is the old axiom that you get the government that you deserve.
Most people got deeply scared in March 2020. We can debate the role of the media, Imperial College and other so-called “experts”, as well as the novelty of a daily death count in creating this fear but it was real. They demanded that government “do something” and so governments did. They had no clue what to do and copied China. Johnson started out rightly by saying that nothing would really stop this but he got destroyed in the Press and by public opinion. He took the message and did an about face.
Many people have then stayed scared. Governments have realised that their activist measures are still popular, given the fear, and have no incentive to unravel them or to assuage the fear. Indeed, they see more political risk in unrolling the measures because they will then be blamed if Covid comes back. They will also lose their “rally round the government” political calling card.
First World War analogies kind of work best for me. It was begat by mutual fear of other countries, rather than of a virus of course. The war was then actually popular for most of its period in all belligerent countries. Even the generals were popular despite the casualties. Ending the war would have taken far more political courage than continuing it. Just like now. It took a long time for the popularity of the First World War to unravel as people woke up to the reality of the disaster it truly was. This happened quickest in places such as Russia and only really happened afterwards in countries such as Britain.
I agree with Toby that the awakening from this man made disaster will be slow. But when it comes it will be all the more vicious for that. My instinct is that deep down many members of governments realise this and will continue to perpetuate the emergency and the fear. Stopping it will bring the whole deck of cards crashing down.
And finally, a word of encouragement from a commentator who describes themselves as A.N. Other Lockdown Sceptic:
As my wise 87 year-old Mum said at the start of this shit show, “They told us that WW2 would be over by Christmas.”
Sadly, we need to be in this fight for the long haul. The truth will come out, we just need to put our shoulders to the wheel to ensure that it does.
Keep up the good fight, fellow courageous lockdown sceptics.
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Whether the truth will come out, we don’t know yet. But the truth is the truth and no government can make it untrue.
While Toby wishes to make it “all about the lockdown”, the truth is now it is “all about the vaccine”. The majority of the public believe, as Toby did, that the vaccine is going to make them free. We shall see.
One flag around which all sceptics and voices of sanity should rally is “No vaccination of children”. Healthy children are not at risk from Covid but they are at risk from the vaccine. We, on the vaccine sceptic side, know that the only reason to vaccinate children against Covid is to ensure the social control permit system (aka vaccine passports) or “Compliance ID” if you prefer, can only work for travel, holidays, pubs and restaurants and sports activities if children as well as adults are vaccinated (credit to whoever it was brought that very pertinent point to my attention).
I think of the political parties in relation to the WEF (Davos) policy package. The only Western politician of note who has opposed that policy package with real energy was Trump. I am still awaiting the emergence of a political party in the UK that will oppose WEF policy across the board effectively. I don’t want a society where the majority of people don’t get to own things but Big Tech and Big Pharma billionaires do. I don’t want a society where lockdownism is the default response to viral epidemics. I don’t want a society that kowtows to the CCP or pursues a bogus and divisive race “equality” agenda.
There you go Toby – your next project: set up the UK’s first populist party with real appeal across the board. You could be the Minister for Free Speech and Education.
“ The majority of the public believe, as Toby did, that the vaccine is going to make them free. We shall see.”
Actually – we’ve already seen. The vaccine narrative was a load of tosh – otherwise there would be no restrictions at all now.
Of course, the PR job for the vaccines was always overblown – as advertising campaigns are. But we never needed one for this virus that is not of ‘high consequence’. And when it arrived – you might have admired the logistics of the scam – but not the numbers when you looked closely.
Ironically, Implicitly, the government has actually provided support for such scepticism about the religious approach to vaccination! But the evidence is that most of the Living Dead won’t get it.
But actually, what we’ve seen is clear evidence that – apart from money making and saving face – its all been about political levers of control; which many of us have said for a long time.
S
Spot on. Some time ago, my MP replied to a critical letter from me, and he was betting on the vaccination programme as if it was a horse in the races.
No shortage of free advertising at public expense for the pharma companies, either – such as BBC ones.
Toby’s analysis of the elections seems reasonable. I know that Labour lost the plot – and at least one previously active member (me), over the last year.
“They demanded that government ‘do something’ and so governments did. They had no clue what to do and copied China.”
Toby Young is stubbornly resistant to the recognition that BJ and Hancock merely commenced implementing the Great Reset strategy they’d received from their World Economic Forum friends. BJ’s initial “Crisis? What crisis?” stance was mere legerdemain, playing upon the British character trait of believing we know better than our government, while bypassing the scepticism with which a government announcement, of a new, and deadly, peril, would have been met.
the govt also give the impression that lockdown was a spur of the moment decision yet there is evidence that govt departments had planned in advance to work from home.
If the one flag to rally around is “no vaccination of children,” you have conceded way too much ground, and assured your loss, I’m afraid.
Mr Young, I do appreciate the opportunity to freely post your site, thank you.
I do disagree with you on some issues, in particular the way this site , in general, deals with the so-called vaccine issue.
Another one is the role of Johnson in this affair. We now know that the UK government have spent over £1.6bn with OmniCom to coordinate, direct and test the SARS2/Covid PR capaign across the media. We know OmniCom have being doing this for the majority of the G7 nations and others. When you coordinate, direct and test your own campaigns , you are running them. The UK govt like others have outsourced this to a US company, OmniCom ( the second biggest such company in the world). We also now that the first of that £1.6bn was spent some weeks before the announcement of the first lockdown and Johnson’s apparent about face. And we know future spend has been authorised.
The recent election results in England, the story is different in Wales and very different in Scotland, were a story of no big gains, no big swings, but a story of mainly Labour voters not bothering to turn out to vote. Take Hartlepool , where the Tories won with a vote a fraction the sixe of their losing vote in the first Hartlepool election in 1974. This time the reason for their victory was a Labour vote less than 25% of the winning vote in 1974. This is partly due to oveall voter turn out being down by over 50% , and within that the apathy of Labour voters. This is no victory for the Tories, this is a loss for democracy.
“a story of mainly Labour voters not bothering to turn out to vote.”
Precisely. I’m not a sample – just an instance, but I refused to cast a vote for Labour for the first time ever. The overall pattern of local results, with gains for the Greens and LibDems from Labour, but none for the Tories, suggests that I wasn’t alone.
Western Germany in the fifties, had to undergo a collective amnesia about the preceding conflict, and this was simply to allow itself (and be allowed) to step into the democratic shoes of its neighbours. It managed it comfortably and I doubt there will ever be any kind of ‘reckoning’ because no-one will want to remember their compliance. There will be enough reasons to excuse and forget it for a very, very long time.
An article I wrote (“Sports imitates life: The Conditioning of Americans to Embrace Mandates”) explains how this (the lockdowns and the public ceding control to the “experts” and bureaucrats) happens. Here’s a few paragraphs:
Authorities WILL create mandates and protocols
My COVID football example actually illustrates a larger and more important point. Namely, it’s officials, authorities and bureaucrats who frame the narrative that ends up controlling our lives. Invariably, these officials have acted in response to fear-producing story lines pushed by alleged or dubious experts.
Here’s how this works. Private citizens or members of different organizations, for various reasons, decide to create associations to govern their members. Once the leaders of these organizations have established their power base, they spring into action to justify their existence. Fear—or any “crisis”—gives them the perfect excuse to exert their control.
Someone has to protect the people, and, by God, these people will do it. By now, most Americans don’t give a second thought to this process. If the authorities and experts say something must be done, then it must to be done. Just as there’s no crying allowed in baseball, there’s no questioning allowed when it comes to the protocols and mandates.
If the Big 10 Commissioner—after consulting with the presidents of the Big 10 schools and their medical experts—say football cannot be played unless these 300 pages of mandates and guidelines are strictly followed, then that’s the way things will be done.
We see the same reality, not just in sports, but in damn near everything
If the government says we must have 10 percent ethanol in our gasoline to “protect the environment,” well, OK then. If the government says we can no longer use the light bulbs we used for seven decades, we shrug our shoulders and buy the more expensive ones we’re told we must use.
If a president, the media and all the think tanks say our military has to invade and occupy certain Third World countries to protect our national security and/or our freedom, most of us salute and say, “Fine, let’s do it.”
As for those odd curmudgeons like myself—the contrarians who insist that none of these things actually HAD to happen—we can vent and write essays with the hope that some news organization with a large number of readers still publishes stories that dissent from conventional wisdom.
In reality, it wasn’t COVID-19 that caused this and scores of other games to be cancelled. It was virtue-signaling, group-thinking busy bodies—the same people who came up with these unnecessary protocols, and then enforce them with maniacal fervor—that caused these games to be cancelled.
I’ll probably be called a nutcase for saying this, but what the hell. The old normal, the one where our lives were not increasingly dominated by specious mandates and protocols that most of us now accept with no questions asked, was a better and happier place.
https://uncoverdc.com/2020/11/27/sports-imitates-life-the-conditioning-of-americans-to-embrace-mandates/
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/05/lk-samuels/the-fascist-left-myth-or-reality/
“… the most characteristic aspect of totalitarian terror [is] that it is let loose when all organized opposition has died down and the totalitarian ruler knows that he no longer need[s]. to be afraid”
Hannah Arendt : The Origins of Totalitarianism
And the propaganda has succeeded in recruiting a corps of collaborators among the citizenry. Here on the east coast the creeps are asking if you’ve been vaccinated and not apologizing for shunning you. They are pressuring owners of small businesses to be vaccinated or close. I have personal experience of this happening, and I think these are not isolated instances.
Wales re-elected that abominable little wrinkly subStalin, Dungford, and his unspeakable Labour gang. Proving that the Welsh are natural, abject slaves.
I’m so sorry!
In our country, in 1862/3 President Lincoln freed the slaves. In 2021, we are all slaves.
Good bold narrative with which I totally agree. However, was/is it not Globalist greed, namely BigPharma and the WEF Great Reset aspiration, that was/is the real driver behind this global crime? I feel that politicians good and bad have been threatened by these multi-sovereign entities. (After all, look what happened to the president of Tanzania who dared opposition.).
Should have voted Independent as I did or ruined their ballot paper. Choosing the lesser of two evils is cowardly.
I don’t know about England, but in my part of Wales the anti-lockdown parties were not credible. When the former UKIP politicians all stand in competition to each other, how can I decide which one to vote for? And why should I?
Reform UK in a Labour constituency? That could only split the anti-Labour vote.
UKIP, Reform, No More Lockdowns and Propel, all on a non-transferable regional vote? Forget it.
At least Plaid came third, behind the party they once claimed they had wiped off the face of Welsh politics.
Freedom Alliance needs to get out of running and just be in the business of putting a stamp of approval behind 1 candidate.
Doesn’t matter which party – if they are anti lockdown/vaxxpass then pick one and only one
Serves them right
The collaborators deserve the jackboot on their necks – they seem to enjoy it
All of the mainstream parties and the media have bought in to the collective madness. Anti-lockdown candidates are dismissed as fringe and most candidates standing for election would not have dared to contradict the official party line. A few voters (like myself) stayed away from the polling stations in disgust. It is frightening how many of my friends, who I would have expected to see through all of the hype, have bought into the idea that there is a global plague. Interestingly the scientists and politicians who most actively promote the lockdown agenda are very reluctant to debate directly with articulate advocates from the other side of the argument. This is both revealing and dangerous for the future of democracy. BBC, Sky, ITV and C4 should amalgamate and become a single propaganda channel. Dr Joseph Goebbels would have been impressed.
What English voters, in particular, seem to miss in choosing to stick with the Labour or Tory parties is that the end game is the “vaccine passports”.
If we get any kind of vaccine passport, then kiss any notion of democracy goodbye. Kiss any sort of right to choose goodbye too.
At present, it’s a matter of personal choice whether you get jabbed or not. It’s starting to become mandatory in that a number of employers will not employ you if you haven’t been jabbed, even though there’s no logical reason for them to do so.
As soon as there’s any kind of International ID linked to just ONE other database – your vaccine record, then you’ve lost control of every right and it becomes a matter of having only the rights that the government wants you to have. If the Israeli model “sticks” then you’ll have to forever be getting ANOTHER jab. Every 6 months or so you’ll have to get whatever Big Pharma and their collaborators in government say you must get. Without that, your ability to do anything may be withdrawn on a whim. So, you’re an activist, Mr Young? We don’t like that. Your right to work, to travel, to shop, to operate a bank account and to rent a home are withdrawn immediately. No, you may not appeal this decision.
Thus, as South Africans can tell you, you’ll become a “banned person” and you’ll have NO rights. Just as it was in South Africa under Apartheid.
THAT’s why voting for anti-lockdown candidates was important. Neither Labour nor Tory are likely to oppose the forced application of a Vaccine Status ID. Now we’re on the fast track to Totalitarianism and the sort of social controls seen in China and in the TV series “Black Mirror”. We HAVE to stop it. It’s the single biggest threat that has ever faced us as free human beings.
The ultimate irony in this debate is that Corbyn J would have been as opposed to Lockdown as his brother Corbyn P.
Had the former made it to No 10 he would, of course, not had the wit to ask the right questions of Sage, Whitty & Co, so would have been swallowed up by the ‘Machine’ that bulldozed Boris and the country into BOTH Lockdown 1 AND the wrong preparation for winter 20/21.
Alot of the problem can be laid at the door of the recruiters of PCR testing en masse. So it is right that all the ‘vested interest initiators’ of their promotion are litigated ’til their end of days.
So too the ‘Machine’ for continuing to rely on them once reality was staring all in the face. The machinery of denial and about-face must have a formal method of removal from all governance, at all times. Which means tying the hands of our politicians (and their advice sources) to a very limited set of actions (and therefore expenditure) that will be permitted in our name – by a formal constitution as an inevitable consequence.
Incompetent, let alone malign (as some suspect), government cannot be allowed to be possible in the 21st C. How science is conducted and communicated into government and on has to be under much stricter scrutiny than the mess that has been revealed in the past year here and across the globe. But we can only do what we can to set the best, right standards in the UK. Dr John Lee has made the case extremely well. We all need to take it up with our political reps and wider to build pressure that can’t be resisted.