We’re publishing an original essay today by Dr. Gary Sidley, a retired clinical psychologist with over 30 years’ experience working for the NHS, asking why the left are more enthusiastic about lockdowns than the right. Contributors to this site have been puzzling away at this for some time and Dr. Sidley’s essay will take it place in the section headed “The Left-Wing Case Against Lockdowns” on the right-hand menu. Here is an extract:
A political dimension shaping attitudes towards the Government’s response to Covid might help explain an intriguing observation I made in the spring of 2020, and one that continues to baffle me: that the large majority of my left-wing, socialist friends immediately embraced and supported unprecedented restrictions that were always going to disproportionately disadvantage the less affluent people within our communities. Twenty months on, and despite accumulating evidence that impositions such as lockdowns and masks are ineffective and hugely damaging, their views seem resistant to change. What are likely to be the key reasons why most Labour Party supporters have backed the Government’s draconian Covid restrictions? Although I do not claim to have the definitive answers to this question, my intention is to share ideas that will stimulate the ongoing debate.
It was clear from the outset that lockdowns, and other unprecedented measures, would hurt poor people considerably more than the affluent, and it was therefore reasonable to expect that those on the left of the political spectrum would push back hard against these restrictions. Dire predictions were evident early in the pandemic. In April 2020, a pre-print paper in the Lancet forecast that the restrictions would have a “devastating” impact on the third-world, significantly contributing to the deaths of more than one million children under five years-old in low-to-middle income countries. Around the same time, the UN International Labour Organisation expressed concern that “half the people in the global workforce risk losing their jobs”. Subsequently, these grim prophecies were substantiated, with lockdowns evoking carnage in both Africa and India, despite their populations being much younger than those in the Western world and therefore at far less risk from the virus.
While the parliamentary Labour Party repeatedly backed the Government’s imposition of draconian Covid measures, typically urging earlier and harder restrictions, the working-class demographic they claim to represent were suffering disproportionately. Whereas many white-collar, professional employees happily Zoomed from home, those in relatively low-paid occupations (such as delivery drivers, supermarket workers and care-home assistants) continued their essential work in the real world. Many other people, particularly the young and lowly paid in the leisure and retail industries, lost their jobs; by winter 2020, an additional 600,000 people in the U.K. had fallen into poverty as a result of lockdown.
Worth reading in full.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
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Some of us have left the Party, largely on account of their attitude. So, their cash income has gone down along with the loss of face (to use the Chinese saying).
Basically the Labour party sees the working class as an embarrassing old relative. If we’d only get an education, if we’d only listen to Labour and stop trying to think for ourselves the world would now be a workers paradise. What the pandemic as shown is that Labour believe only the state can solve all our problems and anything that undermines that belief must be crushed. The problem which Labour can’t seem to get their heads round is that covid is nature it can’t be bargained with or told what to do and will not show any mercy. This is why I believe only by working with nature can we defeat covid, this is what they did in Sweden and what we’ve been doing since July.
I think it is a bit more complicated. The sharp political divide over lockdowns and the left’s almost universal lust for draconian restrictons surprised me too. Even during the Brexit campaign we had the so called Lexiteers. Except that the divide is not that sharp really. At the start of the crisis opposition to lockdown was limited to the libertarian wing of the Conservative Party. Liberals and many Conservatives were and remain just as belligient on the issue as Starmer and his crew. We have been undergoing a social and cultural revolution since the 1960s. Woke is the predominant narrative of the ruling elites. As Peter Hitchens often points out. Cameron was the true heir to Blair and his experiment in EuroCommunism. Yes we enjoy a few more freedoms under Boris but if there is another Covid surge in the UK we too will be back in lockdown before you know it.
Because this whole shitstorm is about having power over us. It has nothing to do with public health whatsoever. Labour are as desperate as any political party to have that power and influence. They love all of this pantomime.
Joe Rogan said his doctor, Pierre Kory, is part of a group that has used Ivermectin to quietly treat 200 Members of U.S. Congress for COVID19. Dr Simone Gold, from America’s Frontline Doctors, told that she has prescribed treatments for Congress. She still believes in her oath, but she is vocal saying she has been contacted by many in DC. Can you believe these demons? Healing for them are OK but not for us. Get your Ivermectin while you still can! https://ivmpharmacy.com
The latter two are my two goto articles on the left in English. The former two are more recent ones in German.
“The left thinks man is fundamentally good. He just needs to be reeducated, primarily by prohibitions, and without exceptions (see mask/vaxx mandates…).”
Der gesunde Menschenverstand ist der natürliche Feind der Linken. Sie hat ihm den Krieg erklärt.
“Common sense is the natural enemy of the left. It has declared war on it.”
Die vorgespielte Menschlichkeit bricht zusammen. Übrig bleibt die Heuchelei, die man immer geahnt hat, aber nie beweisen konnte. Aber oft ahnt der Menschenverstand Dinge, bevor andere sie wissen.
“The faked humanity crashes. Only the hypocrisy, which one always presumed but could never prive, remains. But often common sense anticipates things before others recognize them.”
https://www.achgut.com/artikel/der_mensch_ist_gut._das_kommende_regierungsprogramm
https://www.tichyseinblick.de/meinungen/der-absolute-feind-steht-tief-im-eigenen-land/
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/05/lk-samuels/the-fascist-left-myth-or-reality/
https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class
Serious question for the day. Does Sir Kneeler look a bigger twat with or without a mask?
Neither.
Who is more septic: A QC or a man who names himself after a decomposing jazz musician?
Since when did the Left care a hoot about the poor and vulnerable?
Attention tin foil hat brigade! Toad has provided another opportunity to slag off the “evil left”. Cos you all know, don’t you, that what the ample evidence of corrupt tory waste and incompetence actually means is that the left despise the working class and would be the same except far worse. That’s septic confirmation bias for you.
Whatever you do don’t think about how the interests of capital have been protected during a once in a century event. After all if the Earth don’t provide a fit place for capitalism to continuously make the rich richer then what’s the use of it?
Bloody lefties!
Prime Minister Kim Jong Johnson is a great fat communist fraud who implemented the agenda of Jeremy Corbyn for him.
Lockdown is communist, a policy imported from a communist dictatorship that has concentration camps.
Marxism is the very definition of evil.
no that’s “Capitalism” – silly TFH
Its very simple. They liked getting paid to stay at home and have the grubby ‘workers’ carry on delivering them stuff, making sure food was in the shops and keeping the lights and gas on etc. 50% or so of the population are ‘further educated’ beyond their capabilities, have key tapping jobs and are about as far from the ‘old’ working class in their motivations as you can get. A majority of them are self serving hypocritical virtue signalling morons.
I’ve been called a lunatic for predicting a civil war in this country over the past couple of years, I believe it is getting ever closer. There will be a straw that breaks the camel’s back and an outpouring of rage against the left will occur. Sooner the better for me, and get this country back to a normal Western meritocracy.
It’s easy-peasy why they support such policies – because it means they subsidise and control the living of the less well-off, who then and locked into welfare dependency for life, and thus will gratefully vote Labour again and again.
If you have no incentive to work, be thrifty, save, etc (e.g. via ‘universal income’, which will be touted again soon), then why would anyone receiving it care about ‘restrictions’, as long as they get all their ‘free’ stuff paid for by everyone else?
The left in office. Labour Chief Minister of the Northern Territory in Australia Michael Gunner – sheer ignorant, bigoted zealotry:
‘Stuff it, shove it’: a furious Michael Gunner calls out those against vaccine mandates – video
Northern Territory chief minister Michael Gunner has blasted those who have been campaigning against vaccine mandates in the Northern Territory. ‘If you are anti-mandate, you are absolutely anti-vax’, Gunner said during a Covid-19 press conference. ‘People are actually supporting the idea of a teacher being unvaccinated in a remote community classroom, with kids who cannot be vaccinated,’ Gunner said. ‘I reject that utterly … Stuff it, shove it’
I’m not saying the right are better but at least we know and acknowledge their flaws. Although one might suggest there is no longer right or left just a bunch of deluded facists or communists, both resulting in the same outcome from different starting points.
Why? Your question must be rhetorical because lockdown is communist.
And since when do socialists and communists care about helping the poor?
This fascinates me. I consider myself left of Corbyn but am a daily reader of this website, I don’t feel so alone knowing there are people on both sides of the political spectrum who don’t accept the narrative. I also read Left Lockdown Sceptics. I think human beings struggle to grapple with complexity and putting one’s head above the parapet is incredibly hard. Narratives do change in time but this one isn’t yet.
Just like my Labour voting friends, gay couple with £80k or so a year coming in. Working from home during lockdown, ordering everything online and then when deliveries came having driver place packages just inside front door then retreating swiftly to back of house and hiding for half an hour – incase driver might come back and ask to use toilet or for hot water for a drink.
The left have always found the poor and vulnerable easy to control under the guise of ‘care’
The left have always liked the number of poor, vulnerable and especially dependent to increase thinking that this automatically increases their voter base.
Didn’t work in Scotland, after a while, and they came unstuck with the Red Wall.
Easy, because most of the left gave up thinking about, or even debating, issues over twenty years ago. The left has been so completely consumed by group think and tokenism, that a single fascist flag, at an anti lockdown rally, probably carried by an agent of the state, meant that no one on the left dare question lockdown because only “fascists” do that.
“a single fascist flag, at an anti lockdown rally, probably carried by an agent of the state, meant that no one on the left dare question lockdown because only “fascists” do that.”
The left were screeching about resistance to covid panic being “right wing”, “eugenic”, “putting money ahead of lives” long before there was even a lockdown to protest against:
“The government had a “herd immunity” strategy at the start of the coronavirus pandemic to tackle the outbreak, Jeremy Corbyn has claimed.
The former Labour leader said he had a briefing at the Cabinet Office and was given a “lecture” about the plan.
Mr Corbyn claimed “allowing people to die” was the “absurd” official policy at the time.
….
It was absurd, that you’d build up herd immunity by allowing people to die.
And so, while the government was going into eugenic formulas of discussing all this stuff, they were not making adequate preparations.”
Jeremy Corbyn: Ministers had herd immunity strategy for coronavirus
A “herd immunity” strategy, Corbyn? Yes – the correct strategy, you leftist panicker buffoon!
Furthermore, Labour only likes working class people who are happy to remain poor, working class, dependent on the State and who will therefore continue voting Labour.
There was an indignant article in the Guardian recently bemoaning the fact that Indians in Britain were abandoning Labour for other parties. As if any one ethnic group should vote en bloc for one particular political party. Isn’t that a bit, well, racist?
The comments below the line overwhelmingly pointed to the fact that many Indian families value the nuclear family, hard work, individual responsibility and socially conservative principles, all of which Labour seems to be opposed to.
Labour has lost Scotland, much of the North and Midlands and most rural England. It will therefore not win an election outright for a generation (although it might sneak into coalition government if the Lib Dems capture enough Tory seats in the south).
Of course all of this talk of party politics is irrelevant now that we’ve been taken over by the unelected globalist technocrat elites.
Keir Starmer is just Tony Blair’s representative up here on Earth. He is just pursuing whatever policies his globalist bosses tell him to pursue. This explains the complete lack of opposition by Labour to the government. Why would they oppose the government when they can get the Conservative Party to enact Blair’s policies and take all the flak for them?
Keir Starmer is a stooge for Israel.
https://www.bing.com/search?form=MOZLBR&pc=MOZI&q=keri+starmer+israel+security
Boris Conson is a stooge for Israel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuXwyO7XmNU
Please can we have some leaders who are not stooges for Israel.
Can we please stop this left v right nonsense. It doesn’t matter to which particular party a politician belongs – they are clearly now all singing off the same globalist song sheet.
If nothing else, events of the last two years have exposed world leaders across the “democratic” West as little more than forelock-tugging line managers for the stinking rich corporate/philanthropist elite who really run the world.
The job of Boris and the rest of the traitorous “Build Back Better” brigade is to use the pseudo pandemic to force our submission to the WEF/UN/World Bank-backed Great Reset of the world economy and all our lives.
There is no prospect of champagne socialist Starmer, the remarkably supine multi-millionaire leader of Her Majesty’s Non-Opposition, riding to the rescue. He is a loyal member of the Trilateral Commission, set up 47 years ago by the late David Rockerfeller to ensure the wealthy would always run the planet.
They say the evil old bugger never made a bad investment. And the way things are going, it’s difficult to disagree!
“Can we please stop this left v right nonsense. It doesn’t matter to which particular party a politician belongs – they are clearly now all singing off the same globalist song sheet.”
Yes. The quality of political awareness here is very low – too much just banging tattered drums that have passed there sell-by date. Essentially, superficial denial of the gravity of what is going on.
There is a debate to be had, but it isn’t this mickey-mouse left/right stuff.
Translation from RickH-speak:
“The quality of political awareness here is very low” = Lots of people here don’t agree with me about politics!
“too much just banging tattered drums that have passed there sell-by date” = People here keep writing things I don’t understand and refuse to accept.
“superficial denial of the gravity of what is going on” = People don’t get that the only really important thing here is to make sure the Tories and “right-wing capitalists” get all the blame and the Labour Party get elected, and hopefully by then my faction will be back in charge of it.
“mickey-mouse left/right stuff” = Look, if I can’t defend the left because it has become indefensible, we’re damned well going to pretend “left/right doesn’t matter after all”, ok? [foot-stamp]
All Blairites
This …
I’d be surprised if anyone finds this surprising … the left have always been power freaks … they absolutely love to have power over everyone – they are not happy unless they are ordering other people around – scratch the surface of any leftist and you will find a tyrant screaming to be let out – any opportunity to obtain power over the individual and they will seize it.
Using the words ‘the left’ in combination with a picture of Kneel Shmarmer is a graphical oxymoron.
“Using the words ‘the left’ in combination with a picture of Kneel Shmarmer is a graphical oxymoron.”
This Keir Starmer?
“Labour’s present leader, Keir Starmer was – as an adult – connected to a Marxist sect and its deeply radical magazine. “
https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2021/02/peter-hitchens-sir-keir-starmer-used-to-demand-we-get-rid-of-the-queen-do-you-really-think-hes-chang.html
“Keir Starmer, like Anthony Blair himself, is a former Trotskyist who may not be that former. He recently told an interviewer who explored his dalliance with the fascinating tendency known as ‘Socialist Alternatives’: ‘I don’t think there are big issues on which I’ve changed my mind.’ And why should he? The group’s preoccupation with sexual politics and green issues has since then become the ideology of all the major parties. But the old Labour right of anti-Communist trade union patriots and Christians was hunted down and wiped out almost 40 years ago, and can barely be found any more. Labour’s struggle, like so much British politics, is a left vs left combat. If you want anything else, good luck. But you won’t get it from Sir Keir.”
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/letters-labours-left-vs-left-struggle
Hardly an oxymoron! A pleonasm perhaps.
Shouting “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” & singing the anti-fascist song “Bella Ciao,” protesters lined up behind a huge banner saying “Together for Freedom” & marched to the EU headquarters…
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-business-brussels-europe-8b2fb4eb4992b54cd544fc8fa5e19f26
Bella Ciao – La Casa de Papel
an anti-fascist hymn of freedom and resistance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ao4FEaDGhQ
…
“The song was modified and adopted as an anthem of the anti-fascist resistance by the Italian partisans between 1943 and 1945 during the Italian Resistance against the Nazi German forces occupying Italy,”
…
“and, during the Italian Civil War, the Italian partisan struggle against the fascist Italian Social Republic and its Nazi German allies. Versions of “Bella ciao” continue to be sung worldwide as an anti-fascist hymn of freedom and resistance.”
In my view Labour Party are finished. Who do they represent? Not working people whose aspirations they seem to stand against. I am certain their stance over covid has done them irreparable damage. I certainly am completely through with them.
‘The Labour party are finished’, not if bozo can help it.
When you realise that modern Leftism is a morality play rather than the politico-economic movement it used to be, you can understand why the Left takes up stances that damage the poor and underprivileged within society. The Left’s view is that the poor ‘deserve’ whatever detriment their receive, because they hold such immoral views (and practise such immoral behaviours) on things like Brexit, immigration, patriotism and conspicuous consumption. The Left see themselves as morally superior beings, as they hold the ‘correct’ views, such as globalisation, unfettered mass immigration, supranationalism and ‘Green’ matters. They can thus square the circle in their heads as to their incredibly privileged position within society, both in economic terms and also in their control of the levers of power. Without the moral superiority ‘get out of jail free card’ they would face a massive cognitive dissonance between their stated desire to help the poor and underprivileged and their actual actions.
Thus Leftism is now a religion – one that determines your admission to the ruling classes, or whether you deserve their protection. Have the ‘correct’ views and you can join the elite or gain their protection, have the wrong views and you are condemned to the… Read more »
The Labour party are Tories who wave a red flag.
“The Labour party are Tories who wave a red flag.”
What, this Labour Party?
“The truth about the Labour Party and its ferociously radical leader Sir Keir Starmer is so obvious that nobody sees it. This is why the recent revelation that the Blair creature himself was once a Trotskyist came and went without any response at all.
Nobody in the media wants to believe it, so they simply ignore it. Since the days of the Blairites, Labour has been a revolutionary party, crammed with people who long to get rid of the Monarchy but have more sense than to say so in public.
An astonishing number of Blair’s Cabinet colleagues had deep past links with revolutionary sects. Now such ideas are embedded in a party that used to be based on working-class trade unionism and Methodist Christianity.
My advice is to take note of this now, rather than waiting to find out that it is true, just as it is true that Labour’s present leader, Keir Starmer was – as an adult – connected to a Marxist sect and its deeply radical magazine.”
https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2021/02/peter-hitchens-sir-keir-starmer-used-to-demand-we-get-rid-of-the-queen-do-you-really-think-hes-chang.html
“Your leading article (‘Comfort spending’, 28 November) makes the classic mistake about modern politics which… Read more »
Many mainstream Labour politicians began in one or other splinter factions either because they preferred to be a big fish in a small pond or because Labour student politics was just plain boring.
Most of them probably grew out of it.