Boris Johnson loyalist Nadine Dorries appears to have admitted that the Government, which now prides itself on having imposed restrictions more lightly than others, considered tearing “mothers and fathers and families and children” from their homes if they ‘tested positive’ for Covid during lockdowns to be sent to isolation centres.
A health minister at the time, Ms. Dorries was approached by former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and told to adopt this ‘Zero Covid’ approach, she told GB News.
The now-Culture Secretary told Dan Wootton, who decided not to dig deeper into the claims:
[Jeremy] said ‘you’ve got to speak to Matt [Hancock]’. It was at the time Nightingale hospitals were being built. ‘You’ve got to tell him that you don’t put sick people in the hospitals, you follow a “Zero Covid” policy… When someone tests positive, you take them from their home and you take them to an isolation centre and you leave them there… That’s the only way you can beat Covid.’
Ms. Dorries said she responded:
‘The British public will not stand for mothers and fathers and families and children being removed from their family and their home and put in isolation.’ He said: ‘Who said they won’t?’ I said: ‘The behaviour and insights team who I’ve discussed this with. They won’t wear it.’
This is very revealing. Anyone with an ounce of humanity would have rejected this outright, whether she thought the public would accept it or not.
Remember, also, that those officials in SAGE believed the British people wouldn’t accept being ‘locked down’ at all until Italy made it clear that they would.
Professor Neil Ferguson told The Times in December 2020:
[China] is a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.
So has Ms. Dorries revealed that the only reason we weren’t pulled away from our families after seeing two red lines was because other Europeans weren’t first?
Michael Curzon is Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, where this article first appeared. Subscribe here.
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