It seems that not a day goes by without further confirmation that the Government has been totally incompetent for decades – so this is an observation not confined to any one party.
The most recent news is the pending disaster in many buildings, entirely due to the use of a special reinforced aeriated concrete (RAAC) from the sixties onwards, which was known to have a shorter life than normal building structures. It was highlighted in 2018 and it would appear that in spite of this tsunami of consequences that would be inevitable very little has been done about it. The implications for education could not come at a worse time, after education at school, college and university level was already irredeemably damaged by the completely pointless and unnecessary lockdown imposed by ministers. In this they had very little justification, other than recommendations from an extremely incompetent and not fit for purpose Chief Medical Office and SAGE.
No need to remind everyone that Sweden did not close schools yet it had one of the best outcomes of all Western nations, without a single day’s education being lost for its schoolchildren and one of the lowest death rates from Covid and the consequences of lockdown in the Western world.
It has been asked why, since the issue with schools and RAAC was known in 2018, weren’t the schools all inspected and catalogued while they were closed.
A crisis in education has been building every since the Tony Blair mantra of “education, education, education” was translated into a goal of 50% of all students going to university. For some years it has been clear that this has resulted in far too many people going to university to do totally unnecessary degrees and be saddled with lifelong debt that in the majority of cases the taxpayer will be picking up. The law of unintended consequences means that many of these students who have wasted three years and tens of thousands of pounds for a degree that has no use have deprived the workforce of no doubt very able-skilled workers. This is why we now have a situation where there is an enormous shortage of useful skilled personnel with enormous impact on the building industry and maintenance experts. A further consequence of this – I’ll leave it to you to decide how unintended it was – was to flood the country with such workers from abroad, particularly the EU, and turn a blind eye to the consequences.
The NHS, which is the country’s biggest employer and for which plans have been announced to make it up to 50% bigger in personnel terms, has not benefitted from any university expansion for medical students, resulting in a severe shortage of doctors.
No minister could possibly deny the changing demographics, whereby the population for the last 20 to 30 years has become older and more infirm, requiring more and more resources. In spite of this, the Government refused to open the number of places for medical students in the U.K. on the grounds of cost, which has resulted in having to import more and more doctors from abroad, often on agency contracts costing three times the price of normal salaried personnel.
The situation for nurses is probably even worse, having adopted an ill-thought through plan to train all nurses to degree level. Good nurses do not need degrees and the NHS was supported previously by an army of nurses who trained on the job and more importantly were paid. How on earth do we expect to have enough nurses when not only do they have to undergo a degree but also pay for it. Steve Barclay is another Health Minister in a long line of Health Ministers, all the way back to Ken Clarke, who have instigated major reforms of the health service, most of which have backfired or are clearly not accruable – in Barclay’s case, gladly informing a meeting of health professionals that his department had employed 40,000 nurses for the NHS last year while omitting to say or explain why 50,000 had left. If this continues, it is clear there will be no nurses in a very short time. The major management reforms, which appear to be continuing with no loss of momentum – such as a recent decision to employ super regional managers at nearly £300,000 a piece in order to address a severe shortage of staff on the frontline!
Over-management, de-professionalisation of doctors and complete destruction of morale in frontline staff have been the approach that has been pursued relentlessly over the last decades. The NHS has been made to suffer waves of reforms, with change after change and no sense of irony at the wry observation that things are bad enough as they are. The constant change in doctors’ contracts, again, like education, goes all the way back to Tony Blair who destroyed the GP services in the country by giving them a contract that allowed them to opt out of night and weekend care for a very small change in income, which nearly everyone accepted. I now find that constant change in contracts is a major reason why the NHS is failing so badly, with not only millions on the waiting list but also the numbers dying on it ever increasing, arguably because of management neglect.
One of the reasons for the inability to bring the waiting lists down, which many predicted would be the obvious long-term effect of a lockdown (even if it had only been a few weeks, as promised), is the sense of injustice and need for recognition by all medical staff. In the junior doctors’ case they have for the first time in years elected to go on a series of rolling strikes. What has been most amazing about the strikes is that they have demonstrated that they are already working to rule and are nothing like the junior doctors of my generation and, indeed, many since. One director of a major surgical service told me that the hospital operates much more efficiently without the junior doctors as senior doctors can go in, diagnose and treat within 10 minutes, as opposed to an hour plus for junior doctors’ engagement. In the old days there was a ‘Firm’ system where every junior doctor was formally attached to a team of consultants and senior registrars, which not only enabled good education, teamwork, feedback and so on, but was also fantastic for mentoring and support – things sadly lacking today, resulting in professionals going off on sick leave far more commonly than used to be the case.
However, appallingly bad decisions like these are not confined to education and the NHS but seem to permeate the whole of society. When I grew up everybody had faith in the ‘system’ in that the civil service was competent and would deliver in all areas, from truth and justice and police competence to belief that their tax concerns and pensions would be dealt with swiftly and properly. However, it would appear not any more. It is clear that the Civil Service and the increasingly wasteful and completely useless local governments have, in many cases, been infiltrated by specialist groups and ‘charities’ campaigning for rights, which has resulted in a raft of legislation protecting minorities. Although initially justified, this has gone on to be a rolling behemoth, infiltrating every administrative aspect of the Government and effectively paralysing it.
Another obvious analogy is the way the Government displaced reinforced concrete with a much poorer substitute, leading to the inevitable collapse that we are now starting to see in buildings. Many fundamental aspects of society have collapsed or are on life support in the U.K., mainly due to the unintended consequences of Government actions going back decades. The problem with transport is everywhere to see and involves trains, main roads and even urban movement, whether it be in constant strikes or the almost permanent feature of dangerous and damaging potholes in every city and town that I have visited in the last few years. Even flying, with its impeccable safety record to date, is suffering from the lack of an upgrade in the air traffic control system in this country, while also reeling from strikes across Europe and in the air traffic control networks, adding to constant inefficiencies.
Then there is the water and sewage facilities. Privatised under Thatcher to improve the service and keep future costs off the book, this has led to total privatisation, leading to the opposite of what was intended. Whereas all the money was meant to be used efficiently for improvements and keeping all the infrastructure up to date, having the vision to repair ahead, we now have a crumbling, failing system where the money that should be spent on investment now goes in enormous dividends to the overseas investors who have bought most of these companies.
It is just as bad when it comes to gas and electricity – witness the crumbling gas infrastructure, which greatly contributes to the numerous roadworks in every region in the country, as well as the crumbling national grid, which cannot possibly cope with the Government’s electrification Net Zero plan. The decision to close down power stations long before there were reliable replacements is inexplicable given the unreliability of renewable energy generation in the absence of the ability to store it.
Thus, it would appear that the country has been beset with poor government for at least two and half decades, with political parties and Government ministers who have failed to think through the very obvious consequences – unintended and intended – of many of their actions. Did they think such strategic thinking was not necessary as the problems would not manifest until they had long since gone from office? It certainly now feels that all the chickens are coming home to roost. Virtually nothing that we used to take for granted, even as recently as the 1980s, is working any more. The very worst aspect is that there is a permissive miasma that nobody really seems to care or that nobody, more importantly, is being held responsible and to account for all the numerous failings.
Angus Dalgleish is an expert in immunology and Professor of Oncology at St George’s Hospital Medical School, London.
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Yes, fine. We all get it.
But at least half the country and the entire media were begging for lockdowns.
I’m no defender of Boris Johnson or anyone who pretends to govern me.
But I find this attempt to put lockdowns all on Boris Johnson pretty dishonest. Should he have resisted, For sure. Would he have done it if so many weren’t asking for it? Definitely not.
Like Germans in 1946 who apparently were oblivious to the treatment of the jews and were more than happy to see the Nazi leadership hang at Nuremberg.
It’s a facile comparison, but I’m afraid it’s not a million miles off the mark.
All the lockdowns in England are the fault and responsibility of Kim Jong Johnson, the great fat Communist fraud.
And Jonathan Sumption consistently rejected lockdown.
Well, poll after poll after poll told a very different story and that is that the country wanted lockdowns.
You can try to tell me otherwise. But I was there the whole time and saw it for myself.
People loved working from home. People loved the free pay checks. And the attitude towards the business owners who suffered was that they should suck it up.
Not everyone. But most.
With the entire po,itical class and all the MSM calling for more lockdowns, longer and faster, the public were easily deceived. A more libertarian or a better educated government would have challenged the advice from the Communist led Sage and the repeatedly wrong Professor, et al.
Sure. Like the people in the Nuremberg photo. They were all deceived. Victims of propaganda.
It was interesting that the word ‘libertarian’ was persistently invoked as a pejorative throughout lockdowns, when it was rarely used before. It screamed of a tactical strike to take down any opposition to the disgraceful destruction of our liberties and the theft of a population’s wealth.
‘…the public were easily deceived. A more libertarian or a better educated government…’
A more libertarian and better educated public would not have been deceived, don’t you mean?
We have to come to terms with the fact that a large majority of the public is as dumb as a bag of spanners – easily distracted poor wee lambs, now cheering on plucky Ukraine with no clue what they are actually cheering for.
That’s the issue that needs addressing, how do we fix our education system so it stops churning out mindless blobs?
Lockdowns had never before been used as a response to this kind of virus and didn’t feature in the established policy for dealing with one.
So how exactly did the public come to believe lockdowns were necessary before the government put them into law?
It was the Chinese who went into lockdown, then the Italians, who changed their policy as the trucks rolled into Lombardy full of coffins. I recall seeing an article recently that they had some tie up with the Chinese, and that changed their policy, and then the WHO changed their policy. I also recall seeing people still strolling round a farmers market in West London being interviewed the week before lockdown was imposed and not having a clue what Covid was, or why it might matter.
Boris gave his ‘take it on the chin’ interview and then I presume the ever accurate Professor Ferguson had got at the PM with his 5m deaths prediction, and things went nuts. The MSM got hold of its ‘we’re all going to die, we have to lockdown’ story, other nations were doing it, the opposition were demanding it too, probably lots of voices around Boris at the time too. Other posters are quite right. Looking now with the benefit of hindsight it seems bizarre, but it was plain fear of suddenly finding ourselves in what was being portrayed as a Hollywood ‘End of Days’ Disaster Movie. There are still a lot of people who wont let go of it even now.
But the Diamond Princess had already demonstrated that the narrative being peddled was bollocks. Cruise ships are noted as places where viruses spread very easily, and also tend to have older clienteles who would theoretically be at risk.If the virus was as dangerous as they claimed, most of the people on that ship would have been dead.
Exactly CR.
EXACTLY! How many died? I think it was 7 out of around 3500 passengers.
3711 crew and passengers on board; 712 cases of infection detected; 14 deaths subsequently attributed to Covid…
Deaths “attributed?” I’ll bet they were.
The two suicides among them left notes saying they were terrified of catching and dying of Covid.
In the UK, the weekend before the lockdown announcement, there was the perfect storm of Ferguson’s lies, Emmanuel Macron threatening to lock out British lorries if no restrictions were implemented and footage of sick people in the casualty departments at various London hospitals (bearing in mind politicians can’t imagine a country beyond the windows of Westminster!)
Italy had signed up to the Belt and Road Initiative, so would do as China told them. Macron is a graduate of the WEF, as are Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, Jacinda Ardern, Gavin Newsom, Viktor Orbán, Pete Buttigieg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Matt Hancock and Sebastian Kurz. All the WEF graduates went for the lockdowns in a big way and Klaus Schwab published The Great Reset three months after the lockdowns began.
And don’t forget who owns 80% of the media peddling the propaganda…
The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Lockdown Fraud
https://ccpgloballockdownfraud.medium.com/the-chinese-communist-partys-global-lockdown-fraud-88e1a7286c2b
1. Lockdowns Originated on the Order of Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and Were Propagated Into Global Policy by the World Health Organization With Little Analysis or Logic
Lockdown proponents have frequently justified their policies by comparing them to actions taken to combat the pandemic of Spanish influenza a century prior.[1] But a realistic examination of the mitigation efforts in response to Spanish influenza reveals that nothing remotely approximating lockdowns was ever imposed. In the words of Judge William S. Stickman, ruling in Cnty. of Butler v. Wolf,[2] citing the work of preeminent historians:
Not only are lockdowns historically unprecedented in response to any previous epidemic or pandemic in American history, but they are not so much as mentioned in recent guidance offered by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”). Judge Stickman continues:
Judge Stickman’s intuition regarding the real history of lockdowns is in line with the opinion of the foremost infectious disease scholars. Donald Henderson, the man widely credited with eradicating smallpox, wrote in 2006, “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.”[5] To our knowledge, no scientist ever publicly supported imposing lockdowns until Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), personally authorized the “unprecedented lockdown of Wuhan and other cities beginning on Jan. 23.”[6]
General Secretary Xi is perhaps best known for the punishment of over one million CCP officials for “corruption,”[7] the elimination of term limits from China’s constitution,[8] and, of course, the reeducation and “quarantine”[9] of over one million Uyghur Muslims and other minorities “infected with extremism”[10] throughout the regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, pursuant to the CCP’s pet hybrid of public health and security policy: fangkong — the same policy that inspired Xi’s lockdown of Hubei province.[11] General Secretary Xi later affirmed that he had issued these instructions to the CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee on January 7, 2020,[12] but his instructions have never been revealed. Chinese business leader Ren Zhiqiang was sentenced to 18 years in prison[13] for an open letter in which he requested Xi’s instructions be made public.[14]
When the lockdown of Hubei province began, the World Health Organization (WHO)’s representative in China noted that “trying to contain a city of 11 million people is new to science… The lockdown of 11 million people is unprecedented in public health history…”[15] Human rights observers also expressed concerns.[16] But those concerns didn’t stop the WHO from effusively praising the CCP’s “unprecedented” response just days after the lockdown began, and long before it had produced any results: “The measures China has taken are good not only for that country but also for the rest of the world.”[17] WHO Director Tedros Adhanom added that he was personally “very impressed and encouraged by the president [Xi Jinping]’s detailed knowledge of the outbreak” and the next day praised China for “setting a new standard for outbreak response.”[18]
By February 2020, the CCP had begun reporting an exponential decline in COVID-19 cases. In its February report, the WHO waxed rhapsodic about China’s triumph:
Shortly thereafter, the WHO held a press conference during which Assistant Director-General Bruce Aylward — who later disconnected a live interview when asked to acknowledge Taiwan[20] — told the press: “What China has demonstrated is, you have to do this. If you do it, you can save lives and prevent thousands of cases of what is a very difficult disease.”[21] (emphasis added). Two days later, in an interview for China Central Television (CCTV), Aylward put it bluntly: “Copy China’s response to COVID-19.”[22] (emphasis added).
The WHO’s recommendations are notable for two reasons. First, the WHO’s conclusion in its February report that this “rather unique and unprecedented public health response in China reversed the escalating cases”[23] exemplifies the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. While it was possible that a more “flat” curve in Wuhan could be attributed to the CCP’s lockdown, it was at least equally likely that Wuhan had simply witnessed the natural course of this “novel” pathogen. It should have been obvious that the mere issuance of a policy “unprecedented in public health history” did not automatically mean it was effective — especially given the WHO’s own 2019 guidance for pandemic influenza did not advise border closures, mass contact tracing, or quarantine even of “exposed individuals” under any circumstance.[24]
Furthermore, the WHO did not even consider other countries’ economic circumstances, demographics, or even their number of COVID-19 cases — which were very few in most of the world — before instructing the entire world that “you have to do this.”[25] This conclusion by the world’s foremost public health body was, at best, criminally negligent.[26]
Lockdowns are a Xi Jinping policy, and the significance of that fact cannot be overstated. The idea of locking down an entire state or country and forcibly shutting down its businesses and public places was never entertained, never discussed, and never implemented in any pandemic literature until it was done by General Secretary Xi in January 2020. Lockdowns were never tried before 2020 and never tested before 2020, even on a theoretical basis.[27] The idea of “lockdown” was brought into human history on the order of General Secretary Xi; it otherwise never would have entered the collective human imagination. Anytime anyone endorses a lockdown for any length of time, even a few minutes, they are endorsing a Xi Jinping policy. The remainder of this letter concerns how lockdowns were laundered into the world’s go-to pandemic policy.
Thank you for your excellent summary
Because the vast majority of the population outside these pages are as thick as two planks and thus were taken in by the propaganda
Interestingly I am on the email lists for several well known polls.
From 2020 the more I answered no to lockdowns and that I wasn’t overly concerned about covid the less requests to take part I received
Rigged poll after rigged poll, done by government, fuelled by media hype etc.
On what evidence do you claim that polls were rigged? Which ones?
The fact they always, every time, came back with the result the government wanted and in line with the result of government propaganda.
The same evidence that we know you are a troll.
There is no defense of Bozo in this matter. He instigated the lockdowns. Are we really expected to believe that he was swayed by polls and his own taxpayer funded propoganda outlets? Are we offering Bozo excuses as to his reasons for NOT acting as the PRIME Minister? Not just a minister but the PRIME, number one Minister. Is this appalling, shabby behavior, in effect sticking two fingers up to the British public, what we have now been led to expect of our currently most senior statesman?
Bozo is a grubby, heartless, sinful, drunken genocidalist who demeans this country by his mere presence on these shores. The fact that he still occupies no.10 is a sad condemnation of the rotten soul that is the current political class soaking up taxpayers money in Westminster. They should hang their heads in shame.
The meme showing George Orwell reading 2022 and lamenting “WTF” could not be more apposite while this evil turd continues to breathe.
Does anybody believe Maggie would have allowed this sort of behaviour, or Churchill?
Bliar was and is extremely evil but his lamentable place in the history of these islands will be grossly eclipsed by that traitorous horror currently getting pissed in Downing St.at our expense.
I firkin despair.
I seriously doubt Blair would have locked the country down, for one reason.
Broon would have demanded it.
I have repeatedly said the same, hux: there is NO WAY Maggie would have gone along with the scam. She’d have told everyone to revise their primary school maths, grow up and get a grip on reality.
And the folks who claim that Maggie would have locked everyone up/down because she was an authoritarian and loved the control just don’t get anything, I am afraid.
She also had a grasp of science and was numerate, unlike Kim Jong Johnson, Fart Hancockwomble, Mengele Gove etc…
Yes, Kim Jong Johnson accompanied his lockdowns with Pyongyang propaganda and had the two Ronnies of doom present illiterate, innumerate balderdash in justification for his second lockdown. Their ‘not a prediction’ that they knew would be presented as a prediction was that, without a lockdown, Britain would have more deaths per day than India suffered, despite having a twentieth of the population.
Bastards.
The polls were rigged and loaded with leading questions. The Vaccines Minister was even the founder of YouGov! With any poll, you have to ask: Who commissioned it? What questions did they ask? Who did they ask? What answers did they want? Who paid for it?
The media went overboard, led by Piers Morgan. OFCOM saw to it that no one was allowed to question ‘The Science (TM)’, and Sage was overrun with behavioural control specialists who used advance linguistic programming, among other things, to brainwash millions of people. I know a couple of people who watched the BBC everyday – all of those disgusting, fraudulent press conferences, and are now agoraphobic.
The entire COVID-19 scam was a mix of panic on the part of governments and a dirty stitch up between supranational governmental organisations and multinational big businesses.
And do you remember when the UK television news channels were reporting the death stats from India – without pointing out the numbers were proportionate to their levels of population – as if the UK was at similar risk of similar numbers of deaths with its much smaller population?
MSM media fraud. Government fraud – of which party gate was a part.
And this fraud induced people to queue up mindlessly for jabs which the majority of them didn’t need, jabs that were going to do NOTHING to improve their health, but which left them at considerable risk of adverse side effects, the like of which were reported in a recent article on this site a couple of days ago.
The combination of MSM fraudulent reporting and fear mongering, and the application of considerable political pressure emanating from the government created nudge unit (hands face space, act like you have got it, granny killing disease etc) which both over hyped the fear, together with the fact that both government and media plugged the jabs as “the only way out” of this crisis (no vitamin D? no ivermectin etc?) DIRECTLY INDUCED a lot of people to have the dodgy risky jabs to the detriment of their health – in some cases losing their lives.
And still NOT ONE media outlet to my knowledge has posited the key question exposed by partygate:
“Prime Minister, you have repeatedly told the country, which you completely locked down for long periods of time, that there is a deadly, highly transmissible disease in circulation. And yet you felt safe enough for you and your staff in various whitehall offices to party like it was 1999. Why is that? Do you not realise that it looks to a lot of people that you were not as worried about the deadly virus as you were telling everyone else that they should be?”
Indeed there are those even on GB News who think we should draw a line under it and move on without getting an answer to this question.
Partygate is not about hypocrisy, or not following the rules, or about it being one rule for them and another for the rest of us, although of course all of those are issues.
Partygate exposes the big lie at the centre of all of this: the virus was never as dangerous as the UK public were led by their government and their scientists to believe that it was and it was this lie which induced perhaps 2 thirds of the UK population to be jabbed and perhaps harmed – irreversibly.
I also saw the people who loved working from home and what was for (I don’t know how many) more income for less work.
And I saw the accusations of selfishness directed at people with the entirely reasonable desire to maintain a business they had developed at considerable cost and with great emotional investment: businesses which served and helped others.
Those of the compliant who became more than that, who became urgers, need to acknowledge that they bear responsibility for their unwarranted enthusiasm.
I would like them to ask themselves whether it was wise to believe the stories they were told. If the explanation offered is “belief”, the grounds of the belief need to be considered.
And quite a large number did what Boris did, ignored the restrictions they had demanded, then boasted about it.
True. But then he went on to defend the jabs and vax passports as a price worth paying to return to normality.
The majority of the population is complicit in the whole coronavirus nightmare, whether they care to admit it to others or even themselves or not.
If there had been no lockdown, there would have been no vax passports. The jabs, if needed, would have been effective, not the rubbish put forward as simultaneously brilliant and utterly ineffectual by government.
That’s not the foundation of Sumption’s article. He’s not questioning the lockdowns or vaccination’s, he’s condemning Johnson for not doing what he demanded the rest of us do.
“He made his own risk assessment, while denying the rest of us the right to make ours.”
That questions the lockdowns.
I’m sure none of these people if asked in 1946 knew anything about mistreatment of jews and claimed Hitler deceived them…
By 1946 all of Germany understood what had gone on as many of them were victims, Jewish or otherwise.
Lockdown’s weren’t called for by the public until they were broadcast by the government and the media as a solution, contrary to WHO pandemic guidance of the time not to lockdown.
Whatever the reasons for the lockdowns they were fabricated. This has cost immeasurable misery to people and lasting damage to the economy.
This is the reason the fool should be booted out of office, he got it catastrophically wrong based on a lie that the right thing to do was lock the country down on multiple occasions.
When it suited him to ignore WHO guidance, he did. When it suited him to follow WHO guidelines, he did that as well.
‘Lockdown’s weren’t called for by the public until they were broadcast by the government and the media as a solution, contrary to WHO pandemic guidance of the time not to lockdown.’
I am afraid you have that upside down.
The WHO sent a mission to one of its main sponsors, the tyrannical and lockdown inventing China, in February 2020
The resultant report gave as much as a mandate for worldwide Chinese-style lockdowns as they had the ability to make.
The WHO document praised the Beijing regime’s ‘all-of-government and all-of society approach’ and ‘uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures’ which ‘provide vital lessons for the global response’
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-china-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf
As Stewart correctly said the UK public, already heavily softened up by decades of illiberal Climate Change and ultra-health restrictions welcomed lockdowns in March 2020 and later mask wearing (again the WHO reversed it’s previous position on this) with a kind of stoic mass enthusiasm – as all the opinion polls showed.
To argue thst this was purely top-down imposed by the Government is simply incorrect.
Nope: the UK government didn’t lockdown because of either advice from public health experts or public demand.
I was there: I remember what happened..
‘Nope: the UK government didn’t lockdown because of either advice from public health experts’
I have just cited the WHO worldwide pro-lockdown advice in February 2020.
Then there was Professor Neil Ferguson’s wildly exaggerated modelling in mid March which warned of 500,000 UK deaths if strict social distancing measures (ie lockdowns) were not imposed.
Which they were a couple of days later.
‘or public demand.’
I didn’t say the public demanded them (through what mechanism could they have?) merely that they embraced them with open arms.
Clearly this is inconvenient for agendas seeking to use the issue for politically and socially divisive purposes.
‘I was there: I remember what happened..’
So was I, and so do I
But that is just a by-the-by, all the primary evidence (such as the WHO pro-lockdown report of February 2020 cited above) is readily available.
“I have just cited the WHO worldwide pro-lockdown advice in February 2020.”
The WHO aren’t public health experts. They’re an utterly corrupt, entirely bought globalist organisation funded by big pharma and deranged billionaires.
And Ferguson? That serially discredited gimp? FO.
There was absolutely no reason for the UK government to impose the opposite of their established policies.
‘The WHO aren’t public health experts.’
The issue being discussed is not the level of expertise in this area held by the WHO but rather whether the UK government unilaterally imposed a lockdown on 23 March 2020 against the advice of that or any other official transnational or national public health body such as SAGE – quite the opposite was the case.
Just to make this point even clearer and put it into historical perspective, though there were always individually sceptical positions the Great Barrington Declaration was not issued until October 2020.
‘They’re an utterly corrupt, entirely bought globalist organisation funded by big pharma and deranged billionaires.’
Very loaded, conspiratorial and personalised terms, but regardless of any other institutional underpinnings or motivations in this instance the WHO was certainly acting in support of the CCP’s oppressive and internationally self-serving approach to a flu-like disease.
All irrelevant to the false claim that the UK government acted against their advice on lockdowns.
‘And Ferguson? That serially discredited gimp? FO.’
I wasn’t commenting on Neil Ferguson’s disastrous previous track record (re eg the Foot and Mouth fiasco) but rather his prominent position on one of the UK goverment’s principle public health advisory bodies (SAGE)
‘There was absolutely no reason for the UK government to impose the opposite of their established policies’
Please see all the above, and again the issue is not whether the rejection of established epidemiological practices was reasonable –
But rather whether this was carried out unilaterally and against the advice of established international and national public health bodies;
And it was not.
A PS to my first reply to Redhotscot above because it was a bit unclear at the beginning; the ‘upside down’ bit I was referring to was the timing and nature of the WHO pro-lockdown advice, not that the public demanded the government impose restrictive measures.
You make an important point.
There are degrees of responsibility, and there’s no question that our political “leaders”, who have volunteered for an exceptionally high degree of responsibility, should be judged accordingly.
The people “asking for it”, demanding it, seemed to be the media at large; and they should also bear a very high level of responsibility.
But if we accept no responsibility for our own actions (or inaction) we are infantilising ourselves.
“What did you do during the war” was a reasonable question. Another kind of war was waged from March 2020: a new form of total war which devastated the lives of people all over the planet.
There are many people who need to be able to make the adult admission that they were afraid, and that in their state of fear they accepted many things they later wished they had not accepted.
They should not pretend that everyone was affected in the same way. To use your German analogy, it is as absurd to pretend that nobody was a Nazi (apart from Hitler and his entourage) as to pretend that everybody was.
There was resistance, which the compliant made more difficult and dangerous. The mistakes of compliance were and are serious.
The secret to making any decision is to not pay your lisence fee and ignore the MSM and weigh risks up yourself.
Nobody ever asked me about any of the lockdowns, and the mask thing was a complete turnaround after their buddies managed to get millions ready. Maybe a few hundred public servants were polled, after they were told non of it would affect them?
Yes, Boris is a bad leader, obviously. But the most despicable behaviour has come from the press, who were determined to whip the country up to a frenzy and did so, day after day with their doom-mongering and gross exaggeration.
The only aspect of this disaster whose flames they never failed to fan has been, and is, vaccine injury, and for this they must forever be condemned. They’ve been lying by omission, following orders from OFCOM, and must never be allowed to forget their huge responsibility in the death and suffering of thousands of victims.
It wasn’t just hype, it was blatant propaganda.
The state itself is out of control. There are no standards in public life, there are no limits to the power they assume, there is no moral basis for any of their decisions, there is no responsibility or accountability.
The state is rotten, the civil service is bloated and useless, politicians are lazy, greedy and corrupt, and our democracy is a sham.
Even that is putting a positive spin on it.
The only thing worse than a government is a competent government.
Anyone who trusts in those in “authority” is naive and a complete fool.
Any form of integrity in local or national government left the country some time in the 1960s.
We need to prune state over reach in many areas of our lives. It never makes it better.
Even after all this tho there are still people saying lockdowns were necessary to save the NHS. Pure cognitive dissonance.
It’s a cult
I know the pig dictator is a cult ,but did not appreciate how wide his cultness has gone !!
And many, many more were saying it at the time.
But, you know, it was all the government and Boris Johnson’s fault.
Because that is what the government – aided by their medical and scientific advisers – told people – that they needed to stay at home and social distance to “save the NHS.” The NHS and its staff were elevated to angel/hero status.
And now it is all over ordinary people cannot get access to the NHS, which while we were all being locked down the government was doing a nice behind the scenes job of dismantling.
Don’t take my word for it. Brave medics posted videos on You tube pointing this out.
Totally agree with this article, but, Johnson always looked shifty at the televised threats, in between his, what looked like handlers, he looked coerced, wonder what the coercion was
It’s really not that complicated, if you recall Cummings’ depiction of Johnson as a “shopping trolley”, devoid of ideas or intelligence, other than what is required for his own survival. He desperately needed the support of the two stooges at his press briefings to provide him with the necessary script.
BBC factcheckers are on to monkeypox. It’s drivel, reads like it was written by an 18 year old arts major masquerading as the “health and disinformation” reporter. The job title tells you all you need to know. So much for trustworthy.
This has to be viewed in the context of the The level of perceived personal threat has to be increased statement: Like Boris Johnson and his staff, the not-so-wise SAGEs knew perfectly well that there was never a real danger to the population at a large. The problem scenario was always that so many of the fairly limited group of people actually in some danger because of Sars-CoV2 would be very sick at the same time that a large number of them would die because it wasn’t possible to treat them due to health system overload. That’s what Ferguson’s modelling claimed was inevitably going to happen. These would be OAPs and some people close to retirement age, basically the age group the members of SAGE themselves belonged to. To Johnson (and likewise, to Starmer) these people and – to a lesser degree – their relatives were important voters. The The-Scientists were probably simply afraid for their own lives (cf Cummings panicked flight from the then-epicentre of COVID in the UK). It was claimed the only way to prevent that was to manage the general population like free-range chicken during outbreaks of by bird flu. And hence, that’s what The-Politicians did.
In a so-called democracy, the only value humans have in general is as voters. People wo aren’t yet allowed to vote have no value. That’s why children and so-called young people were abused so grotesqly. A sizeable part of the work force of the UK also doesn’t have this right. These were the expendable essential workers supposed to deliver the stuff enabling the others to hide at home from a danger that never was. Or work in hospitals and care homes. And that’s what Johnson should take responsibility for: Partitioning the people living in the UK into two sets of useful to me and useless to me, with every grey haired clown with a university title and good connections to the government being allowed to do whatever he could dream up to the members of the latter.
We need a bonfire of the bastards
They should be given an appointment with the Wicker Man.
Plus the Witchfinder General.
And Peter Cushing from ‘Twins of Evil’, to make up the triumvirate…
150+ fixed penalty notices, parties, vomiting etc etc and the police close protection officers that accompany the dictator saw nothing
I’ve been telling people this for months.
None of the main protagonsts belived in the Covid regulations: Prof Neil Ferguson, Matt Hancock and Domonic Cummings were all in breach of them.
The same goes for the climate change scam. The VIPs at COP 26 cannot possibley behave the way they did and beleive what they are saying about how we must change our ways. Take one example among many, that of Boris Johnson flying from Glasgow to London to attend a dinner hosted by the spectator, when we are not supposed to take one return flight a year for our annual holiday.
The problem is getting people to see it.
Domunist Dictator, Fart Hancockwomble and Piltdown man hoaxer Ferguson.
Cummings is a different from the others. At the time of his cross-country trip, panic buying was at its height and it was regularly impossible to buy essentials in supermarkets. According to predictions by The Scientists, the hospitals of London would soon fill up with dying people and there were rumours about imminent social unrest. On the day his boss fell ill and Matt Hancock tested positive, Cummings was filmed running out of No 10 with a briefcase. He then hastened home, bundled wife and children into his car and went on a mad drive accross the country to the estate of his parents, where his family spent the next couple of weeks in a cottage hidden in the woods.
That wasn’t some kind of devil-may-care breach of the regulations, it looks more like a coward who’s mad with fear and literally running for his life. Which fits with Cummings being the seriously out-of-control lockdown hawk, even praising the Chinese government for welding apartment doors shut.
“The problem is getting people to see it.”
Indeed it is Simon. A major worry is kids being indoctrinated with the climate change nonsense through their “education”.
Johnson is a lying ammoral coward and not fit to hold office as Prime Minister of Great Britain. His government is equally useless and in no way represents me.
‘a lying ammoral coward’
I thought that was a requirement for the post
Good luck finding someone who does.
Starmer?
I’m afraid your realistic options in the next election will be between Boris Johnson (or someone like him) and Starmer (or someone like him).
The entire system is a fraud.
Yep!
That’s assuming letters of no confidence aren’t being delivered to Brady as we speak.
MP’s are, as we speak, judging the mood of their constituents. Letters are rarely a knee jerk reaction, they are usually in response to MP’s belief in their ability to be re elected, so take time to assess.
Boris may yet be booted out and we will hopefully have a more considered PM. My choice would be Steve Baker.
Mine would be Lord Frost
The picture below sums it all up. They walk amongst us.
Got banned from DT for saying exactly this, but when a Lord says it they publish it as an article. The elites are running riot. It’s well past time the people bared their teeth and let them know we’re still there.
Since when, in modern times, did a civil servant “fear for their jobs”? I wish!
Not just Number 10, but the Opposition, all MPs, NHS tik-tok dancers, Civil Servants and the Media.
Dominic Cummings pointed it out, during his mayoralty, when the conversations got tough, Johnson did a Macavity. Sumption falls into the trap himself, assuming that bunter actually gives a toss, oh he does but only about his own bottom.
When push came to shove, so like the lump of indecisive lard he is, bunter hid behind his doom mongering nudgers.
A leader (of what) bowing to the ‘consensus’, SAGE, SPiB communists and a bunch of idiot incredibly inept statisticians. With a health service gone awol. Johnson, he presided over this car crash and only tried to make political capital, as the nation went catatonic bribed to acquiesent silence with their own money.
Lets be honest on all the big calls since joining the berlin empire – the experts have called it wrong and lied about it incessantly. Be it on feigning ignorance on the federal ambition of the empire. On the ‘benefits’ of mass immigration where there are none. Mass propaganda blitzkrieg, the insane green agenda, QE is a, the solution, batflu, the lies just got bigger and more egregious and johnson sat on his fat fingers and navel gazing he fiddled.
The answer? He’s a lying charlatan and mythologizer of his own wondrous stories, is it not time to scrap his fabling?
Who truly cares.
now that restrictions are over we all know no.10 didn’t really believe in them.
They won’t be able to impose restrictions again, no one will follow them.
I like your optimism, but over the past 2 years I have very little faith in people. They will believe anything they are told by politicians and if it’s on the telly then it must be true.
Lots of people truly care.
I hope you’re right, but when I was delivering Back To Normal leaflets at the end of 2020, the mood of the majority was not inclined to listen; all they saw was a caring government trying to save lives, and I was a wrong’un to suggest otherwise.
Even now on YouTube there is a nauseating US interview with Jacinda Ardern where she gets a standing ovation as her nation’s saviour. Interestingly, she claims NZ is ready to ‘welcome all visitors’. I bet that wouldn’t include me!
Even now their only concern about Boris is that he broke the rules. They aren’t angry that he introduced the rules in the first place.
Because none of them have copped on that perhaps they were never needed in the first place – which is precisely what BJ’s “rule breaking” exposes but no journalist seem to have the balls to write.
I do find it pretty disgraceful that the papers like the telegraph are airing voices who were and are against the last two yrs after the event. It would have been lovely if the papers were holding power to account the last two yrs rather than begging for lockdowns, calling anyone who refused a jab a danger to the wider world and agreeing with all the curtailment of liberties. Bit too late now to play the other side and doing their job properly, at the time the state had the press and broadcasters in their back pocket.
To be fair the Telegraph were publishing Sumption’s articles quite early on.
It really does not matter whether he thought that his parties were allowed by the regulations. Their rationale was that unnecessary human contact was so dangerous that it must be forbidden by law. He cannot have believed a word of it himself. Otherwise, he would surely not have exposed himself or his staff to this supposedly mortal danger, whether it was technically permitted by the regulations or not.
This is the crux of the matter. And it applies equally to Starmer’s gathering. Either social mixing was irresponsible and dangerous or it wasn’t. If the former, then they have recklessly endangered life; if the latter, then the public has been subjected to severe and damaging restrictions for nothing.
Victoria’s Premier, Dan Andrews, has come out as an anti-masker! In response to The Greens demanding that Andrews reintroduce universal indoor mask mandates (they are currently no longer required in schools, shops, restaurants and almost all other indoor spaces but are required on public transport and in airports, aged care and health settings), Andrews got the humpf with his erstwhile political comrades and said that “I won’t take the advice of the Green political party, I’ll consult medical experts instead”. In a radio interview, he further added that “we know those things don’t work against this virus” (so the “medical experts” can go take a hike, too).
So, has the consummate mask Nazi (and lockdown lunatic), the DanFuhrer, seen the light and acknowledged what we knew all along, that the non-functional theatrical prop of The Mask is utterly useless? Or is there a state election in the air in November and he is seeking to politically distance himself from the Greens (who performed well in the recent national election that unseated Scott Morrison’s Liberals), or seeking to distance himself from the hated mask regime (which he fathered)? Is he an opportunistic political slimeball? Answers on a postcard, please.
Still, it’s nice to have a quote from Andrews that “these things don’t work” and are, by inference, all about political performance art, fearporn and control of the plebs. And it also shows that, like your partying Boris Tories, the Antipodean Covid rulers don’t believe in their own hype and never did but simply got a political thrill out of bossing other people around because they were afraid of being seen to “let it rip” and be portrayed as “uncaring”.
Sumption is correct but the damage is already done. Try persuading a true believer otherwise.
The country will never recover in any of our lifetimes.
Replace Boris with; who, who do we replace him with. All of them are the same, including his supporters in labour, libs, greens etc.
Leadership needs a true born leader with a backbone and I don’t see one.
Pandora’s box is open and the lid has gone missing.
Lord Frost would be a far better PM than current incumbent. He’d be a good start.
https://hartgroup.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a1fa0a6b6b9bcb501d631b376&id=61c0bf03ae&e=5dcbfe2f2d.
well worth a read from the HART group.
That overblown blancmange needs to go. We need a man of integrity like Lord Frost. Boris was trying to push us into this WHO treaty on the 22nd, giving away our sovereignty, making sure that those who voted Brexit knew nothing of it because of a news near blackout save for GB News and TalkTV. He is a despicable traitor and should be tried for treason never mind Partygate.
The CCP orchestrated Covid. From start to finish, and sat back cackling as the West destroyed itself on demand.
Snake oil: How Xi Jinping shut down the world?
Author: Senger, Michael
ISBN: 9781957083780
Spot on M’lud.
Strange that the MSM haven’t realised this ……. or could it possibly be that they knew the propaganda was a load of bollocks when they were spreading it, and don’t wan’t to ‘fess up?
“Partygate Shows Number 10 Didn’t Believe its Own Covid Hype”
Exactly; why has it taken them so long to realise that?
No doubt many also realise the climate change scam is just that but are content to use it against us.
One question still hangs, taboo maybe. Why did No10 not believe in the regulations? Why did they not fear the disease as they had instructed everyone else to?
Hubris perhaps? Unlikely.
More likely No10 knew and understood the full data and so too the accurate epidemiological prognosis. They knew the threat was low. They knew the mathematical models, the fear mongering and the statistics were a fraud.
But No10 also knew, as all Governments knew, that Covid has been about social control and manipulation. A ‘proof of concept’ for implementing sustainable development and Net Zero?
How could they resist the international pressure or the taste of power?
Just as we cannot see the hand in a glove puppet we know it is there, animating the puppet.
Partygate and beergate are a series of autonomous twitches by incompetent puppets.
Because Kim Jong Johnson knew there was no risk whatsoever, there’s no way he would have done anything if he believed there was any risk at all behind it.
Farcical. Johnson knew it’s was all bull, but was too weak to resist the clammer for lockdowns – and the calls came from all sides. I don’t care about parties, but I do care about the near £400bn wasted on this dog and pony show of a farce. Our children’s children will be paying for this.
They knew what we k ew and were condemned for saying- that restrictions were useless, that only thevulnera ,e should have been ” protected” and that the chaos, havoc and stress imposed on us all especially on the young by so called experts was evil. Yes, evil. Ferguson, Vallance, Johnson etc al should be tried for their acts against the entire nation and serve long sentences for their acts
I’ve no idea why Johnson is still there.