As my beleaguered teaching colleagues and I try to get our school communities into the swing of things once again this new academic year, I find myself to be merely, powerlessly wishing that no more grotesque permutations of the Covid Madness return for a third consecutive winter. ‘Home-learning’ in particular was, of course, disastrous for children in a myriad of ways. On a purely practical level, it was fairly tricky for the teachers too, so I do believe that most of the profession hopes to avoid the insidious perfidy of forced absences or outright closures. Granted, I would prefer my colleagues to be motivated in these desires by an understanding of the abhorrent, casual neglect of children’s fundamental needs over which we were forced to preside for two years. But I’ll have to be content if the Department for Education will just let us stay open.
Belatedly, conventional wisdom has it that Covid doesn’t tend to seriously affect the school-aged population. Perhaps if the undistorted version of that truism was more widely accepted – that Covid doesn’t tend to seriously affect the healthy population – some teachers (and their unions) might find that their selfish and flawed but unending clamour for ‘more to be done’ lost its sympathisers.
It’s been a typically warm and sunny September thus far, but a small number of our students remain curiously attached to their face-coverings, sporting them lesson in, lesson out, as I look on aghast but unable to order their removal. The so-called harmless, cost-free non-pharmaceutical intervention continues to wreak its harms.
For those of us who have, by now, long fought Covid restrictions, it might feel like a further, renewed battle this Autumn to see off the prospect of the Return of the Madness. After all the hammer-blows of Spring 2020, we ordered our thoughts, picked our battles, identified our sacrifices, practised our polemics, marshalled our arguments and, eventually, took to the fray. For many of us with little or no previous experience in politicking, we may even have learnt some tricks about the art of discourse and debate along the way.
I am not referring here to my professional life of course. In my professional life I am – quite rightly – not permitted to express my personal or political ideologies or opinions to students. No good and proper teacher would dream of doing so – unless of course you suddenly, naively found that your beliefs fell in line with the government propaganda of the day. If you happened to support the mantra “Hands, Face, Space”, you could plaster it across every TV screen and vacant stretch of wall in the whole place. If you were minded to promote social distancing, or face coverings, or bubbles, or ‘don’t kill granny’, or healthy 12 year-olds giving their own consent to being tested for Covid before entering the building, or any other similar paean to the dreaded virus – exhort it from the corridors, folks! If you were an Assistant Head, you might even have the surprising chutzpah to lead a series of science-themed assemblies (to 1,200 impressionable young minds) in which you vaingloriously celebrated the disingenuous and risible proposition that Professor Sarah Gilbert’s AstraZeneca vaccine “saved 2 billion lives”.
No – when I refer to my endeavouring anew to muster awareness of the risk of restrictions this winter, I’m talking about in my personal life, away from school.
There is a danger for those of us who have resisted the mainstream Covid narrative for two-and-a-half years that we forget quite how completely and devastatingly uninterested the compliant majority are in our version of events. Many may have shifted their positions slightly, faced with ever more piles of evidence (from their own preferred sources) of the damage needlessly done. Surely, it would be hard to find someone who would embrace it all quite so gleefully all over again.
But the big arguments are not won; the wider population are still just not listening. Family members try to gently talk us down; friends tactlessly avoid the subject altogether or just silently disappear from view; some colleagues regard me warily and with increasing wryness as a bit of a crank. They all seem to manage to tell themselves that none of it really affects them and, with a special kind of inward-looking perspective, I suppose they can make that be true.
So we keep talking and waiting and wondering where the socially palatable prima facie evidence to incontrovertibly back us up and help us definitively put a stop to all this might come from. I continue to posit theories, based on my understanding of basic principles of human decency and common sense. Anecdotes, ideas and experiences should be part of our arguments and, after all, when that single piece of elusive, critical, confirmatory data lands – why should anybody ever believe what any expert says these days anyway?
Some older adults – I overhear them in crowded cafes – are delightedly and obediently getting in line for their fifth (count ‘em!) Covid jab, and some disconcerting individuals in the High Street and park remain devotedly wedded to their face-covering. They don’t seem one bit ashamed or embarrassed by the many peculiar and ridiculous things their Government forced them to do for a good while there. Is that just it for them? Over and Out, Shut Up, Move On. Are these things, this history, these awful, ungodly consequences we’re all living with, just a permanent feature of the rest of their lives, no questions asked?
There are certainly those who seemed to revel in the whole drama of it all, those who still reel performatively, sanctimoniously backwards in doorways when you dare to step near; those who complied without thought and still appear blissfully ignorant of any possibility of error or mishap or downside and who probably watch too much TV; those who spewed the new terminologies of their epoch with uneasy, faltering confidence: ‘flatten the curve’, ‘viral load’, ‘third wave’, and – my personal favourite – ‘asymptomatic’.
Is it possible that this merry, obstinate lot are the very same people who seem in recent times also to be lurching emptily but enthusiastically from one cause to another? ‘Stay Safe everyone!’ ‘Respect this virus!’, bang a kitchen pan and ‘Save the NHS!’, erect a flag and ‘Stand with Ukraine!’, buy some frozen Chicken Kievs, close everything when it’s hot and etcetera and blah, ad infinitum.
Could it be that the common thread which connects all the headline-followers, the unquestioning, the frighteningly readily compliant, is a lack of something raw, true, local, deep and meaningful in their lives? Might there be a link between the modern world’s malaise, the tragic lack of connection and community, and a very public hankering after connection and community? You don’t know your neighbour, you’re not invested in your town, you couldn’t possibly overcome the awkwardness involved in helping the elderly lady down the road – why not get your phone out instead to prove how good you are at Joining In and Helping Out?
If people don’t have a potentially perilous stake in something close, precious and valuable, or anything at all to believe in which reaches them viscerally, it seems as though they might just keep scrambling around, somewhat manically and pathetically, for Another Good Cause to get behind.
And if I’m right about all of that, then the solution to the real Covid problem lies with people and professionals who don’t know they’ve got a problem.
Get a life. Get a community. Get some meaning. And do not force a single school kid to stay at home again this year.
Fraser Krats is a secondary school teacher.
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Invasion of the technocrats.
A macro version of cancelling local elections.
I suspect the French people won’t tolerate it.
‘Saving Democracy’. There might be a pattern here, but I am too stupid to see it.
Shows how much conviction they have in their arguments doesn’t it, that they feel the need to remove any opposition…
According to Mike Benz the “elites” have said we have to redefine democracy from being the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of “democratic institutions” – meaning US – the military, NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, the MSM, the NGOs….
His interview a year ago with Tucker Carlson is a revelation of how the current state of censorship evolved to what it has become today:
https://rumble.com/v4e8hof-tucker-carlson-on-x-episode-75-mike-benz-on-the-national-security-state.html
In order to save democracy, we have to burn democracy…Paraphrasing from ‘the village’.
I’ve no idea whether she is guilty of what she’s been convicted for and don’t much care. I think this is probably a good thing on the whole as it makes it more obvious to more people what’s going on.
Nice to see the Telegraph getting in a holier than thou dig at the apparently “toxic” brand of RN.
You could probably find embezzlement in every party at some point. Even on the BBC someone pointed out that it’s probably money for the party rather that for personal gain, like BLM.
SNP got away with it so why is RN considered so bad?
Just a cockup/coincidence
Through an unfortunate turn of events, I had to listen to the BBC’s brand of news this morning. They described RN as “Hard Right”. It made me think how, decades ago, parties would be described as “on the left” or “on the right”, leaving room for distinction between the mainstream parties and the extremists. Nowadays, the main broadcast media never talk about parties that are right of centre without feeling the need to add the adjectives “hard”, “far” or “extreme”. Even if they occupy the space left by the former Conservative party.
Something similar is true of many Wikipedia entries. TV stations, newspapers, journalists on the political left are never described as such – the distinction is only made for anyone on the “right”. The message is – there are reasonable people who can reasonably disagree within reason – and then there is the “right wing”.
And nobody defines Hard or Far or Extreme Right. These are epithets are used to imply Fascist or Nazi.
F A Hayek: Socialism, Fascism, National Socialism all share the same roots – elevation of the State over the individual; central economic planning and control.
That being so… hands up Starmer, Macron, whatever fool is now running Germany which of you is not Hard/Far/Extreme Right. And evidently Stalin and Mao were.
Based on previous prosecutions of French Presidents, corruption appears to be a requirement of the Office.
Romania, Germany, France – The Dark Hand of the Left descends across Europe.
Watch your back, Nigel.
As for Nigel, I think his attitude is, if you can’t beat them, join them. This is also similar to what happened to Imran Kahn, as soon as he had a meeting with Putin, he was removed.
Didn’t they try this on Farage already? I seem to remember an investigation or threatened investigation about misuse of EU funds.
This is the same EU which has never been able to get auditors to sign off on its accounts.
Still haven’t heard anymore of VDLs TXT messages to Albert Bourla. I remember that Romanian MEP holding blacked out documents, where is the justice!
If they don’t get them through the voters, they get them through the courts.
Shocking, not shocked.
Wow.
I’m stunned. I shouldn’t be. But I am.
I just thought that appearing to be too brazen would hold these people back.
Romania is one thing. But France? Really?
Clearly they no longer worry about appearances, so I’m not sure there is very much left to protect us from this horrid techno totalitarianism that reigns supreme in Europe now.
What might save us is exactly that brazenness. Overreach.
Maybe. Hopefully.
You’d think that tyranny eventually gets found out. And generally it does. But not always. The North Korea example freaks me out.
Well, North Korea has not been going that long, in relation to human history. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed. Communist China have cleverly allowed a mixed economy, to deliver the goods that keep people happy. But unpleasant if you have to live through it.
I don’t like those timescales. It’s hard for me to get enthusiastic about things that might happen after I’m long gone.
I don’t like them either, for the same reason. Meanwhile we keep buggering on as best we can.
Rona was about as brazen as it gets (utter lie, scamdemic, murder, destruction etc).
Micron et al will preach about their ‘thriving democracy’, where you put your enemies in jail or kill them.
They could declare a one party state and convince most of the sheeple that the dictatorship was a ‘thriving democracy’.
I wonder what they will do to Le Pen when she is in prison? Epsteined?
“Rona was about as brazen as it gets (utter lie, scamdemic, murder, destruction etc).”
I am still gobsmacked that they got away with it.
TCW — Germany’s mad rush to conscription’
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/germanys-mad-rush-to-conscription/
Obvious, I know. Still funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0dWo31hwpI
Thanks for posting that – yes still funny (and aren’t they skinny?)
Put a new RN candidate on the ballot (doesn’t matter who) and have Marine Le Pen stand behind them, silently, for every public appearance. And if the Powers That Be take further action against her then…
On GBN coverage of it all, the point was made that the appeal process is so sclerotic that she is, in effect, not capable of being a candidate at the next election, whatever the outcome of the appeal. So they will need another candidate – at least a physical one, if there is someone capable of taking over.
The process is the punishment
Fair point from Paul Weston, highlighting the corruption that is the EU and who the real crooks are. However, despite you guys no longer being part of the EU, we’ve seen what passes for ‘democracy’ these past years in the UK. This here makes me even less hopeful Reform will win the next election, in-fighting aside, because even if they are the front-runners leading up to the election, I don’t think they will be *allowed* to win. You just know some sort of shady shenanigans will go down nearer the time. I think polls can give a false perception and it’s rarely as black and white as whoever has the most votes wins.
”Barred from standing in the election. Fined, and jailed for two years (house arrest). Her crime? Threatening to win the French Election. This is Ursula von der Leyen’s dictatorship in action. And our Ursula is currently under investigation for real corruption, unlike the Lavrentiy Beria Lawfare waged against Le Pen. For those who don’t know, von der Leyen made an awful lot of money buying billions of euros worth of Covid-19 vaccines directly from Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla via SMS messages on her phone…. which she has now lost….”
https://x.com/PWestoff/status/1906692905177158074
When all else fails…
So now unaccountable Bureaucrats in the EU, using their provisional arm in the Judiciary, have decided that they have the authority to decide who may become a politician and be elected.
All those in UKIP pre 2016 who pointed out that there is nothing democratic about the EU are being completely vindicated.
I’ll be surprised if the French quietly put up with this despotism.
Governments and other powerful interests have been using a form of lawfare forever in the form of financial costs. Those with the deepest pockets get the best judicial outcomes. This is changing a bit where nefarious charges are brought against political opponents. The whole concept of a balanced and fair judiciary has always been questionable. It is just more overt now. This is openly revolutionary.
You have hit the nail squarely on the head! It is the Judiciary everywhere that is causing all the problems, either by giving a veneer of legitimacy to dictators trampling upon democracy, or by becoming dictatorial themselves, using “Judicial Overreach” and “Legislating from the Bench”, like that Communist Oaf de Moraes in Brazil.
All part of the Globalist dream of establishing a Global Kritocracy = Rule by Judges.
Le Pen should seek political asylum in the UK or USA and wage political war against Macron’s dictatorship.
I wish Navalny had done that, instead of walking straight into the jaws of the Lamprey Putin, now busy grinding up Slavs in the Meatgrinder War along with his secret friend the Lamprey Zelensky. Both of them happily massacring White Men in open genocide, trying to reduce the 7% down to 5% even faster.
Both Lampreys should be arrested and charged with Crimes Against Humanity.