For some Tory MPs, the scrapping of plans for vaccine passports does not go far enough. Health Secretary Sajid Javid told Andrew Marr on the BBC this morning that while the Government will not be going ahead with its plans this month, it will “keep [vaccine passports] in reserve as a potential option”. Some backbenchers have pointed out that this leaves the door open for the introduction of vaccination checks a little further down the line (potentially this winter). The Guardian has the story.
Some Tory MPs had assumed it was an empty threat, designed to drive up levels of vaccination uptake among young people. More than 40 of Johnson’s own backbenchers had publicly vowed to vote against making such documents a condition of entry to some venues – enough to wipe out the Conservatives’ substantial Commons majority. …
Industry figures also welcomed the news. Sacha Lord, the founder of Parklife festival and Night-Time Economy Adviser for Greater Manchester, called vaccine passports “untenable and illogical”, while the Music Venues Trust said there were serious issues of “deliverability, practicality, equality and potential discrimination”.
However, Conservative MPs remained wary that the Government was simply pausing its introduction of vaccine passports. Mark Harper, the Chair of the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs, said: “They shouldn’t be kept in reserve – they are pointless, damaging and discriminatory.” Another backbencher said: “The very concept of vaccine passports needs to be ruled out for good, as they are fundamentally unconservative, discriminatory and would lead to a two-tier society that I am confident no one actually wants to see.”
Stephen Reicher, who advises the Government on behavioural science, told the Guardian he hoped ministers had shelved the vaccine passports plan based on the scientific arguments against it, but admitted: “I don’t believe that, sadly it’s probably politics.”
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Government should go even further than taking vaccine passports out of their “reserves” by banning them altogether, says Telegraph cartoonist Bob Moran, because “so many businesses and events are going to impose them regardless [of today’s roll back]”.
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Bob is right, of course. But it won’t happen. The Corona Virus Act will be renewed thanks to the support of the “opposition” and vaccine passports will be back on the agenda when the furore over Poll Tax 2.0 has died down.
Bingo. Our Prime Minister’s husband is saying today that he intends to “repeal” some of the powers of the CCP Virus Act. However, he means no such thing. It will merely be a promise (perhaps even an oath, or a vow) to not use them. The Act will be renewed in it entirety, and then along will come the normal Winter coughs and sneezes, and “With great reluctance, we have no choice…”
Nothing will surprise me – apart from Christmas and New Year being allowed to pass without a new scam initiative and the re-imposition of some restrictions.
My (and others’) predictions on this sort of issue have been multiple times more accurate than SAGE’s record of forecast on anything (admittedly not difficult). Let’s wait as the autumn progresses, and see.
The only surprise is if ministers tell the truth about Vaxports.
I think Bob is wrong. As a business owner I should be able to make the rules about who I deal with. If the customer doesn’t like it he can go elsewhere.
This is true. And the market will decide whether your business will survive
So you support business owners of, say a B & B, deciding the rules on who they allow to occupy a double bed do you? Or whether to bake a cake with a political message they don’t support? Or would they be discriminatory?
Yes I do. I happen to believe that the less state interference there is between consenting adults on how they live their lives the better. I do not think the state should be able to force me to have a vaccination but nor do I think it should force me to serve someone If I have a concern that I or my other customers would be at risk. Customers can then make a decision about whether they use my business or not. If too many decide I am wrong I will go out of business. But that will be my decision rather than the state’s.
But as a matter of practical reality, the attitudes that give rise to people and businesses wanting to exclude the un-“vaccinated”, or non-maskwearers, etc are not organic ones that have arisen out of the free exercise of judgment. These are attitudes that have been systematically indoctrinated into large sections of the population by massive, pervasive fear propaganda and by systematic, professional opinion manipulation. By organised lying on an immense scale.
This is hardly a good issue on which to take a stand for supposed liberty…in many ways you would be supporting the opposite.
I’m trying very hard to think about this, unemotionally. I personally wholeheartedly agree with Bob, and think Vaccination Passports are an abomination of the highest order and find it hard to understand anyone who thinks they are in any way anything other than grossly divisive and unethical.
That said I think there is a larger, or at least another issue, and I can see your point. Demanding a business does something one way or the other is still making a demand that will please some, and not others.
I think you should be allowed, lawfully of course, to plot the course of your own business, in general. I’m not sure it really matters whether I like it or not.
I have never smoked and hate it, but I always thought that when the Government banned smoking in pubs it was wrong. If there were ‘Smoking only Pubs’ I could have made the choice not to go.
I might have argued myself in a circle there! LOL!
Not being able to go to a smoking only pub because you CHOOSE not to is an entirely different matter from not being able to go to a shop or a chemist if they mandate a vaxx passport [show us your private medical records] when ALL SHOPS etc suddenly introduce them because if they don’t keep up with what the competition is doing they could lose custom, or if their insurers won’t ensure them if they don’t mandate a vaxx passport.
That was my point Milo. I never got to choose did I, because Government banned it outright!
if you read my post it was about the right of people who have businesses not to have undue interference from Government.
that’s very different from government mandating something.
great.
no blacks, no dogs, no irish.
I understand your point, but it’s useful to remember that the “no blacks, no dogs, no irish” trope was most likely an early example of a “hate hoax” – a propaganda lie or exaggeration designed to push a political agenda or increase lobby power by emotional manipulation.
“There never were signs saying “No blacks, no dogs, no Irish”. See Clair Wills’ survey on migrants to the UK “Lovers and Other Strangers”. There were indeed discriminatory notices (including some saying “Coloureds Only”) but nothing re dogs. It’s urban myth.”
It’s vital if you want to understand the world we live in to recognise that these kinds of “hate hoaxes” are commonplace, probably accounting for a majority of the “shock” stories seen in the mainstream media, and are routinely used to push agendas, especially identitarian lobby agendas:
Hate Crime Hoaxes Are More Common Than You ThinkA political scientist found that fewer than 1 in 3 of 346 such allegations was genuine.
This is one of the ways we are manipulated as individuals and as a society.
That is BS.
There most certainly were some, even if they didn’t include all three.
I saw a few myself in the 1960s as a kid, living in an area on the south coast of England where there were plenty of dogs, but not many of the other two, at the time, the messages still appeared in the window of local guesthouses.
Elsewhere where there were quite a few, I am sure the number would have been much higher.
“There most certainly were some, even if they didn’t include all three.”
Nobody’s disputing that there were examples of them as separate signs. Back in those days we had the liberty to control who came on our property on any grounds we wanted, more or less, before that basic freedom was removed in order to encourage mass immigration.
What was made up is the idea that there was a prevalent attitude that equated black and Irish minorities with dogs, resulting in the made up sign that included all three together. That’s just the usual indigenous population-hating antiracist propaganda.
brugen, why not supply us with the details of your business, then we can make an informed choice as to whether to patronise it or not?
No gingers, no fat chicks, no furries?
I mean, your gaff, your rules, right?
That’s all fine in theory, and if I knew you’d spent the past half century speaking out against the manipulative and tyrannical laws against discrimination on sex or racial grounds then I could accept that you are a campaigner for principle, albeit rather quixotic.
But you would be a very unusual person in that case. More likely, like the vast majority, you’ve accepted the utilitarian arguments in favour of those anti-discrimination laws.
Discrimination in favour of the compliant and gullible is far worse than mere discrimination in favour of the familiar or preferred. If we are going to forbid discrimination then we certainly should be forbidding its use as a tool for encouraging obedience and conformity to such foolishness as “vaccine”-compliance and covid panicking.
I would agree with you if you were to argue for a new legal settlement recognising that discrimination of any kind whatsoever is a basic liberty right for individuals and for small businesses up to a certain size, but banning it for big business and for government. It would have costs and disadvantages, in encouraging divisiveness and social friction, but it would at least enforce basic liberty. But if you’ve accepted that the state can control behaviour in order to suppress discrimination in areas where it is seen as being for the greater good for it to do so, then this is certainly one area where it should do so.
But if you’ve accepted that the state can control behavior in order to suppress discrimination in areas where it is seen as being for the greater good for it to do so, then this is certainly one area where it should do so.
I do not believe that the state should suppress discrimination for the greater good. I do not believe that the state or any other group knows what the greater good is. As individuals we should be making free choices about what we believe in and what we do as long as it does not harm others (I do not include making snowflakes feel uncomfortable in this.)
The general consensus on the comments seems to be
State coercion should not be used to endorce vaccine passports presumably because that’s bad.
State coercion should be used to stop me deciding who I serve because that’s good.
One of the strap lines under the Daily Sceptic is Live Free. I’m not sure all the commentators agree with this
Can I thank you and djmo for some excellent and thoughtful responses.
“The general consensus on the comments seems to be
State coercion should not be used to endorce vaccine passports presumably because that’s bad.
State coercion should be used to stop me deciding who I serve because that’s good.
One of the strap lines under the Daily Sceptic is Live Free. I’m not sure all the commentators agree with this”
I think that most of us who have commented here might share the ultimate preference for a society in which government does not intervene in these matters. The debate here is, I think, over a point of practical politics on which decent folk can disagree.
You prefer to stand on the ultimate principle, and think it would be a mistake to compromise it, whereas I believe that would be to make the best the enemy of the good, in this situation.
“Can I thank you and djmo for some excellent and thoughtful responses.”
Your courtesy is appreciated and your compliment returned
With HIV they made illegal to discriminate.
I agree brugen, though I definitely think you would be wrong to impose such a restriction, and I hope that the market would reward your competitors who don’t do so.
The individual liberty position on vaccine passports is that, if two consenting adults want to do business together (for example, one selling the other access to a nightclub), and the business they’re doing doesn’t involve the use of force or fraud against others, it is illegitimate for the government to prohibit that transaction. If we believe that because we believe in individual liberty, as opposed to just because we have views on the specific conditions government is proposing, we also need to accept that those same adults should be able to decide for themselves with whom they want to do business.
That does lead to some unpleasant possibilities, some of which have been highlighted in the comments above. I don’t want to see ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ signs appear, but then I also have enough confidence in the market that a business displaying such a sign wouldn’t last long. I don’t want to be asked about my marital status if I book a double bed, and I don’t want to be turned away from an event for not being good looking enough, but I’m also against the state prohibiting businesses from making business decisions that should be the subject of boycotts and bad reviews, rather than prosecutions.
There is another complication here, which Mark has referred to. I agree that the government has been complicit in creating the fear that might lead businesses to make vaccine requirements. It’s also been responsible for creating the means by which businesses can, relatively easily, check the vaccination status of customers. That is absolutely wrong, and I condemn it completely. But we are where we are now, and I won’t support one form of government interference to counter another. That’s the game they want us to play. The government hurts workers by stopping them from working, so people support the government paying them not to work. The government hurts businesses by shutting them down, so people support taxpayer-subsidised half-price meals. The government keeps children off school for stupid reasons, then argues that children need to take the jab so that they don’t miss school. The government has diverted huge sums of money to huge corporations and away from small business, and I dread to think what measures will soon be introduced with the justification of righting that wrong. That’s the pattern here – using one big government action to create begrudging support for another.
So yes, I believe the government should be banned from discriminating on the basis of vaccination status, but however much I hate the idea of anyone exercising the right, I believe private businesses should be allowed to.
“That’s the pattern here – using one big government action to create begrudging support for another.”
Your position would make sense if we lived in a predominantly liberal society in which such a law would set a bad precedent, but we don’t – we live in a society in which government interferes with our behaviour constantly and in detail.
This is not a situation in which a law forbidding discrimination on supposed health grounds would be some kind of unprecedented intrusion, or indeed set any kind of new precedent at all. In fact, such a prohibition would slot smoothly into the legal framework of our society, in which such prohibitions “for the greater good” are the norm, and not an exception.
All you would be doing by opposing such a prohibition in this case would be helping to normalise the propaganda-based scapegoating of the un-“vaxxed”. As I noted previously, I would support a re-organisation of our culture and laws that recognises the inherent right to discriminate as part of basic liberty, and more carefully defines when the state should be allowed to intervene and suppress that right, but applying that selectively to this issue is to do no good and much harm.
I think I understand, but I don’t agree. Government does interfere too much, but to use that, as you do, to allow yourself therefore to claim that things would be different in another scenario seems wrong-headed to me.
Whatever world you think we live in, I would assert that that is when we most need to adhere to fundamental truths, rights and laws.
If they can change because you are not happy with the ‘here and now’, then they can change at anyone’s whim.
If you apply banning to this issue, you have to allow banning for others. This issue isn’t special in any way from any other, surely, in this regard?
“Whatever world you think we live in, I would assert that that is when we most need to adhere to fundamental truths, rights and laws.“
As I noted, we certainly don’t live in a world in which what you implicitly here claim to be “fundamental truths, rights and laws” are in practice honestly or consistently recognised as such.
So while there’s a place for pushing in the right direction wherever possible and appropriate, if you allow those supposed principles to be applied selectively to suit the agendas of the powerful, then you are simply allowing yourself to be manipulated.
The best way to enable the regime to resume their push for vaccine passports when it suits them to do so and when they think the political moment is opportune for it, would be to just sit back complacently and accept the victory of the moment, while letting the idea of discrimination based on vaccine status become further normalised in society.
Contra, the best way to protect preemptively against that likely future resumption of the push for health discrimination, is to push harder now for proper discrediting of the very idea of “vaccine” discrimination. There is a small cost, as you point out, in accepting yet another state intrusion into liberty, but you already accept numerous such intrusions, and even if you, personally, are sufficiently unusual to stand against them on principle, they are commonplace and massively supported in our society already.
I get where you’re coming from, and agree that selective application isn’t helpful. What I’d like to see is people who might have just started thinking about individual liberty because of this issue keep going in that direction, and maybe start to change their mind about issues where they are advancing liberty arguments selectively. Charges of hypocrisy leave arguments vulnerable to attack. I hate lockdown and vaccine passports, but the good thing that’s coming out of it is people becoming more sceptical of the role of the state. If folk are reading Anatomy of the State and listening to Tom Woods because of the Covid stuff, that’s a silver lining, and I’d love to see this create a huge number of people who are already against the next big government move, regardless of where they stand on the issue the government is interfering in.
“What I’d like to see is people who might have just started thinking about individual liberty because of this issue keep going in that direction, and maybe start to change their mind about issues where they are advancing liberty arguments selectively.”
I would like that too, and I’m not saying that you are wrong in your basic position.
But this is not a situation where we are defending a relatively pure principle, as it might be if we were defending say the First or Second Amendments in the US. This is just detailed politics, in a nation in which the principles are already massively compromised. So the question is are the benefits of standing on principle to enable a very harmful thing, worth the costs of trivially further compromising those already profoundly defeated principles?
As I noted in my reply to ebygum below, in practice the regime doubtless intends to return to pushing vaccine discrimination when it feels the political calculus is more favourable to it – probably the next time there is a big disease panic dominating the news, quite possibly this winter.
Will we be in a better position to resist that if we have pushed a campaign to forbid vaccine discrimination in society and kept the regime on the defensive on the topic, or if we have allowed the ideas of such discrimination to be normalised in society by some businesses applying them? In practice, people struggle to understand why, if something is bad, it should not be banned. That’s just the culture we live in, arguably an inherent flaw in human nature.
You can argue for taking a relatively complex stand in saying there should be no prohibition but companies should only be punished by losing business, and that’s a very attractive position in theory. I just doubt it will work in practice. The regime will find ways to support and protect big businesses serving their goals in these matters, and we are a long, long way from the kind of society in which there is any kind of level political and cultural playing field.
Or On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
What you said! Just so much better than my arrempt!
Why oh why do some businesses like to shoot themselves in the foot?
I can only assume that it’s a mixture of virtue signalling and enjoying some weird power trip, mostly based on ignorance.
We went looking for a pub to have a drink and a chat with two friends. In Wales masks are still compulsory (they work so well, don’t they). Our preferred pub was heaving and too noisy for us and not a mask or an anti-social distancer in sight. So we went to another one that we (used) to like. On entering we were confronted by a sea of plastic sheeting and a gun pointed in my face -apparently the lad felt the need to take my temperature. There were two other regulars only. We walked out.
I wonder why that business was deserted and probably facing bankruptcy? Any ideas Brugen?
They will go elsewhere – if they have any sense.
Bob Moran has a point, although businesses imposing vax/test checking may not be doing so out of fear. ATG ticket agency (for many UK theatres) is insisting on checking papers at the door and when I queried this, said the government had asked them to do it.
I suspect the temporary halt is simply to butter up MPs into renewing his wretched Covid Act.
Of course this is how it will be done. By guffawing across the table at an expenses lunch with their cronies, telling them that they have a common purpose to impose vaxports across their businesses.
Queen Nicola the First of Scotchland has had to impose vaxports now because she’s a nippy wee munter whose cabal of cronies are largely public sector parasites rather than private sector oligarchs.
When voluntary compliance has capped out in England, then they’ll be imposed.
The problem with granting a Government emergency powers is that they can use them any time. And they will.
I thought emergency powers were meant for emergencies, not just in case. (And it seems abundantly clear that any emergency has been purely a result of government restrictions. Does Belarus have an emergency?).
But notice they’re going ahead with the literally stupid or evil plans to discriminate in favour of the “vaccine”-compliant in enforcing the literally stupid covid international travel nonsense.
Bob Moran is correct again, and would have made a far better PM during the covid panic than any of our elected politicians.
All this has happened because the government are more frightened of global oligarchs than they are of us, but at least they are bit frightened of us.
That’s a charmingly optimistic view. Why on earth would they fear the people?
They’re right, Kim Jong-Johnson has left the door open to reverse course in one millisecond
Drastic and devastating monetary reform is the endgame; not vaccine passports. They may just have been a psychological trick intended to force vaccination uptake on behalf of their globalist overlords. But why do they need everyone injecting with dangerous genetic nonsense? That’s the question we need to get to the bottom of…..
I respectfully disagree: vaxports – or rather, social credit score apps – will be a vital tool of control in the Great Reset.
Queen Nicola the First has shown that by pressing ahead with them. But she has no cronies in business who can impose them on her behalf. The Prime Minister’s husband is asking his oligarch chums (well, owners) to do the dirty work for him, and will only mandate them when “voluntary” compliance caps out.
That’s exactly what I believed until I came across this speech by Ernst Wolff: https://odysee.com/@LongXXvids:c/Ernst-Wolf-speech—summary:3
His interpretation, which makes an awful lot of sense to me, is that this is essentially a panic move to distract everyone from and disguise the collapse of the dollar, which has been happening since 2008. He says the financial elite have run out of financial sleights of hand to disguise the collapse and have turned to their buddies in Big Pharma to concoct a crisis designed to turn the population against itself (which phenomena like BLM, Antifa, and Trump have already done plenty of in the US) and that corona policies are therefore designed to be divisive, incoherent and illogical so that one half of the population is terrified of the virus and the other half is terrified of the policies and where they’re leading.. he thinks this will be driven all the way to the point of civil war, which is the environment they need to be able to pose as saviours, with their reset looking like a solution to stop the violence and chaos. Looking at what’s happening in the US, this does to appear to be what’s happening. This is also a more positive interpretation for us – they aren’t doing this to win more power or wealth (they already have more than enough of that), they’re doing it because their Ponzi scheme is collapsing and they feel they have no choice. In this context, we need to resist their agitation and coercion and avoid violence and division, which might be exactly what they want.
but how does that account for what also seems to be a depopulation agenda??
It may just be that there are implementation issues (it’s a government IT project after all) and they are buying time?
Agreed, and I expect they’ll be working on (well, tendering to a crony for) a vaxport scanner app so that we can be probed remotely and efficiently.
I’m so glad Bob Moran is back at the DT. His last couple of cartoons must have had the Cowardly Lion raging in his No.10 lair.
For a very fat and lazy and adulterous and immature man.. Boris Kemal Johnson and Rockerfeller Nut Nut and Eugenicist Rockerfeler Stanley are playing everyone..
It’s actually masterful stuff, far better than Cummings ever managed. I’m fascinated to know who’s pulling their strings.
Rockerfeller Foundation… Shwab.
Are we really this naïve? Still? After 18 months of this pythonic squeeze, relax, squeeze harder?
Mandatory imposition of vaxports has been temporarily paused, and nothing more.
The system remains in place, and will remain in place. They are already required as a contractual condition of entry into some venues. The correct sort of chaps with the correct sort of common purpose will be called up and asked if they wouldn’t mind awfully imposing vaxports across their retail and office empires.
Meanwhile, Queen Nicola will charge ahead openly with the New Normal, and iron out (or stamp on) the hitches and the opposition.
Come Autumn/Winter coughs-and-sneezes season the terror will be ramped up again, muzzles will be back South of the border, and “With great reluctance, now is the time for Vaxports”.
In the meantime, I have no doubt that they’ll come up with a Vaxport Sniffer app so that our outsourced hi-vis Stasi can probe us efficiently and remotely, with our without our consent.
Please, please stop falling for politicians’ words. Look only at their actions and reality. A temporary reprieve in more despotism is not the same as increased freedoms, it is merely a brief relaxation in the slithery coils that are breaking our spirit to resist.
We’ve still got mask mandates in Wales – because our wise leaders are so wise! …sorry I can’t find any proof of that either.
i don’t beleive anything they say.. they’re spending enough money on them
UK – Vaccine Certification Contracts
And they are doing some of it via Entrust, owned by the Quandt family in Germany.
Google either and be prepared to be severely shocked at the history of this family and that the uK government should be shovelling taxpayer GBPs to them.
Beyond shameful – if this was known to TPTBATM, doubly so, if not – is anyone surprised?
Vaccine Pasports are not over. Great to see the huge demos in France & Italy every weekend against this tyranny. However, late August, the WHO issued an 80 page document giving technical specifications and implementation guidance on Digital Documentation of Covid-19 Certificates …. here …. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-2019-nCoV-Digital_certificates-vaccination-2021.1
This is obviously part of ‘Lucifer’ Schwab’s Reset project. Our Government must come out against that entire project not just the passports. It will won’t it??
Unfortunately, (for them) the end is nigh. Pfeffel Pig is about to be shown a lesson. Short. Sharp. Shocking. They are presently winning. They will lose. This is our ‘window of opportunity’ as Klaus Schwab might say… bring on the tumbrels. No Mercy. Information, resources and useful links: https://www.LCAHub.org/