There’s a great letter in the Telegraph today asking where broadcasters find Brits who want to remain in lockdown. These people may be happy to merely “exist”, the author writes, but “some of us want to live”! Judging from England fans filling Wembley Stadium and dancing in streets across the country last night, many more are in the “get back to normal” camp than some reporters suggest.
SIR – Television reporters constantly interview members of the public who claim that they don’t want lockdown to end. Where do they find these people?
If their lives have not been blighted by the lockdowns of the last 16 months, I can only assume that they don’t work or run a business; they don’t go shopping; they never eat out; they don’t have school-age children or students in their family; they don’t know anyone in hospital or a care home; they don’t have health problems or ever need to see a GP; they never go on holiday; they never go to the theatre, a cinema or to a concert; they don’t support a charity; they neither attend nor support nor try to organise a local club or organisation; they don’t go to public talks or meetings; they don’t have or want any social contact; their family never plans an event such as a wedding; they don’t wish to attend any funerals.
This amounts to existing, not living. Some of us want to live!
Valerie Monaghan
Cowbridge, Glamorgan
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What’s truly amazing is that it got printed.
It’s the Telegraph – currently the most sceptical of the mainstream newspapers. Now if it had appeared in the Guardian that would be amazing!
Or The Times, which is unbelievably pro-lockdown verging on sinister.
Agreed, I cancelled my subscription after the editorial the other day calling for mandatory vaccinations for nhs and care home workers. Most of their readership lap it up though, judging by the comments.
I had a comment removed for using the term “experimental gene therapy”. Subscription cancelled .
Ditto. I had been a reader for years. Had a long chat with someone there whose job it was to try and keep readers thinking of leaving. I think we got a convert! He was shocked at some of the simplest stuff I shared with him and had to confess that he was getting quite a few similar calls.
Encouraging…a bit.
Yes, Dominic Lawson accused lockdown opponents of being Harold Shipman in the Sunday Times.
The Times cartoonist blamed the disastrous fires in Australia in early 2020 on climate change, rather than arson and the cessation of backburns.
Taken together, I stopped buying the Times.
The Times was Leftist drivel by 1989.
Surely global warming – sorry, I mean “climate change” – causes covid. We never had covid before the industrial revolution. I rest my case.
Contained in a copy of the Surrey Wildlife Trust magazine which came through the door recently was an editorial puff for an organisation called ‘Crack the Crises’. It talks repeatedly about ‘the interlinked global Crises of Covid, injustice, climate change and nature loss’. Unbelievable. How the Marxists have managed to lump covid in with all their other pet causes is strange and disturbing as it highlights the manipulation of the overall narrative: feel permanently scared and threatened by everything, no matter how ridiculous the ‘connection’.
Our great leader does read the Telegraph though, so it counts.
I do believe BJ is totally and utterly uninterested in lockdown restrictions and this latest easing is his way of saying he cannot go on with it any longer and it should be delegated to individuals and businesses, just as Ron DeSantis ordered in Florida over a year ago. It took 18 months of total policy mess to arrive at this point in the UK. Better later than never I suppose.
Then why the heck isn’t BJ using his power? He must know that the majority are sick of all this… or are they? Perhaps not yet. But by that point it will all be too late…
I think many are sick of it but at the back of their minds quite a few are still cautious. For example polling shows quite high levels of support for mask-wearing and you can see in the shops very few non-mask wearers, though I think this is changing….
I was at a meeting last night (in Wales) and the subject of England ‘unlocking’ came up. Everyone except me condemned the idea and said it was foolish to stop taking precautions. Most said that they would continue to wear masks and use sanitiser in shops even when they were not mandated. Everyone there had been double-vaxxed, except me again!.
Welsheeples. My God, do they make me sick or what?
Knowing the Welsh they may very well be actual Sheeple
I had lunch yesterday with two friends who I’d always considered to be quite intelligent. Neither of them supported the lifting of the restrictions, they seemed quite content to carry on with mask wearing, test and trace etc. etc. And yet, during the course of the lunch, they bemoaned the fact that they couldn’t do the activities they used to enjoy !
For me it was a very frustrating and lonely couple of hours….
If someone is wearing a mask to prevent them infecting anyone else, why are they even out?
If someone has had the vaccine and is wearing a mask, they clearly don’t believe the vaccine works, so why did they have it?
And remember, if someone is wearing a mask to protect others & have been vaxed, they will have had to have caught the virus & be symptomatic in order to transmit it, so the vaccine didn’t work [asymptomatic transmission has zero scientific support, as evidenced by the govt never having produced it].
If they are wearing the vaccine ‘just in case’, then there is nothing that will stop them wearing it, despite the fact that the virus has a >99.9% survivability rate, and ‘cases’ in themselves are meaningless.
The very latest landmark Danish study on mask wearing concluded that there’s no effect in wearing them (the numerical difference was at the noise level).
Because the vaccine becomes illegal if he gives up emergency measures — He has to keep some in place in order to coerce people into taking the experimental Jab
DeSantis has, from what I understand, taken steps to block companies from discriminating though – e.g. banned any insistence on masks. In contract, Johnson and his sidekicks seem to be actively encouraging this sort of thing, presumably with the specific intent of creating social divisions as there’s no way they can’t be aware what will happen.
I think the delegation is really a part-abdication, they don’t want to fully own a properly libertarian agenda so they are allowing people and businesses to fill the gaps. Your point on DeSantis is interesting though, my understanding was that it was up to businesses but I may well be wrong. I do know he was legislating to stop any future lockdown. So enlightened, can you even believe such a conversation happening in collectivist Europe?
Fatfuck Pfeffel Pig is not the guy who gets to decide what happens with lockdown. He’s merely a puppet. He can try to sway this way or that way but ultimately he has orders he must follow.
Indeed. Remember he said no Christmas lockdown but buckled easily when it came down to it. He’s Pinocchio: watch the puppet’s nose grow as he lies.
Indirect bullying is still bullying. Fascism by proxy is still Fascism.
Hitler didn’t personally lock peoo,e in churches and then set fire to them, or herd Jews into gas chambers, but he was guilty of it all the same.
Hitler actually ordered very little. He just let other people know what was expected. A bit like allowing businesses to impose restrictions while suggesting that it’s a good idea.
He’s just trying to save his hide.
That reeks of those Solzhenitsyn reported in the Camps saying ‘If only someone would tell Stalin what is being done…’
I’d love to agree with your statement on BJ but I think 15 months of pain demonstrate that he’s been pretty keen on lockdowns, presumably influenced by his personal experience with covid last year. This was his “battle of Britain” Churchillian moment and he completely bottled it after a couple of weeks.
Television reporters constantly interview members of the public who claim that they don’t want lockdown to end. Where do they find these people?
The real question is WHY DONT MSM DRONES FIND PEOPLE ASKING WHEN LOCKDOWN IS ENDING.
Indeed. I’m sure they are not too hard to find, but if they were hard to find, they could be manufactured. The media are following an agenda as far as I can see.
They probably do but will not air such blasphamy.
The BBC have for many years chosen mainly to lie by omission: I don’t see this changing in a hurry due to a fear of the “Conservative” government!
That is such a 2020 question.
The media is in on it. Vaccines are not about health. Lockdown measures in one form or other are here to stay. Vaccine passports are coming no matter what they are saying now.
All long resolved.
Some of the still unresolved questions are:
I think many of us are looking at certain states like Florida and South Dakota with envy and hope. And are even more hopeful that the Arizona audit leads to something substantial. If it doesn’t, I fear the American Constitution is in real jeopardy. And that beautiful simplistic document is keeping the wolves at the door, so to speak.
Just because somewhere has more individual freedom doesn’t make it a more interesting place to live. See Ganesh in the FT on this recently. But your point is well taken. I would say we are heading towards the Florida model now. Yes you may have to wear a mask in WalMart and on public transit but everything else is as normal.
Heading to Florida? You think the UK government is about to convene a conference of scientists with a wide range of opinions and conclude sensibly that lockdowns are ineffective and harmful and legislate against mandatory vaccines, vaccine discrimination and lockdowns in general?
I would say that is a tad optimistic…
My gut sense is that collectively SAGE and the cabinet know the game is up, that there is total exhaustion with lockdown and restrictions and with the double-vaccination they have run out of excuses. Plus it is becoming very apparent that the NHS is melting down BECAUSE of lockdown. This was one of Javid’s first observations in his new post. Given that the health service is damned either way, that everyone is fed up and that the vaccinations have worked (whatever that means), on-going lockdowns would only have eroded the already dwindling authority of this government.
So the language of personal responsibility is deployed as the government (quite rightly) starts to retreat from the Covid arena and focuses on more pressing matters like its aftermath, post-Brexit trade, the union etc.
I suspect those like DeSantis and the Swedish epidemiologist whose name escape me knew that this was what the end point would look like in an open democracy, so why go through all the interim pain and expense? As Trump said in April 2020, “We’re gonna open up and people are gonna die.” Beyond the folksiness of his delivery and the fact that it was Trump, this statement encapsulated an enlightened cost-benefit assessment presented truthfully to the population. The UK has finally arrived at this point, but at what an enormous cost.
Save the NHS. Get Back to Work. It’s SAGE Wot Did It.
The average kiwi or ozzie’s on lockdowns forever… though the 1% can get there cheap-as-chips on taxpayer subsidized fuel!
#winning #depop/defrag #newnormal
They probably find plenty who do want lockdown restrictions to end asap, but they don’t appear in the broadcast. That’s how the media shape the narrative.
Same people they always find on “yougov” polls…
I enlisted myself on you*gov. The ‘chats’ in particular use loaded questions invariably leading to answers that support the mainstream narrative. The feedback to each question showing that your answers put you in the minority are also designed to bias your next response towards the mainstream. Perhaps a few more sceptics should enlist to level the playing field.
I am enrolled, but stopped doing their useless surveys. Often the multi-choice options were all biased, so it was impossible to answer questions from my standpoint (ie. sceptical).
I used to do the YouGov polls but they haven’t sent me any for about a year now, perhaps they didn’t like my answers and have cancelled me.
And the same people who, when I say I’m going on another London march, ask me what I’m protesting against (not once – many times!) Are these vaccines damaging people’s memories and critical thinking faculties? Something certainly is!!
Yougov used to be owned by Zahari the vaccines minister didn’t it? I suspect he still has some contacts there who ask the right questions and get the right answers.
The people interviewed are in very many cases the friends and acquaintances of the people doing the interviewing.
For selfish and shallow people the COVID-19 lifestyle is a welcome escape from risk, reality and responsibility. Something to hide behind. Someone else pays for it and everyone else bends over backwards to accommodate their special needs. Of course they don’t want this to end and the BBC is happy to perpetuate the hysteria. Despite vaccination and testing about 400,000 elderly in this country still live under inhuman soviet-style restrictions in care homes and hospitals while everyone else is having a football party. Shame on them. I’m not supporting England, What is England now? where cowardice and deceit are the main virtues – the more you can exploit the pandemic the better – this applies especially to the British media who print alarmist false news to prolong the hysteria but also GPs who have refuse home visits throughout, many MPs, business people. Vile parasites at all levels of society. Maybe a decent football team is all we have left.
I can’t help but cheer the team on. Though if you consider furlough with the football team, the notion of ‘bread & circuses’ is very much on my mind.
On the contrary, selfishness is a virtue and lockdown is entirely altruistic.
It is certainly derived from the morality of sacrifice and death.
I wonder how many of those who want these restrictions permanently are civil servants and other public sector jobsworths?
People who pay no tax and contribute nothing.
Remember people, the media in the U.K. do not want us to be free. In fact I would go as far as to say that they are actively trying to turn the uk into a totalitarian society and want us all to be locked down forever. Please boycott all MSM and write to advertisers in any newspaper or tv channel advocating further lockdown telling them you will not buy their products and the reasons why.
As I said before, maybe 300 people in the stadium (not including officials) last night wearing masks. The overwhelming majority of the 60,000 didn’t seem to “want to continue wearing them once the regulations are gone”.
Yeah, the polls are bullshit, the majority just want their old lives back. There’s a demographic that didn’t want England to win. They don’t want people enjoying life together and celebrating. They’re the people that this letter addresses. They’re a nasty and very vocal minority.
Very good point although I suppose the crowd is skewed towards people who “like having fun” (weirdos!) which is the same group that want these bullshit rules to end.
YouGov polling needs investigating as I’m positive that it has been corrupt from the start. Their results are quite frankly unbelievable. Unfortunately, I’m also positive that the government were basing a lot of their decisions on those results. Nadhim Zahawi was one of the original founders of the company and the current chairman, Roger Parry, once wrote a book titled, “Delivering The Neural Nudge”. Enough said.
Still reading the Telegraph as some of the writers are sceptics but no MSM, very disappointed with the new GB news, still very amateur and there seem to be a lot of twenty year old presenters who tend to hector their interviewees.
Australia seems to be finally waking up the insane Covid Zero policy but New Zealand seems a major basket case.. Anyone with a spare 40 minutes should view this video about their quarantine hotels and treatment of returnees…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8ocDKEFsUY
Two views on the British government’s Chief Medical Officer from BMJ Rapid Responses
Iatocracy
Re: How long does covid-19 immunity last? Chris Baraniuk. 373:doi 10.1136/bmj.n1605
Dear Editor
We were once told that the key to defeating Covid was getting the infection rate below 1, so it should be a surprise with 75 million vaccines administered to the UK population as of 23 June and rising [1] that the Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, cannot envisage a return to normal life till at least next Spring [2].
I note that it was not me but a Public Health professor from Imperial College, Azeem Majeed, who raised the question whether this Gargantuan effort has really been effective [3,4]. If vaccinating everyone cannot return society to normal for the foreseeable future what we seem to have now is some very confused thinking indeed.
Of course, it was the former editor-in-chief of this journal, Richard Smith, who wrote last year [5]:
“Doctors have important roles to play in a pandemic—primarily in treating the sick and advising on prevention—but they cannot become rulers, and politicians cannot hide behind them. And we, the people, must never succumb to the idea that a world run by doctors would be a better world.”
We have on a collective level “succumbed”, manifestly we have a much worse world, and there is perhaps no clear direction but more tyranny.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-…
[2] Connor Boyd, ‘Britain won’t return to normal until at least next SPRING: Restrictions could be reimposed this winter, Chris Whitty warns’, Daily Mail 7 July 2021, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9761529/Britain-wont-normal-spr…
[3] Azeem Majeed, ‘ Re: How long does covid-19 immunity last?’, 30 June 2021, https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1605/rr
[4] John Stone. ‘ ‘ Re: How long does covid-19 immunity last?’, 1 July 2021, https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1605/rr-0
[5] https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/08/11/richard-smith-the-faults-and-danger…
07 July 2021
John Stone
UK Editor
AgeofAutism.com
London N22
@JohnStone32
Thank you to Professor Whitty from 1800 UK DoctorsRe: Covid-19: Prepare for a third wave, warns England’s chief medical officer Gareth Iacobucci. 373:doi 10.1136/bmj.n1577
Dear Editor,
My colleagues and I wanted to thank Professor Whitty. We had to close the post after 48 hours as the response was overwhelming.
Dear Professor Whitty,
We wanted to express our sincere appreciation and thanks for your tireless work during the Covid 19 Pandemic.
Your professionalism and expertise has been a constant source of information, and hope, for the United Kingdom, at an unprecedented time.
We trust and respect you.
With all best wishes,
The Members of Physician Mums Group UK and Physicians Together
1801 signatures
06 July 2021
Jane S Charles
GP
Broomhill Surgery, Sheffield
Respond to this article
How exactly has Whitty been a ‘source of hope’? Surely even those who agree with him would struggle to find much positive in anything he has to say!
I presume this is a joke?
I wish it were
Pass the bucket
That second letter must be tongue in cheek?
Never mind Valerie, according to Kim Jong Johnson, freedom is not too far away or some other such balderdash.
This whole episode has revealed just how dependent some have become on the ‘State’. It’s a childlike existence and the very thought of living as a sovereign being, acting within their own agency, absolutely terrifies some. What a way to exist.
But… as the football celebrations are showing, and despite what the doom-laden newspapers say, many, many people, just want to get on with life once more. And three cheers to that.
What’s the point of living in a constant state of fear? To hell with that. I would rather embrace life, with all the risks and opportunities, and live as a free, conscious, rational human being, thank you.
The sad reality is probably that these are people who do all of the above (or at least a sizable subset of it). They just don’t want others to be allowed to do it, too.
Last week, I met a woman walking in the other direction on the pavement around 22:40. When seeing me, she seemed visibly rattled, hectically pulled a medical mask out of her handbag and wrapped it around her mouth (leaving the nose uncovered). At that time of the day, she doubtlessly came from some kind of indoor meeting which had been illegal during the strict lockdown phase. I’m pretty convinced that she had been attending these kind of “illegal events” all of the time, without ever thinking that something familiar to her could pose a danger.
The NHS app has been downloaded 19 million times. That is 28% of the population and in my opinion closer to the figure that want lockdown/restrictions to continue.
28% against 72%.
I’ll take that.
Yes, that would be a good way of measuring genuine support for lockdown, plus or minus a few percent. And also taking into account the number of Smartphones currently in use in this country.
Does that include repeat downloads? Because I expect there are many who downloaded it when they were forced to use it to sign in somewhere, then removed it again straight aftwards (and repeat the same next time).
So how do they think that most people want lockdowns to stay
YouGov. It always gives a figure of around 70% support for lockdowns, continued restrictions, facemasks etc. I don’t believe that figure for one minute.
What they don’t know, or wouldn’t admit, is how many of them have been deleted.
Anyone I know who has been “pinged” by the app just deletes it straight away in disgust (only got themselves to blame, muppets) so I suspect a lot of the downloads have now been deleted.
Agree that’s a good measure but probably should be based on the % of the adult population in which case it’s higher than 28%.
I am now loving lockdown
I enjoy watching morons getting fucked about
Couldn’t agree more, Valerie. I would be interested to hear if these people really exist or as with a lot of the covid data, it is more hyperbole
Pandemic over …
Must’ve been a good lunch. Looks like he’s having a grandad nap.
I was at a rural show last week – a big one. Thousands of people. And it was just like the old days.
No-one jumped out of anyone’s way. No one did that swerve when walking past others. And outside, 99.999% of people didn’t wear a bloody mask. You could see people’s happy faces. It was wonderful.
You were supposed to mask up when going in enclosed spaces like toilets and marquees. In toilets, only 50% mask wearing. Tents a bit more but…..not a single trader, judge or official wore one! Most traders were in individual small stalls and tents outside, and not one of them was masked up….at least I didn’t see any.
People smiled. People talked. People connected.
Did I see people outside in a mask? Yes, I did…..Probably fewer than a dozen all day. And they stuck out like sore thumbs! They looked a bit defensive, didn’t make eye contact, but it was hard to judge as you couldn’t see all their face. I hope they felt the odd ones out, because they certainly were.
There were Covid Wombles, supposed to help keep people apart, but I only saw 2 all day, and they weren’t exactly doing much. One was queuing up for a burger and the other was just ambling along.
This made me feel more optimistic. Let’s not give up hope.
Lucky you – they’ve cancelled the 2 shows where I live for the 2nd year. ‘Can’t take the risk!’
I should say I am in Scotland & according to my brother, who stayed last week, people are a lot more compliant than where he lives in England.
At least some areas of the country are ‘going back to normal’.
Fantastic — we need say no more . Well done
Has no one had the sense to ask why this is happening. Many people live on their own in modern society. Many people have had twenty years of indoctrination to believe the State is their saviour. Therefore Government knows behavioural patterns can be controlled. Whether that is negatively or positively.
the world has had 16 months of fear and negativity. The UK has had nearly 7 years of fear and negativity. Why doesn’t the Government, for once, try a little positive messaging. Why don’t they tell us that the numbers recovering from covid are 99%. Why don’t they send a message of hope that we will see Granny again and there was never a possibility that a 3yr old would kill her.
It seems to me that the Government knows fear sells. Fear means the Government can control the population. I am through the anger barrier and in to the white hot seething barrier. The stupidity of people who cannot see they are once again being led down a path to serfdom and death. These bloody people are so bloody gullible they may end up taking us all over the cliff edge.
Would be interesting to see the breakdown by on-street mask wearers vs non-wearers.
The liars of MSM TV know exactly what they are doing, just as they knew what they were doing when the only Brexit voters they could ever find for their vox pops would be obese mobility scooter riders with a fag hanging out of their mouths! Vox pops are one of the easiest ways to maniulate opinion and it is virtually impossible to counter the bogus claim they are objective and impartial. Representative “panels” can be equally bad but in that case it is easier to demonstrate their partisan nature. Who can forget the Newsnight panel chosen by a leading polling company that was 90% anti-Brexit?
As it has been revealed, most scenarios televisions show regarding c19, are ‘crisis actors’ from specialized companies such as “CrisisCast.com”; hence the ‘statistics’ showing that people want to keep Draconian measures are pure fabrications intended not to inform, but to indoctrinate minds!!!
Having said that, only very ignorant, gullible and brainwashed minds continue to believe any official narrative on covid!!!