The mainstream media has gone into damage control mode over the Telegraph’s ongoing Lockdown Files story. Obviously, not all of the mainstream media, the Telegraph being part of said media, and the Spectator having done a good job too.
But much of the work of honestly analysing the implications of Hancock’s leaked messages has been left to alternative media outlets such as Spiked and, yes, the Daily Sceptic.
Take a look at the Financial Times, for example, and we find an odd piece proclaiming that Matt Hancock is “not so much incompetent as annoying”. True, Hancock comes across so badly in the Lockdown Files that even a puff piece can’t completely exonerate him, but is the takeaway from his many appalling messages really just that he is “annoying”?
This limited acknowledgement of Hancock’s immense folly aside, the article attempts to find some redeeming qualities in the vainglorious ninny:
Hancock’s WhatsApps also show that he persuaded then Prime Minister Boris Johnson not to bring forward the end of lockdown in summer 2020, and to shut schools in January 2021, fearing “a policy car crash when the kids spread the disease”. This has aged much better than, say, Rishi Sunak’s Covid-spreading brainwave of paying people to go to restaurants.
Devi Sridhar in the Guardian goes further, seeing the Files as a justification for her lockdown zealotry, with the main issue being that the Government didn’t act sooner, while another piece in the Observer is titled ‘Anti-lockdowners are out in force, filling a Covid inquiry gap with bogus ideology’.
It claims the Telegraph are “trying to shoehorn the WhatsApp leaks into their own ideological narrative”, thought at least admits that “the story demonstrates one thing beyond question – that it was wrong for the Government to kick the assessment of its Covid record into the long grass by setting up a statutory inquiry that would take years to report”.
Most distasteful has been the attempt to shoot the messenger by attacking Isabel Oakshott’s decision to leak the messages exclusively to the Telegraph, or to release them at all. This issue may be of some interest, but hardly seems the main story. Yet the instinctive reaction of big name journalists has been to try to discredit Oakeshott.
First Nick Robinson grilled Oakshott about how much she was paid for the messages, as if she handed them over in a sports bag at a meeting near the docks. Cathy Newman then did the same regarding Oakeshott’s contract at TalkTV, and Kay Burley asked why Matt Hancock gave the messages to a “lockdown denier”, whatever that is.
Of course, it’s not surprising that journalistic procedure means more to journalists than to the average person, and I also might think twice now before giving Isabel Oakeshott 100,000 of my private messages. But isn’t all this badgering of the witness a crude attempt by the mainstream media to regain control of the narrative? With perhaps an added element of guilt and embarrassment due to their failure to do their jobs at the time, instead choosing to abet the Government in getting its Covid policies to land, however absurd and unrelated to scientific evidence said polices often were.
It is a depressing reminder that the mainstream media will never change, preferring to consolidate the established narrative than to explore the messy truth.
Perhaps more worryingly still, the public don’t seem to have processed the findings of the Lockdown Files at all. A recent poll in the Sunday Times, admittedly from the always questionable YouGov, finds that 37% of people still think the Government wasn’t strict enough, while 34% think it got it “about right”. Only 19% said its handing of the COVID-19 outbreak was “too strict”, despite it now being undeniable that many of the rules were based on nothing but political expediency and cowardice.
So far the Lockdown Files seem to have merely hardened whatever opinion people already held, with sceptics still in the minority. Or at least that is how the MSM and YouGov might spin it. In reality, I suspect many would refuse to comply with lockdowns or similar restrictions in future.
I hope we never have to find out.
Nick Dixon is Deputy Editor of the Daily Sceptic. You can follow him on Twitter and Substack.
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I’m sure there are well meaning people working in “public health” – lots of them perhaps. But I don’t think anything will ever convince me to give my support to any initiative or organization that labelled itself “public health”.
“Public Health” is actually a good thing. In wealthy countries it enabled the eradication of preventable diseases like Malaria. What it is we need to be worried about is the hijacking of bodies and institutions in the pursuit of political agenda’s. In the case of climate that is “Sustainable Development” and “Net Zero”.
It should be good but I have zero confidence that the hijacking you mention can be prevented.
Yes but it is the hijacking that is the problem not the idea of public health. As regards climate all institutions have been hijacked —science, education, all government departments, art, media, and virtually everything else you can think of. So eg we would not say that the arts or education are bad things. Only the hijacking of them is bad.
I think publicly funded bodies that set out to “do good” will get hijacked so the less we have of them, the better.
So you want “less” public schools? “Less” public fire brigades and police? “Less” public hospitals. ———-I am a small government person myself but I think you are rather taking things to extremes.
Bodies are only being hijacked by the progressive left, and it is they we should be attacking, not the actual bodies.
The bare essentials only that the market is not able to provide sensibly/affordably. The NHS is a disaster, but in any case it’s concerned with treating sick people, which isn’t quite the same as “public health”.
“Public Health” gave you vaccinations for everything from Small Pox to TB. ———-But I think we are wasting our time here. We are playing with words. —–Notice I say “we” not you. —–Perhaps we should focus our attack on this parasite new government, because if we both want smaller government that doesn’t interfere in our lives then we now have the very opposite.
Never a waste of time debating with a fellow sceptic. I think we agree on who the enemy are and where we should focus our efforts. If there is ever a winding back from the gigantic state and all of its tentacles, it almost certainly won’t go as far as either of us would like! I guess my point is that the political branch struggles to implement what it purports to want even regarding the most basic and fundamental or services it directly controls never mind all the other do-gooding institutions that it funds. As for vaccines, I don’t know enough to comment. Sanitation and food hygiene I would be ok with but when the state starts wanting to nudge my private health choices I have to say no. Have a good day!
“The Director-General of the World Health Organisation is adamant that this must be his organisation’s priority”…….Bet he isn’t adamant in private, and I bet he also has a private Jet.
Great article, and I have been saying all of those things since about 2007. Climate Change dogma is based on faith and emotion rather than fact and reason. It is a political agenda that requires it’s own facts and makes statements of certainty about things where there are none. It will all the time make claims that are a tiny smidgeon of the truth and will turn that into a planetary emergency. The Malaria scaremongering is typical of this idea that people must be filled with fear in order that they accept the politics masquerading as science. Malaria used to exist in the UK, Holland, USA etc and what wiped it out was good public health enabled by prosperity. It is not a disease of climate yet that is what we are repeatedly told and it all seems plausible because it is told to us as if it is common knowledge with this air of authority because “all scientists agree”. This is FALSE and matters of science are not decided by a show of hands from government funded data adjusters and climate modellers.
A friend said to me one time “Why would governments tell us there is a climate emergency if it isn’t true”? ———This is the crucial question that everyone needs to ask. I asked it in 2007 and what I have found is that Climate Change and its solutions are the biggest pseudo scientific fraud ever perpetrated. ——-My friend asked me that question because he is getting his information from mainstream news who are presenting a particular narrative, and he, like most people think that these news channels (like BBC, SKY News) are doing investigative journalism on this issue and so can be trusted. But once you read books like “Hubris” Michael Hart, —-“Watermelons” James Delingpole, —-“Energy and Climate Wars” Economides and Glover, ——“Taken by Storm” McKitrick and Essex, —–“Climate Uncertainty and Risk” Judith Curry etc etc you realise very quickly there is a completely different story altogether. You may disagree with that other story, but like my friend, how can you disagree with it if you NEVER HEAR IT?
Very true. And the reason why the politically driven “Climate change” is clearly nonsense, is simply its basis on CO2.
The personalities driving this global policy originally needed a scientific term to justify and promote their novel idea and they chose CO2, a gas everyone had heard of but few know very much about.
They forgot, and presumably did not know at the time, that human beings are simple animals which require oxygen to breathe, whereby we convert some of that oxygen into CO2 as part of the biological process of life.
In fact, we all exhale 100 times as much CO2 as we inhale: simply put, we are all CO2 generators – with every breath we breathe.
So, using CO2 as the basis for all evil is idiotic and requires the extinction of all animal life, not just human life.
And then one can discuss the logarithmic relationship between CO2 and its greenhouse effect, or the research showing CO2 at high atmospheric levels has a cooling effect, or the far greater effect of water vapour on the climate (the public would never have accepted water being the source of all evil), and so on and so forth.
Leave the climate alone! We are far too stupid to fully understand its workings and we are frighteningly arrogant if we believe we can control it.
Finally, to your list of authors, I suggest you add Patrick Moore (ex Greenpeace), Ian Plimer and Gregory Wrightstone.
Yes but we can argue about science all day. We can talk about feedback loops, logarithmic rather than linear effects, climate sensitivity to CO2, models full of speculations regarding a myriad of parameters etc etc but we are mostly wasting our time because this issue isn’t and never was about science in the first place. The science is just the excuse for the policies.
I am just trying to find ways to open people’s eyes to the obvious. We are animals, therefore we exhale CO2, therefore CO2 cannot be harmful.
Having said/written that, I have not been able to convince people with science PhDs! Very frustrating!