We’re publishing an original piece today by Dr. David McGrogan, a Professor at Northumbria Law School. He points out that the gap between what senior politicians say and what they do could not be greater, but for some reason the public still clings to the belief that Covid restrictions flatten the curve. You can subscribe to Professor McGrogan’s Substack newsletter here.
‘Secret Santa gate’ is satisfying inasmuch as it produces some schadenfreude at Boris Johnson’s expense. And the sense of public outrage about his latest scandal is tangible. But I wouldn’t expect it to change much as regards lockdown and other restrictions. Remember Matt Hancock breaching the drinking curfew in the House of Commons bar? Remember when the Mayor of San Francisco was filmed contravening mask restrictions in the city – on two separate occasions? Remember when a gang of diplomats and MEPs were caught having an orgy during the winter lockdown in Brussels last year? Remember the dozens of other incidents we could all reel off in which lockdown-supporting politicians indicated the rules simply didn’t apply to them? Remember bloody Barnard Castle? Did any of these events stop further rounds of Covid restrictions arising?
The truth of the matter is that, for all the flouting of their own restrictions by the ruling classes, the general public seem incapable of doing the mental arithmetic. They never seem to make the inductive leap: Boris Johnson and his cronies have all of the data, have all the latest updates from their team of crack scientists and medics, and they clearly do not think that Covid is much of a personal risk. It is starkly, uncompromisingly revealed by their actions. They aren’t worried about having Christmas parties. They aren’t worried about ‘super-spreader events’. They aren’t worried about killing their grandmothers.
The natural question that should follow is: so why should we worry? And yet nobody is prepared to ask this question: not the general public, nor the media, nor parliamentarians, nor pundits. The truth of the matter is that while people enjoy being outraged about Tory sleaze, they simply aren’t very concerned about the wider implications. They will grumble and grouse, but they will continue to wear their masks, continue to cancel Christmas parties, loyally display their vaccine passports when the requirement inevitably comes, and work from home when told. We are kidding ourselves if we think that this latest distraction is anything other than theatre – and a way, perhaps, for the media to kick Boris while he’s down.
Almost a year ago, I wrote a piece on Lockdown Sceptics, as it then was, about the problem of ‘moral truth’. I made the case then that people are not swayed by fact-based argument; they instead look for a prevailing moral norm, and then try to comply with it. The moral norm is: lockdowns, mask-wearing and other restrictions ‘work’, they save lives, and therefore we should do those things. As time goes on, I become more convinced that this is the root of the problem, and you only need to consider Secret Santa-gate to see that it is so. Boris is being raked over the coals not because his actions reveal that most of the Covid restrictions are purely for show. He is being pilloried for going against the moral truth about ‘stopping the spread’. That is why we are stuck, irrespective of whatever scandals our politicians become involved in. And we will continue to be stuck, until the moral norm eventually (fingers crossed) shifts.
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“The natural question that should follow is: so why should we worry? And yet nobody is prepared to ask this question: not the general public, nor the media, nor parliamentarians, nor pundits. “, nor the churches!!
A diminishing segment of the public believe that Covid restrictions flatten the curve. Look at the tv poll which had to go down the memory hole because too many chose the ‘wrong’ answer.
I wonder how many of the people at the Xmas parties travelled in specially for them, as most Whitehall civil servants were (and still are, in my experience, working from home). They must have risked their lives (according to the scientists) for some cheese & wine!
“Perception is reality.”
We could also say that “the Narrative is the reality.”
Once the Narrative has been established (bogus though it may be), it’s too late to change it.
I blame the “watchdog” press for not nipping bogus narratives in the bud early enough to keep them from being formed … or “spreading” if you will.
I wouldn’t expect any wrapping containing Boris to read ‘may contain traces of nuts’.
This is what you get when those in positions of power, influence and celebs/well-heeled get special treatment and are allowed to break the rules THEY themselves keep telling the reest of us to follow.
This is a VERY different situation to that of tennis player Novak Djokovic, who has been a vaccine sceptic from the start and has never asked for ‘special treatment’ in order to play events – it’s just that he will not reveal whether he has been vaccinated (likely not, then).
The daft thing about the PM’s crowd flouting the rules (like Prof Fergusson) is that THEY KNOW 100% these rules have nothing to do with public health and EVERYTHING to do with coersion and control, hence why they flout them with impungity, as do all the other politicial parties, journos and the rich & famous – mostly when the cameras aren’t rolling.
Sometimes, like with the Labour Conference/arterparty, COP26, etc these hypocrites are stupid enough to revert to type on camera, as Labour MP Zarah Sultana did and then tryied to play the victim when criticised. Most of us here are not being critical of them NOT wearing the mask, etc, but their hypocrisy when they… Read more »
Ignore posted on wrong article
https://off-guardian.org/2021/12/08/discuss-uk-announces-plan-b-in-the-shadow-of-the-party-that-never-happened/
Personally, I agree with those commentators BTL that the very opposite is true: this was leaked now because (only) Johnson stands in the way of Gove and the hardliners.
Casablanca gambling? I’m shocked!
https://youtu.be/SjbPi00k_ME
Reg. the Christmas party and their attitude and own behaviour…
I think this is a dreary article – probably it was written before last night’s news conference but the message is that the government is disgusting in word and deed, and now is not for doing sorrow rather than anger.
No, it is correct, the anger at the government is for flouting its own restrictions when it should be directed at the government’s restrictions.
Bitching about government hypocrisy implies restrictions are correct.
I understand that point well enough but I don’t think there is just one place where anger is directed at the moment and a lot of people are acknowledging the bigger threat.
The bigger threat is the restrictions, imposed on whim and removed at the pace of a slug on Mogadon.
……
…
I honestly believe that if the Bozzer was found over the dead body of the Queen with a knife covered in her blood and witnessed by 17 chiefs of police, the said police would still not “Take any action”
Every event like this is used as an opportunity to double-down harder on the lies. Take the BBC for example; their headlines are ‘Covid death families demand apology from PM’.
Rather than attempting to deflect arguments, they absorb them and invert them.
We’re truly living in Orwell’s nightmare.
See also “climate armageddon” or whatever they’re calling it this week.
“the gap between what senior politicians say and what they do could not be greater, but for some reason the public still clings to the belief that Covid restrictions flatten the curve”
It’s not a mystery – the public clings to the covid panic moral norm because it is systematically lied to and manipulated by professionals with unlimited budgets and the power of law to coerce, and those whose job it is to question the narrative mostly refuse to do so.
Advertising works. Who knew? (Apart from the businesses who spend billions on it, of course).
And because it gives them a hate target – i.e. people not wearing muzzles / not spiked / not ‘following the rules’, etc.
World-famous Churchill impersonator Alexander Kemal, known by his stage name Bojo Johnson.
I am often disappointed with the headlines chosen for The Daily Sceptic. Within minutes of last night’s press conference there should have been an article called “BORIS TOUTS “NATIONAL CONVERSATION” ABOUT MANDATORY VACCINES”. Instead, here’s one about the Downing Street parties, which frankly is so in the weeds as to be irrelevant.
The London Calling podcast is also disappointing, almost “controlled opposition” as they say. For two weeks now Toby and James have gone on extended rants defending fox hunting. Why? How on earth is that going to further the anti-lockdown cause? London Calling is already a chore to sit through – which takes twice as long as it should due to Toby’s (and James’s) stuttering – but having to sit through country-types chortle about hunting is making it satisfyingly skippable.
They have to be careful though. I can’t believe TDS is still up and running.
Agree. I used to love London Calling. Stopped a couple of months ago after references three weeks running to hunting. I DO get that some people think it’s fine to kill animals for sport. And I actually like some of those people, and obviously I appreciate VERY MUCH what Toby and James are doing in other spheres!! What I DON’T get is their complete lack of awareness that a substantial proportion of their audience find their ‘sport’ abhorrent. I could accept it coming up once in their broadcasts, but not over and over again for god’s sake. . (And no I don’t eat meat.) It’s like ‘two fingers up’ to us. So, yeah, it’s a pity, but I can’t listen any more.
the function of the blood sports chat is I think to be an antidote to our Safetyism culture. All those germs in the mud, all that recklessness.
Pheasant shooting I agree is fake and ghey, as the kids say nowadays, but riding to hounds is the genuine article, the antithesis of lockdown mentality
His ‘national conversation’ is a domestic abuser blaming his victim.
It’s not just the headlines, it’s the whole softly-softly DS/LDS editorial policy. The fact that so many readers still choose to look the other away after 20 months of TY’s day to day mission to defend his beloved Tory chums is always amusing. Many now choose to forget TY fully accepted without a squeak the roll out of Big Pharma driven mass experimental genetic therapies – despite the thousands of Yellow Card adverse reactions and 1 in 24,000 death rate – and the intention to include school kids who were in no meaningful statistical danger from C19. He preferred instead to put out a LDS article last Spring claiming he was a lockdown sceptic not a vaccine sceptic (even though this wasn’t a true vaccination).
Only TY (and his closest BTL acolytes) could deny that being a lockdown sceptic has always been inseparable from questioning the governments’ intrinsically linked vaxx policy. Not forgetting he also recently publicly announced in DS that the arguments against lockdown have failed. Johnson’s no10 press team could not have done it better.
I think what ought to be taken into account is that approximately 30% of the population is currently hypnotised and in a deep state of trance, hence no amount of factual evidence can breach this mindset.
I think only by leading by example, staying strong, relating personal stories about the negative side-effects of the situation, and asking pertinent questions, will the situation improve.
Once enough people snap out of the coma and come to their senses, things will change. There is a reason why behavioural ‘scientists’ (brain washers) are on the SAGE committee. Further reinforcement was clearly evident yesterday during the disgraceful Johnson and Whitty show.
You can identify the hypnotised – they’re the ones wearing three masks as they drive a car on their own.
Was at an open air Carol concert last night in my local town park. We were all crammed together, singing to the heavens. It was rather lovely. There were about 500 of us unmasked…and there were three with naps on.
I am reminded of a good old English saying…
“Give one enough rope, and one will hang oneself.”
Very true and happening all the time, keep going UK government, it will not be very long before you self destruct.
As we turn into 2022, I believe HMG will transition into OPERATION ARSE-COVERING, which will involve moving away from the pandemic and focussing the plebs on some other crisis. I think that might involve Russian ground forces. But fear not, we’re not going to forget what you did with lockdowns and injections. Not ever. Not even if the Russians get to Kent. You’re going to pay for what you have done to us.
I don’t think most people do think that we are still trying to flatten the curve, Its like the stages of acceptance, now we’re at the confusion stage, “well I don’t know what to think”. Or they don’t want to accept they’ve been had.
I think you are correct, and that is one reason why it is so important to show non compliance. The most visible way to d this is by not wearing a mask and not socially distancing.
Sajid Javid, a million cases of Omicron, translates into how many deaths?
You’ll never make it as a top journalist, speaking to the Health Secretary like that. Try something more like:
“Why aren’t these restrictions harsher?” or,
“Why isn’t it law to have face nappies stitched to our cheeks?” or,
“Why can’t we have boosters every 48 hours?”
Don’t worry about thinking up new ones. You’ll be given a list by the PM’s goons when you walk into the press briefing room.
True. My other question was going to be ‘what is the name of next Xmas’s variant?’
Yes it’s about changing a moral norm, but one first step to overthrowing a moral norm is to discredit it, and the first step to doing that is to undermine and discredit its advocates.
No, you just reject the whole premise behind it and do so openly.
Two different issues – one is one’s personal approach and the other is political strategy and tactics.
They are fully consistent with each other.
Yes, in the sense that you can reject the whole premise and do so openly, and simultaneously see the utility of discrediting the advocates of the covid panic moral norm, as a political strategy aimed at overturning said moral norm.
I don’t see a conflict here.
I’m not stuck. It’s never been clearer in my head that this pseudopandemic is nothing more than that. Made up bollocks, by serial liars and vested interest groups to implement Agenda 30.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6umArFc-fdc 4:30
There’s no current pandemic of anything except over-testing.
Rules and regulations are only for the little people.
Who knew?
I refused to get excited about Cummins and Barnard Castle. No-one died or was even put at risk. He didn’t think he should moderate his behaviour? He is a hypocrite?
Big surprise.
I expect my parents’ generation, especially in the USA were glad to see Al Capone banged up. For fiddling his tax. It might have been more appropriate, more saisfying, even, if he had been convicted of murder and mobster activity.
In my book, Barnard Castle, Handycock’s snogs, Santagate, (add hundreds more examples with perhaps the antics at FLOP26 being the supreme instance) are very annoying but absolutely predictable.
But I feel very strongly that Cummins should have been sacked (nay, sent to the Tower) for appointing Professor Pantsdown Ferguson- with his long history of completely incompetent “modelling”, as representing THE SCIENCE.
The gormless twat still pops up on TV, every verse end.
The BBC still presents Ferguson as a scientist when he’s a scientist in the same way that Lady Gaga is an Icelandic giant and Hafthor Bjornsson had a hit with ‘Poker Face’.
It’s early days yet but has anyone else noticed a virtuous ramping-up of mask wearing overnight? I was in McDonalds this morning (don’t mock me) and was the only person maskless. There were plenty of other customers waiting for orders and they were all masked. Nobody challenged me, but when I got out I checked the news to see if they’d made masks mandatory in restaurants. They hadn’t.
So why was everyone wearing one? Was it because they also didn’t check the news properly and assumed Plan B was masks everywhere from today?
Or was it some kind of subconscious virtue signalling in response to the Downing Street party bollocks, where wearing a mask in places you don’t need to signals that you are a right-thinking, decent person, not the kind of person who’d break the rules? I know many people wear masks where they don’t need to for exactly this reason, but McDonald’s early morning customers are not usually that type.
I had a walk through the shopping area of my local city yesterday
It dawned on me that the people I saw are not worth saving
In my opinion Stan’s plan to reduce the population of the UK to 15m doesn’t go far enough
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARDhJ2dpuYU
Unfortunately it has been near universal mask wearing around my neck of the woods since last week. I think there is a large segment of the population who like being muzzled. It fills me with despair.
A relative of mine walked, in a mask, 2 miles along leafy suburban streets the other day to pay a call on a friend. I said ‘you must have looked a right fool’ She said she wore it because it was warm.
Literally, what can you say
Oh fuck off. This is not some jolly jape. Get that fucking picture off the site. No-one here gives a toss about their fucking party. They are Satanists who are trying to kill us.
I think you mean ‘Santaists’, but I do accept it’s easy to get confused with party politics at this time of year.
Maybe the problem is that they made parties illegal rather than just recommending.
let’s face it, they where more interested in stopping illegal raves or people causing nuisance rather than people having smallish informal gatherings.
They reacted to the wider installed base of Labour stooges than actually getting on with leading effectively.
The problem is that the idea that covid is exceptional and requires exceptional measures is a Big Lie which has been used to enable the biggest global power grab in world history
I would like to propose whoever grassed Allegra Stretton up for an honour in the New Year list.
Her old man? (would you want your Mrs anywhere near that fat greasy hippo?)
It was probably Allegra Stretton herself in order to sell the lockdown and be nowhere near the blame for this fundamental removal of rights.
No one did. As I have posted elsewhere on this thread, the apparent leaked video of Allegra Stratton joking about ‘the party’ from last year is conducted from the revamped Downing Street press room. This only started being used earlier this year (2021) and so cannot be from last year. So not only is ‘the party’ staged, it looks like the so called leaked video is staged too.