Liz Truss has won the race to become the new leader of the U.K. Conservative Party, and will take office as Britain’s next Prime Minister on Tuesday, replacing current PM Boris Johnson.
During leadership hustings, when asked whether she “would ever authorise another lockdown,” Truss ruled them out: “No, I wouldn’t.” When asked whether she regretted any of her support for lockdowns during her time in government, Truss claimed she’d always been against them: “Every single time I was given the chance to express a view I was on the side of doing less.”
But that’s a stretch. Truss repeatedly urged her constituents to comply with lockdown measures. And in fact, on BBC as late as October 2020, Truss defended the Government’s lockdown measures and chided critics who, as she put it, claimed they “don’t like” the measures without “proposing alternative measures”.
We’ve expanded test and trace and we are working to find a vaccine, but until we have a vaccine we do have to live with this disease, and the measures that we’ve put in place, whilst not measures that we’d want to have to do in normal times, are the best way of dealing with it that we have now. And I notice that none of the critics are proposing alternative measures, they’re simply saying they don’t like the current measures, and what I’m saying to you, Nick, is there’s a group of people saying the measures are too lax, and the others are saying they’re too tough, I think we’re striking the right balance…
Truss later voted in favour of vaccine mandates for health workers, vaccine mandates for care home workers, and the use of vaccine passports for the right to access everyday venues.
The lockdowns of 2020 failed to meaningfully slow the spread of the coronavirus and led to the deaths of countless thousands of young people in every country in which they were tried. While it’s reassuring to know that the new PM has foresworn future lockdowns, it’s deeply unfair to those who were bold enough to fight against those terrible measures from the earliest date – at tremendous personal expense, and despite the onslaught of shaming from those, like Liz Truss, who defended the measures – for Liz Truss to retroactively pretend that she was among them.
The Great Revision continues. Hold on to those receipts.
Michael P. Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. This post first appeared on his Substack page, which you can subscribe to here.
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