We’re publishing a long read today by philosopher and activist Dr. Ben Irvine, formerly an Honorary Fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of Durham and now a writer, philosopher and campaigner. In it he sets out his thesis that over-cautious unions drove the country into lockdown as they ratcheted up their demands in the spring of 2020 and repeated the performance on subsequent occasions. Here’s an excerpt.
The first lockdown happened in March 2020 after the NEU threatened the Government with unilateral schools closures. The masks on public transport mandate in the summer of 2020 happened after the RMT, the rail workers union, threatened to strike. The masks in shops mandate in the summer of 2020 happened after USDAW, the retail workers union, lobbied the Government and allegedly threatened industrial unrest. The second lockdown happened in November 2020 after the NEU called for a ‘circuit breaker’. Christmas 2020 was heavily restricted after the British Medical Association (BMA) furiously lobbied the Government to tighten the Covid rules. The third lockdown happened on January 4th 2021 after the NEU orchestrated a massive teaching mutiny to stop the Government from reopening schools; the Government panicked and locked the whole country down later that evening, to cover up the mutiny. The first and the third lockdowns lasted as long as they did because the teaching unions refused to go back to work as normal. The masks in schools mandates, as well as other deranged measures in schools, including testing, bubbles, isolating, and more, were all driven by teaching unions, with the NEU centrally involved. And Covid vaccines were rolled out in schools, against the advice of the JCVI, because teaching unions demanded the measure.
Overall, the picture is clear, albeit incredible: the whole coronapanic debacle has happened because the Government has repeatedly capitulated to demands and threats made by unions. If those demands and threats hadn’t been made, Britain would have remained free.
Worth reading in full.
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The WEF have bought and control both sides. Labour has not been an opposition party for a long while. The Unions no longer represent their members.
I thought this article an excellent piece, exposing the political pressures behind the scenes.
Unfortunately governments around the world unleashed events which they seem to have no idea how to control – as though one can simply “pause” inter-connected economies and businesses and then expect them to all restart at a later date. Also unleashed has been the inner authoritarianism of many of those in power around the world – perhaps it has been always there but has not had a chance for such free expression as recently: not enough obeying and getting the “vaccine” so increase the pressure with policy X, Y or Z, etc.. Perhaps government leaders naively think it will “all come right” in a few years: sadly, I think they will find out otherwise.
Union leaders are only interested in their fat salaries and gold-plated pensions and are more than useless at representing their membership.
I am prepared to believe that a version of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact applies to the Covid Lockdowns:
British Communists in the Unions and the Communitarian Globalists ….. both pushing a destructive policy to bring about their objectives.
In the UK, the unions attempting the destruction of the CON Party and a PM they hate; and Globalist Communitarians attempting to force the pace of The Great Reset.
This doesn’t exonerate Johnson for his disgraceful, disgusting, cowardly destruction of millions of British lives.
And the facts remain that Fauci was channelling funding to Wuhan for GoF research. That’s where the virus came from. And Patents have been awarded for almost two decades for SARs-type viruses. And the EU has been planning for Vaccine Passports for a very long time, with the implementation date scheduled to be 2022.
If it was only the trade unions who generated and lobbied for restrictions the pandemic would have been over a long time ago. They were knocking on an open door. I do not have all of the answers as to why this madness happened and still pervades our society but more thinking is needed to fully identify its reasons ( there are a number of theories I know) and how to avoid it happening again.
Nah this is bunkum. You need to read PSEUDOPANDEMIC by Iain Davis to know where the REAL power is.
Union members who went along with the hysteria of their leaders were just typical run of the mill useful idiots. To blame unions for the crime of lockdown is wide off the mark. It was a globally agreed strategy amongst idiot governments and their puppet masters: lockstep, so they could ‘build, back, better’ and usher in an era of biometric information passes for all that would lead to unprecedented control of citizens everywhere.
We need another Thatcher if we want a Prime Minister to stand up to left-wing unions intent on bringing down a Government.
We’ve got a Heath. No spine; no balls; no common-sense; no use.
There is too much speculation in this long winded essay. If there is any truth in it, Ben Irvine has, however unintentionally, provided a simple path by which Mr. Megarich could have accomplished his stated agenda of mass vaccination, population reduction, and global digital ID, namely by bribing only 2 or 3 union heads in every state or province of every G7 country. The combined cost of all these bribes would have been less than 10% of the income he has since made from the so called vaccines. Such a 10 fold return on investment would make it, as Megarich himself said, his best investment.
Further, with the media pumping out lies and promoting fear, it should have been an easy matter to convince these union heads that they were acting in the best interests of their members.
And here I was thinking that Labour were controlled by unions. But wait, we have a Labour government in all but name. Who’d have thought a Tory government would be more authoritarian, high spending and high taxing than the opposition. Vote Conservative, get Labour.
The question that is not addressed here is why the unions, particularly the public sector unions, behaved in this way.
The former Shadow Education Secretary, Kate Green, said at the Labour Party Conference, ‘Don’t let a good crisis go to waste’. That would appear to be the key.
Over the last 20 years public sector unions (and the rail unions still behave like public sector unions) have become more centralised and divorced from their mainstream members. Their
leaders are from the Corbyn-supporting Hard Left, whilst their members are moderate social democrats. The public sector has, in effect, had a pay freeze since 2008. The UCU was already engaged in industrial action before March 2020 over pay and pensions. Other unions, such as the civil service union PCS (bizarrely not mentioned) would have been had it not for the antipathy towards industrial action of their alienated members. Many public sector trade unions were vehemently opposed to Brexit. They were certainly furious that the country, particularly the industrial working class, had chosen Boris Johnson over Corbyn, who had become a quasi-religious figure to the middle class left.
This union pressure was real but it did not come from the working class, private… Read more »
All unions have the same philosophy, to attract more members by offering to get them less work for more money. The people to blame are the economic fuckwits who believe that crap
This again, no the unions didn’t drive this. Boris and his regime drove this, the unions simply fomented support in the rest of the public sector. Useful idiots.
Exactly…..why people keep focusing on other groups/people to explain away this medical dictatorship is to be divorced from what has been right in our faces since March 2020 when Johnson fired the starting gun….not a knee jerk response but the result of months of planning and behind the scenes meetings with members of the global cabal.
Dr. Vladimir Zelenko said anyone that willfully vilified and obstructed access to hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in the prevention and treatment of Covid-19 is guilty of first degree capital murder, genocide, and crimes against humanity. They are trying to jab as many people as possible so that their great reset aka depopulation plan work. I believe in God & Jesus. If I get sick I will take my Ivermectin that I stashed just in case and leave rest to God. If you want to get Ivermectin you can visit https://ivmpharmacy.com
Do me a favour.
The Tories couldn’t give a flying //// what the unions wanted.
Judging from the union-biased letter we got from our HT on Jan 3rd last year the day before schools closed again, I would say education unions definitely lobbied hard and closed schools against Gov guidance at the time. Most of the teachers at our school were keen to keep teaching and did not take well to online teaching, but it was the HT that kept quoting union stances to parents, despite them not having the first clue about public health or pandemic management. Nevertheless, the point remains, we elected a Government to GOVERN. I didn’t elect education unions to decide when my children have the right to their education.
A very long-winded way of explaining how a lot of voters love lockdown, so a lot of lockdown is what we’ve got.
Lockdown is communist so, of course, unions want the maximum restrictions in response to Covid.
Same reason the Trotskyite “opposition” are enjoying this so much – same as the bastards crippling Wales, Ireland and Scotland.
The timing of Blair’s highest honour award is no coincidence. It shows they’re no longer trying to hide the flavour of their politics anymore while the world conforms to a global communist future.
They’re openly laughing at us – they’re laughing and waving two fingers on each hand.
My response to this is , France. Its teacher unions have worked hard to keep schools open , albeit with masks etc, so that the parents could continue to work.
A more unionised country you cannot find.
The manic behaviour comes from the top, Macron, not unions. Although I admit that the yellow vests certainly worried him the year before.
Suffice to say that there have been many opportunists, individual and organisation.
This is an interesting but incorrect thesis. The unions do not have that kind of political clout at a national level. No offence to the general secretary of USDAW but as far as Boris Johnson is concerned, what Bill Gates says goes and what Paddy Lillis says is probably irrelevant.
This is not to say that the Government aren’t indifferent to the threat of a strike by teachers or shopworkers. But it is fanciful to suggest that such threats inform policy above all other factors. Does the author really believe that if such strikes hadn’t been brewing, lockdowns wouldn’t have happened?
In fact, the Government has had the trade unions (and the Left generally) in its pocket since the beginning of the crisis.
Johnson’s ostensible favouring of herd immunity and light-touch containment drove the Left to take up arms in support of lockdowns (really lockouts) and all the other repressive, anti-human prescriptions of the biosecurity world order – and now, of course, vaccination is seen as a comradely public duty.
The trade unions and the Left haven’t really budged from that position in almost two years. They have been cheerleaders for the biggest ruling class attack on the… Read more »
I think the unions effectively blackmailing Johnson is highly plausible. If they had called a General Strike of the public and retail sectors whilst we supposedly had a dangerous pandemic the Mainstream Media would have been hyperbolic about the “evil Tories.”
Perhaps the 3 weeks to flatten the curve was the original intention, until Johnson got Covid and Raab (Deputy) decided to extend it. We will never know.
There is no one cause for the destructive policies we’ve had forced on us: but a great many Opportunists who saw a chance to advance their objectives …… include the Globalists/WEF; Communists of China and their lapdogs; bought and paid for useful idiots in the UK.
Johnson was not the PM to stand up to any of them. Churchill and Thatcher might have.
What a wonderful picture of plump Turkeys voting for Christmas!
“Stupid” will be the Nemesis of us all!
Yep – and you wouldn’t want to meet any of those thugs on a dark night.
The unions were just part of a much bigger picture, that includes the media + academia + SAGE etc + Starmer’s Labour Party, who were pushing for lockdowns and jabs and masks. Everywhere we look in the media and academia there are financial entanglements involving big pharma, the Gates Foundation etc. As Dr Malone pointed out in the Joe Rogan interview, a prominent board member at Thomson Reuters is also on the board at Pfizer. It is not by accident that the Tories have been using the Build Back Better slogan repetitively, quite exactly whether they are somehow directly paid to do so remains a mystery, but a real investigative journalist would want to find out.
All the unions are, just like the professions, conspiracies against the public. Whenever Westminster/Whitehall identify a body capable of channeling dissent, they plant operatives in them to disrupt or take them over and control them with Common Purpose moles. Thus the people are controlled from the centre.
Really Will?
So the likes of Fauci Collins and Farrar and the massive campaign against the formulators of the Great Barrington Declaration were as nothing compared to a few strikers in the UK who, for context, the Tory Government has deliberately ignored for the last decade along with trades unions in general.
I fear that Toby has been influencing you too much.
[NB son and daughter-in-law both teaching throughout the last 2 years panic].
Extremely interesting but highly speculative. There might be some truth to the theory of union influence but the essential task of joining the dots requires a lot more work from Dr Irvine.
It’s clearly correct that the unions played a huge and disgraceful role in pushing the panic, and Irvine has collected a lot of hugely important evidence that, if properly minded, would reinforce the lesson that this country learned in the mid-C20th, but too many have forgotten since – trade unions are mobs exploited as power vehicles by sociopaths, that should should never be allowed any political power or influence whatsoever. The teachers’ unions in particular have been especially contemptible and fascistic in their approach.
But in the end the responsibility still rests with the government and with Johnson. Not in the childlike sense that the lefties in denial seek to apply it (“Johnson/Trump Bad. Johnson/Trump Fascists. Johnson/Trump cause everything Bad!”)
Rather in the sense that they were in office and they had full responsibility for the actions they took, and a duty to govern.
“People often say that Boris has failed to stand up to the unions because he is weak. I don’t know.”
Clearly he was weak, and they were weak. They never even tested their strength.
In the end, the radical evil and lunacy of lockdowns was something no PM or government should ever have accepted responsibility for… Read more »
I mostly agree with that, but the nagging doubt I have with the theory that Johnson was merely weak is that it doesn’t explain the Tories’ repetitive use of the Build Back Better slogan. Why and how do the unelected members of the WEF wield so much power over our elected politicians?
Influence rather than power, mostly, I suspect.
It’s a fashionable collection of hugely powerful and wealthy people and organisations. How could it not influence the power-hungry?
As for the slogan, just a snappy slogan and a way to smarm up to the aforementioned hugely wealthy and powerful people and organisations, I think.
Does it really need to be more than that? (Though that’s bad enough in itself, when you consider the consequences of the undue influence these types wield, and the causes they push).
Well either way the Tories are alienating a lot of their core supporters with everything they have been doing since 2020. They must know by now that using this particular slogan is helping to increase that alienation, yet they keep on using it.
I believe “alienating their core support” in order to pander to soft leftists has been core Tory strategy for decades. And the senior figures in the Party are largely unabashed Blairites.
That’s why we have had repeated Tory election wins and governments, but not a sniff of conservative governance.
They can do this because they face no challenge from the right – there is no significant actually conservative party to which conservatives can decamp, and fptp means it is very hard for such a party to arise. so the initial consequence of abandoning the “Conservative” Party would be Labour governments.
It’s a problem, but the only solution is to grasp the nettle.
That all makes sense until the point where people on the left also start to wake up to the activities of the WEF and the Gates Foundation etc., at which point the Tories will start to lose support from the left as well as the right.
“Fact Checking The Fact Checkers – You Will Own Nothing”
http://participator.online/articles/2021/12/fact_checking_the_fact_checkers_you_will_own_nothing_20211202.php
Of course there will be a section of people on the left who want to accept the new totalitarian world order because they already have nothing so they feel they have nothing to lose. However the powers that be are going to wreck the economy which will affect everybody (I suspect severely), prices will go up, people will be unable to afford to heat their homes, food will become expensive.
Have a read of Iain Davis’ excellent essay on the pseudo pandemic. It’s on the UK Column website.
As an aside, the idea of a “deep clean” of a building to exterminate a respiratory virus is as ridiculous and insane an idea as any of the others that have been floating around for the last two years.
Indeed. They can’t even keep the ducting systems clean that carry the air to breathe. What chance the rest of the building?
Regardless of whether or not the unions played a significant role in the disastrous policy decisions of the past couple of years, it’s good to see that the blame game has begun – I suspect that in a few years time it will become difficult, if not impossible, to find anyone who thought that ‘lockdowns’ were a good idea.
Not a ‘disaster’… if you are sitting in Davos.
I disagree.
Tories have never listened to Unions.
It was the media that set the narrative from day one.
A media paid for by a Global Elite who also “own” science, Big Pharma and politicians to further their agenda.
This has been a fake PCR test/ Media scamdemic from day one- devised principally to force the mass injection of the Global population with a Gene Therapy experiment.
Seems to have gone very well so far .
Not a gene therapy experiment exactly. They know exactly what’s in the injections, the unknown, probably, is how long before the mass deaths and injuries kick in.
Yes it is indeed just that …an mRNA Gene Therapy Experiment – no less!
The results will be all around us with ADE and progressive Immune Deficiency (certainly ‘acquired’ and certainly a ‘syndrome’).
Nothing can excuse the unions’ exploitation of Tory inclinations. It was simple, short-sighted and self-defeating opportunist political tactics – coupled with the genuine fear mythology developed by government.
But it was the government that drove this – unions just jumped on the band waggon.
The Unions had the opportunity to cover themselves in glory by understanding the science and ensuring as many people as possible stayed at work e.g. teachers, and worked with the government to keep as many small, unionised business open.
But they didn’t, the temptation to throw their particular spanner in the works of British ‘industry’ was just too strong.
Strangely, instead of working in defiance of the government, as is usually the case, they worked hand in glove to ensure the country shut down almost entirely.
The blame can’t possibly be laid at their feet entirely, but they were/are willing and enthusiastic participants desperate not to be labelled as antivaxxers.
The fear most people have of that term is astonishing.
I repeat, the union leaderships have been bought. They are grotesque failures and wholly complicit in the destruction and coming depopulation of this country.