Watching the new intake of MPs file into the House of Commons in 1918, Stanley Baldwin is said to have remarked that they were “a lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war”.
Who were they? During the Great War Britain could not trade with the Central Powers; nor could sprawling imperial supply chains be relied on. The shortages, and the need to fill them, had created a new class of seamy and unscrupulous businessmen – mostly drawn from the lower ranks of pre-war industry.
Stanley Baldwin was dismayed at this. But he wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t hard to imagine that total war might lead to a coarsening of national life. The willed collapse of international trade, the controls on commerce, the controls on information – these were hothouse conditions for the spiv and the sneak. It had even produced a political analogue: David Lloyd George, who sold slap-up honours at marked up prices. National emergency; national oligarchy. The two were more or less inextricable. Baldwin could grasp that this was the unavoidable side-effect of a war that he had supported.
This is an insight too far for the Britain of 2023. One feature of a politically immature society is that it blames national problems on the ill will or incompetence of individuals, rather than the systems they inhabit. Remove these individuals, they think, and the system will work. So it is with Britain’s Covid Inquiry which turns on the doings and undoings of a handful of people. Who knew what and when? Who was acting under what advice? Who approved certain contracts – and why?
Fundamentally, these are people who refuse to accept the inevitable side-effects of their own project. Faced with the terrible consequences of the policy of lockdown, they cast about for individuals to blame, for “wreckers”.
Take procurement. The Covid spivs – those who cashed in on lockdown contracts drawn up in a hurry – are not an appealing bunch. They are an indeterminate mass of Wonga loaners, actor-managers, fintech frauds, heat pumpers, ad men, Comms men, ESG gurus; the flotsam and jetsam of the Chipping Norton set. Their spiritual chief is not Lloyd George, but Matt Hancock. Like the Great War profiteers, their rise was eminently predictable. During lockdown, the vast majority of companies in Britain were prevented by law from operating normally. Only the fiat of Whitehall could designate a sector as ‘essential’; this depended on access to power, not on producing anything that people wanted to buy. The world of lockdown was practically designed to operate on the backslap; it did. You cannot have a lockdown without creating the Alex Bourne’s to match.
Still, the Inquiry is likely to stay focused on the old charge of corrupt and inept politicians – always an authoritarian slogan. Nor does the rough contempt for civilian Government stop there. In the Inquiry’s hunt for wreckers, elected politicians are the only fair game. Scant little has been said about Chris Whitty, or SAGE, let alone Independent SAGE, its wild Ultra cousin. This comes as something of a surprise. During lockdown, established Britain could agree that the elected Government did not have any particular right to disagree with these people. They exercised power at every level, and kept up a direct line with the news media. There’s Chris Whitty in the WhatsApp groups, acting the part of the pained parent – a vain conceit. It is only now we are told that these people are, in fact, humble public servants who play no part in frontline politics. This idiom, the idiom of bureaucratic twee, has always been self-serving. But it is utterly pervasive, even among the politicians themselves. Official inquiries – mysteriously – always happen to shore up established opinion. This one will prove no exception.
The Covid Inquiry, then, is not an empirical exercise – but a political one; perhaps even a therapeutic one. It hopes to rebrand lockdown as a noble cause, led astray by guilty men. In this way it seeks to revive the moral case for restrictions, and, still more, the moral case for the civil service. In the end, it is not a chance for catharsis, but a classic case of power petitioning itself.
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The “outbreak of an unusual Asian disease” scenario on p21 of the Behavioural Government document highlights how politicians can be manipulated. Until we have politicians who show some resolve, we should look past them for the decision makers who also need to be held accountable.
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/BIT%20Behavioural%20Government%20Report.pdf
The Covid Inquiry was set up:
1) in order to kick the issue of Covid restrictions beyond the next General Election
2) to ensure that the main characters responsible for wrecking the economy and ruining millions of lives were long gone when it finally reports back
3) to justify the suspension of our Civil Liberties and Human Rights – and to retain the policy for future use
The one thing it most definitely isn’t intended to do is report honestly and fairly on the appalling consequences of the tyranny.
It’s not us you need to convince, it is the General Public. But they have moved on and do not wish to be told they were duped. There are doubtless some lines of argument which will make some of them wake up, but in general I think it will just take decades for the correct understanding of what happened to become mainstream, and even then I am not convinced. The modern fashion for the necessity to appear “nice” may mean that the collective delusion will last centuries.
Absolutely talking to friends and ex colleagues about anything “convid” is well… heads and brick walls they either don’t get it still or as you say don’t want to know. When they look at me all they see is the imaginary tin foil hat. Hopeless I’m sorry to say.
A giggling Matt Hancock! Oh wouldn’t you love to punch that pathetic little ugly scrawny face through the back of his head? Less of a real man you could not make up!
When I was younger friends and I used to joke about whose head we would most love to shove through a plate glass window. My favourite was Ester Rantzen. M Handcock replaced her some years ago.
Good article. Thanks for stating it in such direct terms. Our entire system is rotten. Boris the Mammary shaker said as much in another article on this site. We are ruled by corrupts and criminals. Stanley Baldwin knew this. 100 years later it is 10-100x worse.
“Mammary shaker”
brilliant mate!
My reaction to this article is: No shit, Sherlock. Keep going, coz there’s a lot more. You’re barely scratching the surface.
My conclusion after this whole fiasco is that we need a new political system.
Away from global and supranational organisations. These never work for the individual.
It will need to come up from the grass roots, because the current system won’t be overturned by the sitting Parliament.
Some ideas are brewing, but it will take the engagement of the population to make this happen.
How do we engage them?
Will there be a turning point where they realise they do need to engage?
Political systems require the vigilance of the citizenry to keep the politicians honest. Don’t trust them or their motives, be sceptical and be prepared to protest and push back strongly when they overstep. That’s the only real guarantee of freedom. If that culture is not strongly embedded, no system will keep you safe from tyranny. Sadly we’re a long way away from that due in large part I think to material prosperity. It will take impoverishment to make people wake up – and impoverishment may well be where we are heading.
https://open.substack.com/pub/petermcculloughmd/p/dr-mccullough-testifies-in-the-pennsylvania?r=ylgqf&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Peter McCullough’s testimony.
Very powerful.
To add to his testimony:
Please share.
Wow, you know your stuff!
This is remarkable testimony – thanks so much for posting the link. I watched immediately and immediately forwarded it to everyone in my contact list. Many of them are fed up with me for “banging on about Covid” (esp my daughter and son-in-law, who faithfully continue to get jabbed), but I persist.
I note that McCulloch doesn’t once consult any notes. A remarkable man.
A fantastic quote that I read posted on here a couple of days ago(apologies for not recalling the poster) by Mark Twain.
“Politicians are like diapers, they need changing regularly and, for the same reason!”
Of course.
Run by the Cartel, for the Cartel.
‘Being seen’ to review, whilst getting on with the globalist agenda.
Say one thing, do another.
You might as well get the BBC to review itself.
This should be compulsory reading for the inquiry:
‘The latest data of all-cause mortality by week does not show a winter-burden mortality that is statistically larger than for past winters.
There was no plague.
However, a sharp “COVID peak” is present in the data, for several jurisdictions in Europe and the USA.
This all-cause-mortality “COVID peak” has unique characteristics:
• Its sharpness, with a full-width at half-maximum of only approximately 4 weeks;
• Its lateness in the infectious-season cycle, surging after week-11 of 2020, which is unprecedented for any large sharp-peak feature;
• The synchronicity of the onset of its surge, across continents, and immediately following the WHO declaration of the pandemic;
• Its USA state-to-state absence or presence for the same viral ecology on the same territory, being correlated with nursing home events and government actions rather than any known viral strain discernment.
These “COVID peak” characteristics, and a review of the epidemiological history, and of relevant knowledge about viral respiratory diseases, lead me to postulate that the “COVID peak” results from an accelerated mass homicide of immune-vulnerable individuals, and individuals made more immune-vulnerable, by government and institutional actions, rather than being an epidemiological signature of a novel virus, irrespective of the degree to which the virus is novel from the perspective of viral speciation.’
Footnote 2 (02 June 2020) to https://www.hartgroup.org/pandemic-definitions/
It is estimated that at least 700,000 civilians starved to death in Germany between 1914 and 1919 as direct consequences of British supply shortages aka the formally illegal total trade blockade of Great Britain against the central powers. And Germany did rather well because by that time, it’s traditional agrarian regions in the east hadn’t yet been transferred to Russia’s communist empire on behalf of the UK. Things were much worse in Austria and worst in Turkey whose ruling classes didn’t care much for the fate of the population.
The attached image is a private photograph made by the chief doctor (Obergeneralarzt) of the German military mission in Turkey 1917 – 1918 showing heaps of corpes of starved people in Mossul. When English troops later liberated this town, they quietly cleared them away (the text says Victims of the famine in Mossul). No crime against humanity here, obviously, the right guys did it and the wrong women and children died.
I have no idea what point you are trying to make.
War is a barbarity best avoided.
That is why our politicians should be ashamed of themselves for allowing conventional deterrence in Europe to atrophy.
‘Germany invaded neutral Belgium 04 Aug. 1914. From the next day, civilians were executed en masse, as the invasion force advanced on its first obstacle, the ring of forts around Liège. To retaliate for the shelling from these forts, the German troops rounded up inhabitants of surrounding villages. Victims were selected and shot, those still alive being killed off with bayonets…….there were women, children and old men among the victims……’
‘…..a series of large-scale massacres, pillaged and burned towns and villages, and deported survivors. The hardest-hit places were Aarschot on 19 August and Andenne on 20 August; the small industrial town of Tamines on the Meuse, where 383 inhabitants were killed on 22 August; the city of Dinant, where, on 23 August, the worst massacre of the invasion left 674 people, one out of every 10 inhabitants, dead; and the university town of Louvain (Leuven), where the treasured university library was burned and 248 civilians killed. Further south, hundreds of people were executed in the Belgian Ardennes; on one occasion 122 alleged francs-tireurs were killed in groups of 10; the last ones had to climb on the mound of corpses to be shot. On a smaller scale, invaded France saw similar killings: the first civilians were shot in the northern Meuse-et Moselle on 9 August, and, among other massacres, 60 people were killed in Gerbéviller, a large lorrain village, on 24 August.’
Sophie De Schaepdrijver 29 Jan 2014
Regardless of which side anyone is on, wanton death like this is always tragic, they where all just people!
The price of Democracy is eternal vigilance
Its a bit late now, but we need a really independent enquiry into the government’s controls and restrictions claimed to be due to covid. Its clear they were an experiment in government control and covid was just an excuse, so they could find how far they could go with it. I have zero confidence that the current government enquiry will be anything more than a total whitewash, so the controls and restrictions probably in a more severe form will be ready for use when the next excuse arrives.