I’ve written a comment piece for Mail+ about the recent spate of revelations about Downing Street parties, pointing out that it isn’t just Tory politicians and their staff who’ve been ignoring the Covid restrictions.
It’s worth bearing in mind that it isn’t just Conservative politicians and their senior aides who ignored the restrictions they expected the rest of us to comply with.
A photograph emerged last night of Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the Opposition, drinking a beer with Labour staff in a constituency office in Durham when Tier 2 measures were in place. Given that Starmer has consistently called for even tougher Covid restrictions in England – much like those imposed by Mark Drakeford, the Welsh Labour leader – this is another example of flagrant hypocrisy.
Mind you, Drakeford himself is no angel. In November of last year he was photographed dancing in a crowded room at a Diwali celebration without a mask, breaking his government’s own rules making them compulsory in all indoor spaces.
And let’s not forget Sadiq Kahn, the mayor of London. In October, he berated Boris for not following Drakeford’s lead and imposing a mask mandate and condemned those who refused to voluntarily wear face coverings as ‘selfish’. A few days later he was photographed at a crowded party with Liverpool footballer Mo Salah with no masks in sight.
This begs the question: Why have all these advocates of lockdowns and related restrictions been flagrantly ignoring the rules?
It’s not a straightforward example of ‘do as I say, not what I do’ – something we’ve grown used to from the political class – because these leaders supposedly had a vested interest in following their own rules. After all, weren’t they worried about catching the virus? They told us these measures were for our own protection.
The only explanation I can think of is that they knew some of these rules were pointless. We now know that many of the non-pharmaceutical interventions governments made around the world to try to control successive waves of Covid infections made little or no impact on the overall ebb and flow of each variant. Just look at Sweden, which didn’t impose a lockdown in 2020 and had one of the lowest excess death rates in Europe that year.
More recently, Boris himself proved the doom-mongers of Sage wrong when he ignored their apocalyptic predictions of what would happen if he didn’t impose tighter restrictions – 5,000 deaths a day, said Professor Lockdown. The Omicron variant, like the previous ones, has proved self-limiting and begun to fade without the Government doing much at all.
But this begs another question: If they knew the rules were pointless, why did these political panjandrums advocate for them in the first place? My conspiracy-minded friends will say it’s because they were doing the bidding of an international cabal of rich, powerful men who had a vested interest in locking everyone down, whether because they would benefit financially – hello, Jeff Bezos – or because it helped advance their sinister political agenda known as ‘the Great Reset’. But I think the truth is less exciting.
I believe the reason the Government imposed three lockdowns – and countless restrictions in between – was because it calculated it was better to be seen to be doing something to try to suppress the virus rather than just ‘letting it rip’. Boris must have known over 100,000 Britons would likely die as a result of the pandemic and there was little he could do about that, but at least it would be harder for his political opponents to hang those deaths around his neck if he locked us all in our homes. And the reason his opponents criticised him for not going even further is because they hoped to do precisely that.
The one good thing to emerge from these scandals is that it will make it harder for the political class to play the public for fools again. If senior politicians ever impose another plethora of pointless, incomprehensible restrictions – whether Tory or Labour – I hope we’ll all pay about as much attention to them as they do.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: A leaving party was held at the Cabinet Office in December 2020 for Kate Josephs, head of the Government unit responsible for drawing up Covid restrictions. The Telegraph has more.
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They imposed them because they were following orders. A hint of deja vu re that phrase.
Credit where credit is due. Today’s Telegraph had its lead ‘covid’ letter from a true sceptic. The writer points out that the No 10 shenanigans show that they didn’t take the Covid business seriously, but asks why, even now, they continue to pretend it is.
I saw a very sensible point was made elsewhere – Sp!ked, I think…
We are in agreement that Boris and the Cabinet ignoring the protective regulations is a strong indication that they did not believe that those protective regulations would save them from a major disease. So, why did they put them in in the first place?
initially, this must have been because of trust in the Medical Advisors. If you are running a country, an accepted expert in their field says that a great threat is coming, and ALL the other evidence you have confirms this then you are going to put protection in – you can’t not do this.
Then, when it’s realised that it was pointless, you can’t back down. If you do, the opposition will slaughter you, and the people will vote you out.
You HAVE to pretend that it was all worth while. Which is why we still have mask rules…
Up to a point. They could easily have de-escalated a year ago and stuck to it, citing their former restrictions as ‘having worked’.
They can end masks tomorrow if they wish by citing OUR evidence against them.
Hardly anyone reads this website, so the public would never know we were right all along.
Downinggate!
Even if these ”lockdowns” were deemed by the majority of ”them” – nevertheless there could have been exceptions for extreme circumstances, such as the visiting of patients in hospitals. It is the downright cruelty of many of these ”rules” that is abominable. Someone actually sat down and thought up these particularly brutal punishments – knowing that they wouldn’t have to abide by them personally. There’s a special place in Hell for them. I hope they get there sooner rather than later.
”deemed necessary”
This analysis completely misses the point. They don’t / didn’t think the restrictions pointless. These people have an aristocratic mentality. They didn’t feel personally threatened by the virus. They thought that if enough peasants did as they were told that it would ‘save lives’. Their position is totally consistent with their behaviour. They just don’t consider themselves as part of the ‘population’ that needs to be controlled.
So how to explain this, from 11 May 2020? Why reassure us?
”UK Gov’t confirms Covid19 harmless to VAST MAJORITY of people” – Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adj8MCsZKlg&feature=youtu.be
I wish it was going to be difficult to fool the public ever again. Fear mongering and poor education = malleable sheeple, easily frightened by their own shadows. Look how many are still wearing masks outdoors or while driving alone! I truly despair for our futures…
Please. Please ignore this silly distraction. We now have a terribly serious problem with the mRNA experimental biologicals. They are destroying lives. Watch today, Dr McCullough’s presentation on the Mercola website. Ignore the distraction. Please read everything you can on the safety issues in these mRNA experimental biologicals. It is horrifying. Take the authority you own. Take back your life, your children’s lives. No one should be coerced to take any experimental drug!
Not enough is said, and forcibly, that people should NOT be coerced or blackmailed into taking what is an UNLICENSED drug.
As you say, there are now too many distractions from this harm that’s being caused. It’s a pity more people are unable to stand firm and point out that their work contracts didn’t stipulate they’d be required to take part in a medical experiment in order to keep their position.
Your conspiracy minded friends were a lot more accurate than your less exiting truth, or should be rude to say bollocks!!
You failed to mention the role of the Public Sector Unions.
Basically, Johnson imposed the restrictions because he is a coward. He wouldn’t stand up to SAGE. the Unions, the Media or anyone else. So much easier to bully, threaten, gaslight and terrify the British people.
What a piece of work he is.
But a very well-paid piece of work. ”You just blather and sneer, PM – we’ll see to the rest..”
Can you clear up one point, please, Toby?
You claim that “Boris must have known that 100,000 Britons would die as a result of the pandemic”. Are you accepting 100,000 people died of Covid?
This throw away line opens a whole can of worms.
Nothing to do with any medical reason; it was all about testing how we would react to the imposition of absolute control over us. Sadly far too many were willing to comply.
Wake up Toby Young. It is the Great Reset! You are in denial. What more evidence do you need? Lockdowns in lockstep around the world at the same time. Coincidence? Same language, same threats to the unvaxxed. Read Schwab, it’s all there for you. Not conspiracy. Fact!
https://www.bitchute.com/video/pNsIjAFitsG2/
Reiner Fuellmich talking about the upcoming criminal charges against Teodros Gates Fauci et al. He says they have help from some in the German intelligence services the police and the army. The pharma companies have no immunity because this crime is premeditated and deliberate.
Kia Ora from New Zealand. Our country is also caught up in this mandate madness. Spot on article about why the UK govt went about imposing various mandates because Government needs to be ‘seen to be doing something’. Also, particularly with masks, it’s an activity they can give people to make them feel as if they are ‘contributing’ something in the ‘good fight’ against covid, just like you give children a small task whilst cooking to make them feel important. That’s right, our governments treat us with contempt, like we are children. My fear is they will keep on all these restrictions after this minor pandemic has become endemic, simply because they can and find it all useful. Indeed, Mass Formation has been and is at work.
The UK took its lead from Europe. There is little material difference between our approach and the policies adopted elsewhere. The overreaction to the pandemic points to a deep seated malaise in western leadership in addition to the cynicism. The lockdowns achieved nothing. As the evidence mounted that this was the case, our leaders simply doubled down on their mistakes causing misery in their wake. How can they be trusted ever again?
Forget about Covid. WTF are the government doing having all these parties?
I doubt Paris Hilton has this kind of party schedule. Any other public office: Doctor, teacher, librarian. Drinking alcohol at work is forbidden.
By contrast at number 10 and the cabinet office. The most important public buildings in the land, it’s just wine and cheese, followed by a leaving do, followed by a BYOB then a Christmas party.
This lot seem to be getting pissed up every day of the week. You’re supposed to be running the country, not drinking like a bunch of university freshers. Do some damn work!
The one good thing to emerge from these scandals is that it will make it harder for the political class to play the public for fools again.
I disagree. People are consumed with the hypocrisy not with the authoritarianism and loss of liberty. Allowing people to ‘vent’ at hypocrisy, resulting in a few changed faces, is like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
By getting people to vent at hypocrisy is a distraction and a deflection to preserve the totalitarianism. All totalitarian states do this: they have purges from time to time, but the real powers stay in charge.
“We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do it.”
I’m sorry Toby. This just does not hold together. They have made promises and plans and gone back on them time and time again.
“Flattening the curve” is the prme example. It flattened by the beginning of June 2020. This was not due to anything they had done. Had the interest been there to stop this whole sorry saga, they could have done it there and then – and claimed it was their doing.
Then there was the promise of the jab for the vulnerable only. Having achieved that, again they had the chance to stop the nonsense. But they continued towards coercion, mandates and jab passes. All against what they promised.
At every juncture, they have had the opportunity to pull the plug on the so-called pandemic and leave without too much egg on their shirts.They have constantly chosen not to do this. Enter the ‘conspiracy theories’ which repeatedly manifest as truths.
If the object of Boris’s lockdowns etc etc was to be seen to be doing something to suppress the virus rather than letting it rip, why is it that I know that doctors were asking for supplies of Hydroxychloroquine to be made available very early in the pandemic, but were being told by their Health Boards a.k.a. HMG that they couldn’t have them?
So tens of thousands (and maybe hundreds of thousands have had to die from lockdowns and related measures (and maybe “vaccines”) just so that Peking Piffle could avoid blame from political opponents for “covid” deaths?
You know, sometimes I wonder if something does need doing about democracy (or at least what passes for it here).
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/turning-of-the-tide-no-just-a-lull-in-the-storm/
Very good comment from Peter Evans on the above thread
Tom Penn writes in pessimistic mood today, and he can hardly be blamed for moments of despondency given the scale of “our” government’s duplicity and ruthlessness in implementing “Rockefeller-Medicine” lockdowns and a monomaniacally Covid-only ‘health’ regimen.
On occasions, we can all be forgiven for noticing what we are not supposed to notice – that, for example, the insane money-printing and stratospheric inflation it’s generating are almost certainly last-ditch efforts of a robber-baron financial elite frantically seeking to prevent a looming catastrophe of their own making. Namely, their desperate endeavours to stop the fiat currency system they’ve irretrievably exhausted from fully collapsing before they’ve implemented their new digital, worldwide programmable money slave system.
The Great Crash they fomented in 2007/8 through greed and fraud was never recovered from, and it’s in its dying days now.
But another way of thinking about this goes like this: the architects of the current darkness are heirs to the same surreally wealthy and megalomaniacal financial elites who have been financing blood-soaked wars for profit, usurious wickedness and covert governmental manipulation for centuries. They were exceedingly cautious to remain deeply in the shadows.
But today, the… Read more »
And the article was excellent too – “this isn’t a scaling back of the restrictions, it is just a lull before they bring in more”
Toby should read it and maybe re-think or edit his whole piece
I think Toby is out of touch.
It’s not Jeff Bezos we’re worried about so much.
It’s Bill Gates.
Come, come, Mr. Young! The government didn’t need to be seen to be “doing something” about Nothing! A panic was deliberately raised about a virus with known antidotes. Governments all over the world acted in synch to frighten and restrict their citizens. All discarded their ready pandemic plans and adopted the same useless, illogical measures which further frightened, isolated, demoralized, impoverished and sickened the people. All now are forcing leaky, deadly injections.
The poobahs’ flagrant disregard for rules shows the virus didn’t scare them. (Probably they were taking hydroxychoriquin and zinc). And their breaking all the rules they set for others shows a flagrant disregard for the country and its people.
Must have been a cock-up. Still, it’s not over until the fat bozo sings.
I think they’re so hubristic, and so steeped in doublethink, that it genuinely never occurred to them that it was inappropriate. So yes, a cock-up.
Covid restrictions were necessary if “project fear” was to succeed, which it largely has. Project fear had to succeed because they want to get every arm filled with an experimental medication that the vast majority of the population don’t need. Every arm has to be jabbed, either because a) it’s the quickest way to turn every single human being into a digitized object with a pass/id controlling access to social/economic life, and/or b) it makes Big Pharma unbelievable shed-loads of moulah.
The parties have done us all a favour really, who knew? The only conclusion anyone can come to, who isn’t rabidly Covidian, is that they weren’t that worried about the “novel” virus.
And the only thing that was ‘Novel’ about it was that it was ‘Tagged’ in a lab, to differentiate it from the good old common cold ….
There is nothing easier than to play the public for fools. Fools, or rather gibbering idiots, is what they are.If it wasn’t obvious before the covvibollox, it most certainly is now.
I can’t help feeling that the outrage (entirely justified) at the parties and the somewhat benevolent focus on the imminent scrapping of some of the recent Covid rules are distractive air cover for the infrastructure of social control (e.g. Vaccine Passports) that has been put in place and will doubtless remain. This infrastructure will likely transform into the CCP social credit model, which was always the end goal. This will be linked to the ‘healthy living’ app and digital currency. It was never just about a virus.
Apparently Saj has just said Vaccine passports will be killed off in a couple of weeks….
Covid Passes to be Scrapped Within Two Weeks – The Daily Sceptic
Agreed, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be held in reserve and morph into the CCP social credit app. I don’t trust a word that the government says.
But they still discriminate against unvaccinated people by mandatory vaccines for health and care, and by force isolating unvaccinated who test positive or are identified as close contacts.
Until they stop discriminating against the unvaccinated we’re not free.
Yeh, right. Like the lockdown was three weeks to squash the sombrero.
Is he going to give the same order to the devolved govts to also get rid of theirs?? until they are gone right throughout the UK they are not killed off