The Telegraph‘s Robert Taylor has written an excellent comment piece with which readers of the Daily Sceptic (and our previous incarnation Lockdown Sceptics) will readily identify, entitled: “Bravo to the lockdown sceptics, who were smeared and dismissed for daring to defend freedom.” Responding to lockdown-Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s comments in the Spectator that he was a lonely voice in Cabinet challenging the groupthink and Sageocracy that Boris had allowed to take hold, Taylor writes of his relief to learn that “one of the most senior members of Government during that whole lockdown business has finally admitted that the strategy was overdone, badly handled and badly communicated”.
I had to do a double take when I saw the reports. For those long lockdown months, nobody in government, let alone the Cabinet, was prepared to say any such thing. It was left to a few courageous journalists and scientists to take on the overwhelming force of the lockdown fanatics, with police fining people for sitting on park benches and neighbours eagerly shopping each other like this was some authoritarian country.
The brave few kept the flag of personal freedom alive. That really is no exaggeration. And they paid heavily for it. On social media the abuse was intense. You don’t care about lives! they snarled. You’re murderers! they claimed. And in the mainstream, things weren’t much better. You’re a “small, disproportionately influential faction,” moaned a Guardian Leader, that “denies the virulence of the virus”. Thanks for that.
One MP, Neil O’Brien, took it upon himself to publicly discredit any sceptic, declaring “they have a hell of a lot to answer for”. No, you do Mr O’Brien, for stifling free debate, along with certain mainstream news outlets for failing over a two-year period to examine whether lockdown might cause more harm than good.
Yes, it was lonely. But now the man who was responsible for running the nation’s finances belatedly tells us that we were not alone. He now tells us it was wrong to empower scientists to such a degree; wrong to allow Sage such sway over policy; wrong not to consider the long-term impact of lockdown on people’s health and wellbeing; wrong not to discuss the inevitable huge delays to cancer, heart disease and diabetes diagnoses; wrong to close schools; and wrong to instill such fear.
That’s what some of us have been saying all along, and copping a pile of abuse for our troubles. Sunak even tells us that he was prevented from discussing his doubts, and that when he tried to do so he was met with a brick wall of silence.
Worth reading in full.
Nonetheless, Sunak still won’t say it was a mistake to lock down, showing that even the most sceptical of those in power at the time struggle to admit the enormity of what they did and apologise for it. But it’s good to hear more scepticism from those who were in Government at the time, and also a clear statement that the way decisions were made and the way debate both internally and externally was censored was harmful and wrong. Yet debate is still routinely being censored on social media, showing the problem is still with us.
I also somehow doubt Neil O’Brien “took it upon himself” – given how unusual it is for MPs to engage in attacks on respected scientists like Oxford’s Professor Sunetra Gupta, at the Daily Sceptic we have long suspected he was put up to Project Smear by certain members of the Government.
Stop Press: Not surprisingly, Sunak’s Spectator interview has prompted a backlash from lockdown-fanatical former Downing Street employees.
‘Mad Monk’ and ex-Boris right-hand man Dominic Cummings claimed on Twitter the interview is “dangerous rubbish” and “reads like a man whose epicly bad campaign has melted his brain and he’s about to quit politics”.
The Sunak interview is dangerous rubbish, reads like a man whose epicly bad campaign has melted his brain & he’s about to quit politics. Also pins blame *unfairly* on
— Dominic Cummings (@Dominic2306) August 25, 2022& others. Will blog laterhttps://t.co/PG0YLZq5cZ
Meanwhile, Lee Cain, then-Downing Street Head of Communications, tweeted:
Huge admirer of Rishi Sunak but his position on lockdown is simply wrong. It would have been morally irresponsible of the govt not to implement lockdown in spring 2020 – the failure to do so would have killed tens-of-thousands of people who survived Covid. In addition, without lockdown the NHS simply could not have survived and would have been overwhelmed. This would have seen an even greater backlog of excess deaths for missed cancer appointments etc.
Looks like lockdown orthodoxy is alive and well among its U.K. architects, who still believe it saved lives and the NHS would have been ‘overwhelmed’ without it – as though Sweden doesn’t exist, infections weren’t already falling ahead of the lockdown, and Covid then conveniently disappeared and left anyone who avoided it in spring 2020 alone and undisturbed for the rest of their lives.
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Soon everything will look like TV ads where there are 40% more black people than there are actually in the country.
It is true, your figure is probably conservative. One is told that* the only ads featuring all-white actors are for funeral~cremation services, suicide support, life insurance and equity release programming.
*One watches no MSM.
The propaganda isn’t even subliminal anymore. It is right in your face manipulation.
Not to forget the “game” shows jammed with everything but straight white (majority) ethnic Brits.
Don’t forget Antiques Roadshow.
Always, always, in the background, in camera shot…
Have you read about the new M&S show?
I shall be giving it a miss.
Strangely there are very few black women apart from in clothing adverts. Plenty of capable black men though and always married to a white blonde woman. No white men married to black women and white men are always useless.
Actually even in real life it’s usually a white woman partnered with a man who is black, in my experience, but not every time. But I’ve noticed what you observe on TV and other ads too. Although over here in the Netherlands you do tend to see white men with females of other ethnicities, such as Malaysian-looking.
But I’m still waiting to hear from the resident misogynists ( and their female supporters, apparently ) on who is responsible for this so-called “feminization of the nation” that they keep harping on about. They never seem particularly forthcoming in providing evidence to support their accusations and assertions. Apparently we’re all meant to just go along with that and accept that women are the villains of the piece, despite all evidence to the contrary demonstrating men are the ones calling the shots in most senior positions across all sectors, and no further questions or challenges are tolerated.
Possibly because to acknowledge the elephant in the room would be too jarring for them to cope with: that if there actually is such a thing as “feminization of the nation” to blame for the decimation of society then it’s evidently being ( inc the origins from the past, e.g Rockefeller, Kissinger, Club of Rome etc ) orchestrated, for the most part, by men.
“Prove me wrong”, as they say.
calm down dear!
Had a feeling you’d pop up.
Empty-handed, naturally…
Misandrist.
Feel free to provide some evidence to back that up, but as I’ve been waiting 3 years for one of my other long-time haters to provide some for the very same unsubstantiated accusation I think I shan’t hold my breath.
It pleases me to know i obviously trigger you and your ilk, though. Get used to it.
Or is “misandrist” to you basically any woman that has no qualms about calling out the bullshittery of blatant misogynists on here?
I’ll wait.
I think you mean the 3% that there actually are, are represented as being about 97%.
What is remarkable is Asians, approximately 12%, are hardly represented at all in TV ads, but it seems they are classified as White or ‘White-adjacent’ so they don’t count as ‘diversity’.
Soon? I think we’ve been there for a good while within the media and advertising industry…
Interesting that a woman in charge of recruitment resigned due to her ( quite rightly ) disagreeing with and opposing this idiotic, discriminatory and potentially dangerous policy. So who’s in charge at the RAF then, who should have overall responsibility when it comes to the running of their organization? That’d be a man named Rich Knighton.
https://www.raf.mod.uk/our-organisation/senior-commanders/
So who’s in charge over at the MoD, who has ”overall responsibility for the department”? That’d be a man called John Healey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Defence_(United_Kingdom)
So we have white men in charge who are actively discriminating against white men, but none of that matters because of the alleged ”feminisation of society”?
Make it make sense!
It is unwise these days to assume ‘Lizzy’ is a woman.
Well done to Matthew Coverley for courageously exposing and challenging this outrageous policy.
Imagine the Chinese Air Force rejecting experienced Ethnic Chinese pilots in favour of Ethnic Africans and Ethnic Indian Subcontinentals, for example!
LBC presenter wants to shut down the internet:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nbw1N29cEw
More accurately depicted as the DIE Programming, as all that falls in its path does not survive.
‘Civvies in uniform’
I took the ‘Queen’s shilling’ in 1969 and left in ’86. As aircrew I can state from experience of the flying world, that I didn’t meet one person of colour who was either a pilot or navigator. I met a handful of such folk who were corporal stewards on VC10s. There were no female pilots or navigators either. Group Captain Nicholl’s principled resignation was a cri de coeur for common sense.