As Rishi Sunak prepares to become U.K. Prime Minister after all his opponents dropped out, it’s worth recalling what he said during the leadership race in the summer about lockdowns. As part of his leadership pitch to Tory Party members he boasted that he was responsible for stopping lockdown in December 2021 when he cut short an overseas trip and flew back to London to intervene.
In an interview with Andrew Marr on LBC, the pandemic-era Chancellor said he rushed back to “stop us sleepwalking into a national lockdown”.
We were hours away from a press conference that was going to lock this country down again because of Omicron. And I came back and fought very hard against the system, because I believe that would be the wrong thing for this country, with all the damage it would have done to businesses, to children’s education, to people’s lives.
I noted at the time it was the first time a leading U.K. politician, whether Government or opposition, had implied that opposition to lockdown was a reason to vote for him, and this seemed indicative of a major shift in public opinion about Covid restrictions. The fact that he felt no fear about trumpeting his anti-lockdown stance and saw no need to couch it in careful language about taking the virus seriously marked a big shift from the pandemic era when lockdown scepticism was often beyond the pale. Even more striking was that Marr didn’t bother to challenge him on any of it, despite alarmist calls at the time from the editors of the BMJ and HSJ, among others, for restrictions to be urgently reintroduced.
Will Sunak remain sceptical of lockdowns and put this scepticism into practice when faced with a new surge in infections and hospitalisations, or indeed when pressured to sign the U.K. up to international pandemic agreements? That remains to be seen. The fact that he was one of the quad of four ministers who made all the awful major pandemic decisions is not exactly encouraging – though he now claims to have been a frustrated sceptic trying to bring another point of view to the table. His Eat Out to Help Out scheme in summer 2020 to try to get the economy moving and people meeting again may be an indication of his genuine anti-restriction instincts – if also of his willingness to splash the (borrowed and printed) cash. The fact that he now has the impossible job of clearing up the inflationary mess created by his own fiscal and monetary incontinence does perhaps have some justice about it, though is also obviously perverse: “Yes I made the mess, but don’t worry, I’m the one you can trust to clear it up!”
A number of sceptics are concerned about his links with the World Economic Forum. To me, he comes across as someone who is generally sceptically and practically minded but also prone to going along with elite groupthink. This is also seen in his attitude to Net Zero. Rumours of his Net Zero scepticism have often swirled, the Telegraph notes, but in public he has not disputed the target. During the leadership contest he pledged to make the U.K. energy independent by 2045, saying: “We need more offshore wind, more rooftop solar and more nuclear. We need to insulate millions of homes and ensure that people know about the steps that they can take, at no cost, to improve the efficiency of their homes.” He pledged to streamline planning and licensing rules for green energy to help achieve that goal – so more unsightly, land-hungry renewable developments people don’t want. He also told the COP26 climate conference in 2021 he would make the U.K. the “world’s first Net Zero financial centre”. What role any scepticism about Net Zero or lockdowns will play in his tenure at the head of Government is anyone’s guess. It will be worth watching closely to see if any can be detected, or if he will slip seamlessly into becoming as much an evangelical preacher of the new fashionable causes as his former boss.
Here is what he said to Andrew Marr on lockdowns in full.
I’ll tell you what I was doing in December, though, because I still remember it quite vividly. You know what I did in December was fly back from a Government trip I was on overseas and I flew back to this country to stop us sleepwalking into a national lockdown. Because we were hours away from a press conference that was going to lock this country down again because of Omicron. And I came back and fought very hard against the system, because I believe that would be the wrong thing for this country, with all the damage it would have done to businesses, to children’s education, to people’s lives.
That’s really important in December Andrew because we were hours away, we were hours away from a national lockdown, but I came back and challenged the system, and said this is not right and we don’t need to do this and I’m glad I won the argument. But it should give people some confidence that in the same way I stood up for Brexit, in the same way I did that, I am prepared to push hard and fight for the things that I believe in even when that’s difficult.
Watch it here.
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Two things worry me about Covid responses around the world:
1). How can there be so many different ones, for a single ‘real’ disease?
2). Doesn’t Covid-treatment and policy relativism really mean total epistemological anarchism in ALL science and medicine from now on?
In other words, anything goes. Science and medicine are hopelessly politicised and relativised. And that’s scary if YOU have an objectively real disease that needs curing.
Yup. If it’s taken too far it’s the death of science. Science will stop delivering benefits, bridges will collapse, aeroplanes will fall out of the sky. A second dark age.
You don’t think you’re making the word “science” do too much work in those sentences?
When was the golden age of science, in your view? 1600? The 1920s when scientific “research” first got organised in a big way (by DuPont the chemical company)? In 2019 just before the Covid lies took off? Or it’s still to come maybe, with the internet of things and artificial “intelligence” etc.?
Well the “science” died a while ago with the great global warming fraud.
Now just follow the money – that’s science.
When was the heyday of non-money science?
I don’t know enough about the history of science, but it seems much more politicized than it used to be in my living memory.
It’s fine to hold tongue-in-cheek epistemological anarchism like Feyerabend; in other words to believe that in medieval times, trepanning really did work (or why did they keep doing it?), or native American medicine really did cure cancer (perhaps God is a relativist and allowed past techniques to work – in the past?); but to do so in earnest today would surely be Wokery madness biting too close to the bone…
Or people believing covid vaccines work..
….and fairies live at the bottom of every garden!
The corrupt Globalist Billionaires and the Pharma Companies have killed objective science – politicians stood and watched.
“The Science” seems to adapt to how each populace can/has to be controlled. Give it a few weeks and this whole pack of cards is going to fall. Wall St are dumping Pharma stocks – they know the FDA hid clinical trial data.
Search for video’s with “Edward Dowd”, he’s been looking into Life Insurers 4Q reports.
A cynical person might conclude that there is a giant, worldwide experiment going on. But, of course, as I have been told numerous times, “do you really think that governments get together to discuss plans and decide policies?” . No, they just meet up every few months to swap family photos and talk about how the roses are getting on in the garden at home, and how well the grandkids are doing at school.
Only diseases that can make money for Pharma will be ‘cured’. How do we imagine they are going to reduce population by the crazy numbers they want to see? Gates talks of a 15 % reduction – that’s 1 billion just for starters.
( Leave out the Chinese because with an ageing population they want to se an increase in birthrate!)
Why do people still get tested in HK if it means 3 weeks of lockup in a hospital, despite probably having nothing wrong with their health, or, at worst, having a mild cold? Are many forced to get tested or what? Or are they naive, trusting of the authorities, and selfish? There’s got to be a reason.
It’s close to China. They probably can’t get away with farting without a fine.
A reason? Chinese heavy policing perhaps ?
If Hong Kong has a crisis, then it is because Hong kong wants a crisis. Utter madness.
Toby,
Please get on to the Canadian situation. It has gone beyond crazy.
The Canadian government says it’s considering sending even more soldiers to Latvia – to defend Ukraine’s “right” to have US NATO bases – but it can’t control the streets in Ottawa. All mouth and no trousers?
Custer’s Last Stand? Freedom’s last stand?
Comical. Explains why the pictures showed them on their trollies smothered in masks – obviously because there was very little wrong with them and they certainly weren’t struggling to breathe.
It’s not easy seeing the world gripped by insanity. We just haven’t been brought up to believe that most of the people around us could go mad.
They are trapped in the idea that they have to have zero covid cases and are incapable of seeing their lunacy.
I still don’t believe in this photo-op crisis. The orginal statement was that some hospitals were operating at more than 100% capacity. Technically, that’s nonsense as nothing can operate at more than 100% capacity. Hence, it really means some hospitals are treating more patients than someone believed they would ever treat. Note the some here. This means less than all and also, less than most and one could presumably replace it with
a few.
I’m no expert but I think this is the first piece I’ve read that seems totally genuine, not quite what I was expecting. Reading between the lines, this person is acknowledging that they (not the individual) have been duped but are too proud to admit it. I believe we can all understand that, which is an unfortunate character trait of those in power. It would take a brave person to admit being taken in by this farce. The only saving grace would be, being the first nation to publicly announce that the spell has finally been broken and the covid-19 farce demolished. Read between the lines.
There is a sickness……and it’s not “Covid”.
It’s not the vaccines that were administered to the vast majority of adults in the world; it’s those Stupid Pills someone slipped into the water supply … They apparently were “75 percent effective.”
See Canada and NZ for a particularly nasty and life damaging outbreak among the manic political class!
But…but.. I thought the far east countries were the clever ones, the ones who had learned from the experience of the first SARS, had learned the valuable lessons and so were the ones who were the example of how to manage the COVID crisis?
I’m literally wetting myself with laughter seeing how these zero covid idiots are going to get themselves out of the hole they’ve dug themselves into.
UK Column News showed a clip today of some sort of honey trap where some executive from the CDC was discussing rolling out the new Covid jabs for kids and admitting that the safety trials should be longer. He also mentioned that we’re not going to announce anything yet because we don’t want to get people too agitated. That sounds a bit like last summer in UK when vaccines minister said, ‘we have no intention of introducing vax passes, they’re not the British way, also hand job also said the jab it not going to be rolled out to children.
Is all of this stuff I read at the Daily Skeptic really happening?
Did the world ever really go through any kind of Enlightenment?
Absolutely nothing to do with China.
Everything to do with the chinks IMO
I’ve been in hospital in HKG. Old system. Brilliant efficient setup. Then the communists got their hands on it.
‘but test positive, you can look forward to an enforced stay in a hotel room …with no windows that open…’
I thought the advice was to fling the windows open, freezing half to death – or has that changed now? Is that only if granny is in the room?
In response to the previous article (asking the question about why hospitals are seeing so many cases), I commented that it was perhaps because a lot of them weren’t actually ill. Looks like I was right.
Yes and why do readers have to provide the obvious answer rather than the journalists constantly asking questions which have such obvious answers?
Medical Phoney War against the people of Hong Kong – part of the Globalist campaign to weaponise ‘health’ against the global population sponsored by Gates’ “World Health” agenda, the WHO the WEF and the UN.
Population control through making people sick, using that as an excuse to control and inject them to make them sicker and then and providing ung the ‘experimentl’ cure to the obedient. What an earner for Big Pharma!
It seems the planned ‘New World Order’ NHS is destined to play a big part in this policy!
Wait until the British public find out! The cynical would say you can’t beat them, so join them and buy Pharma shares!
It’s certainly not the wonderful, free-wheeling place I recall from living there in the early 1970s. More’s the pity. Wonder if it’s got anything to do with the new landlords?