We’re publishing a guest post today by Dr. David McGrogan, a Professor at Northumbria Law School, about why the consensus in favour of Covid Restrictions seems to have collapsed almost overnight. David wrote a piece last January entitled “The Failed Strategy of Lockdown Sceptics: We Appealed to Reason, Not Emotion” which gave rise to a long-running debate on the right-hand menu (“Why Have Our Points Failed to Land?”). But almost a year later, our points are landing like Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy. Or are they? Here is an extract.
Since it’s mostly just about feelings, does this mean that the efforts of Toby, Lord Sumption, Peter Hitchens, Neil Oliver, Brendan O’Neill and the like have had no effect at all? Would the madness all have ended in the fullness of time anyway?
I’m not so sure. Milton Friedman once said that he thought his basic function was to “develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” In other words, yes, public opinion is led by emotion, but this makes it fickle. It can shift, and shift quickly. The trick is to make sure that, when this happens, it is your ideas that are the ones “lying around” (to use Milton’s phrase) for them to seize up.
People in other words, will increasingly start to feel that this lockdown nonsense has to stop. As they do, they will start to look for evidence and arguments to support that view. Thanks to the efforts of Toby and those like him, they will find a huge wealth of this in the public domain. Lockdown sceptics, in other words, probably haven’t been very persuasive or influential when it comes to the broad swathe of the population. But that hasn’t been the point. We’ve been keeping the alternative view alive, so that when eventually public opinion shifts, it is our ideas that they will pick up, and which will increasingly therefore begin to drive the agenda.
Worth reading in full.
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I wonder if Jon Fuller appreciates that people die every day from a many and varied causes, but it is not the job of the government, local or central, to try and impose poorly planned and thought out solutions to save anyone. Haven’t we just done this for three years and found it sadly wanting.?
Jon Fuller presumable lives and works in Southend, with buses cycle tracks and footpaths. good for him. For us who have to travel as a matter of necessity, ULEZ’s are going to be an extra hurdle to bridge. I am very fed up of people exclaiming that people are dying because of this or that, we are all going to die some day regardless of the proclamations to the contrary if you do AB & C you will avoid a preventable death, the truth is far from it.
Death is unavoidable, get used to the idea and live a bit before you do actually die naturally, not slowly suffocating underneath mountains of virtuous slurry.
“virtuous slurry” is a very apt description.
The implication seems to be from activists that for want of human activity, people would live forever. Everybody likes clean air, but the claimed crises from particulate emissions have never materialised in mortality and life expectancy figures, which have steadily decreased and increased respectively since before the beginning of the industrial age.
Do we need any further proof that the US travel ban has nothing to do with a virus? And do we also need further proof that the HHS secretary thinks everyone has sh*t for brains so they’ll believe one iota of BS that he spouts? Beyond ludicrous this..
”The truth is the US has not lifted the travel ban. It is still in place without expiration, and will only be terminated by President Biden upon recommendation by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Hope in that respect is grim for both citizens and noncitizens harmed and kept apart from loved ones by the restriction.
HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra testified before the House of Representatives on March 28th that “the actions that our Administration is taking with regard to American citizens is to protect them as best possible against covid. The actions we take with regard to those trying to enter the country are somewhat similar, but there are some differences because these are folks who are asking for permission to come into the U.S.” Representative Claudia Tenney (R-NY) asked if the decision to not lift vaccine mandates was political, to which Secretary Becerra responded that the mandates, including the travel restrictions, are “based on science and the evidence.”
To make this abundantly clear for the public: Presidential Proclamation 10294 requiring non-citizen non-immigrants be vaccinated to enter the US will only end if President Biden rescinds it, Congress repeals it, or the Judiciary strikes it down. To date, no lawsuits have been filed challenging the ban on foreign visitors.”
https://brownstone.org/articles/us-travel-restrictions-remain-in-place/
All I can say is that I hope the day Biden finally goes, of natural causes of course, he does so in a pile of his own excrement, terrified and full of regrets over his life.
He is using the awesome power of the office of the president to do the bidding of a pharma crime cartel. He’s a truly evil human being.
Ulez is awful. It’s more environmentaly friendly to keep an old car going than to scrap and replace, but ULEZ prioritises replacement.
“Friends of the Earth” have no expertise in climatology. They should also be forced to account for the damage resulting from a mass shift to zero carbon, or else acknowledge their bias.
Activist opinions are already compromised, and we already know the Beeb are uncritical of anything they already agree with.
Perhaps a new organisation “Enemies of Friends of the Earth”…
He said if the scheme was phased in over two years “it wouldn’t be a problem”. …
Bo****ks – It is a problem when ever it is “phased in”.
“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.” – R. Feynman
“ULEZ is expanding.”
Could we not have a bit more outrage, a touch more vitriol? Ghettoisation moves closer still and the most negative phrase is…
” business owners in places like Essex are worried about the economic impact.”
We are in the fight of our lives and DS quotes the BBC and an F o E idiot who tells us “people are dying,” – Oh F. Off.
The air in this country is cleaner than it has ever been and yet we have to tackle “climate change.”
Breaking news – climate change goes with the planet.
Climate Crisis is an impossibility.
Once again can we stick to our own vocabulary and stop ceding the language to the oppressors?
I think, Huxley, that the reason the vitriol hasn’t kicked in, like the Yellow Jackets in France, is that there isn’t a focal point, a flag for us to rally round. People are seeing this stuff as individuals, being concerned as individuals, not as a group. The level of propaganda is making people feel like THEY are the outcast with the weird thoughts when they are not. The time will come when people everywhere will become the resistance, but they need to know they are not alone.
If you want to see a real commerce contraction, wait until business owners realise their market will shrunk dramatically as a result of the 15 minute city lunacy.
There is a major health crisis and we have to tackle it. Tackling climate change and toxic air are not going to be easy, but we have to do this for the young,
Bullshit alert. We have to do this for some people who didn’t ask for it because … well … they haven’t really been born yet but if they had been born, they would doubtlessly agree!
Plain English version: I’m really afraid of toxic air. Something must be urgently done about it! And remember: I don’t believe in chemtrails. That’s a Conspiracy Theory!!
I wonder if Jon Fuller understands that charging poorer people a daily tax to drive their cars won’t do anything to clean up the air …. unless it forces them to give up their jobs and live poorer lives as a result, which will impact not just the individual but also their families, the local economy and wider society.
And that all the studies show that poverty reduces life expectancy and kills.
Or is that all a bit too much for the Eco Nutter to comprehend?
Expanded ULEZ is just a money-making scam for TfL.
“The BBC has the story.”
I had to literally force myself to read on past that point. What I got was pretty much as anticipated.
Exactly!
Climate change actions are always extreme and their forecasts end of the world. This has been the case for over 50 years. This extremism will ultimately doom these extreme policies as they are more damaging than any pollution problems.