During the heady days of February and March 2020, my first daughter was approaching her third birthday. I remember that time dimly now, as though peering at it through a fog. The main recollection I have of my emotional state was that I was deeply concerned about what was going to happen to my daughter and children like her. Not because I was worried about the virus, you understand; I was one of the (it seems, very few) people who was actually keeping tabs on the stats and knew that the modal victim of the disease was somebody in his or her late 70s with two comorbidities. My worries stemmed from the, it seemed to me self-evident, point that children need to socialise and that this is critical to their healthy development, and I was terrified there was going to be a lockdown and that my daughter would end up suffering as a result.
It is a very strange feeling to be the only person amongst one’s friends and family who is worried about the application of a measure which everybody else seems to think is the only way to stave off a threat which you consider to be infinitesimal. One day I will have to try to explain that feeling to my grandkids. But irrespective of my own feelings, the lockdown of course happened, and my overriding concern was making sure that my daughter got as normal a childhood as I could manage in the circumstances.
I knew the law, so I knew that I was permitted to leave the home at any time and for as long as I liked if I had a ‘reasonable excuse’ (not once a day for one hour, which was what Government ministers and journalists were all leading people to believe on TV), so I simply took the rules at their word. I had a reasonable excuse, which is that I had a toddler in the house. So we just went out. All the time. We went to the beach. We went to the park. We went for walks in the country. We went to the shops that were open (I think we went to the local Tesco more or less every day for several months). I did barely a lick of work. But I knew that something bigger was at stake, and I was determined that when it came to my own child my conscience was going to be clear; I was going to do the most I could on her behalf. My wife was a lot more worried than I was, naturally enough, but she was willing to entertain my (to her eye dangerously lax) strategy, and so that period of March-June 2020 was basically non-stop outdoor wandering for my daughter and me.
I quickly discovered that I was not the only one doing this: there was a small cult of parents who, like me, were chiefly worried about the social development of their children, and whom one would encounter from time to time when out and about – surreptitiously letting their kids play on the swings or kick a ball around on a patch of grass. Generally, these partners in crime of mine were happy to let the kids play together. I owe a never-to-be repaid debt of gratitude to an anonymous Turkish man I met out in the country one day who let my daughter fly a kite with his own children.
The reason I recount all this now is not to put myself forward as Dad of the Decade. We were amongst the lucky ones in that by July 2020 my daughter’s nursery was open and remained so thereafter. I do not wish to contemplate how hard it must have been for, say, a single mother with school-aged children. And we in the U.K. have reason to be thankful for small mercies – at least here mask-wearing was never required for those aged 11 or under. But I do want to establish from the outset that my own response as a parent to the news about COVID-19 was not based on complicated modelling or carefully calibrated impact assessment, but on a simple, informed calculation of risk, combined with the love that a parent has for his child. I knew my daughter wasn’t at risk, because the evidence on that was clear by February 2020. (Anyone who tells you that “we didn’t know anything about the virus” at that time is either spouting porkies or doesn’t know what he is talking about.) And I wanted the best for her. So what else was I going to do? The issue, in other words, was not in the end very complicated. I did what I thought was right.
There are people out there, however, who do want to make out that things were terribly complicated, indeed almost irremediably complicated, and some of them have contributed to a recent issue of the academic journal The International Journal of Human Rights, which is all about Children’s Rights Impact Assessments (CRIAs) and “the lessons” of COVID-19 within the specific context of the Scottish Government’s response. It makes for fascinating reading, providing as it does an insight into the mindset of people who should from the very outset of the ‘crisis’ have had children’s best interests at heart – that is, children’s rights advocates – but who still to this day cannot bring themselves to accept that the problem with respect to children’s rights during the 2020-21 period was lockdown itself and not the fact that it was somehow badly implemented. In the background, I think, there is an abiding sense of shame amongst children’s rights advocates about how badly they dropped the ball during the first lockdown, which manifests itself in a determination to ‘learn lessons’ for the future, but I of course concede that this might just be projection.
Including the introduction there are 11 articles in the journal issue, each having been written by one or more experts on children’s rights and who was involved in an independent CRIA (conduted in early 2021) commissioned by the Scottish Children and Young People’s Commissioner. Clearly, going through all of the articles forensically is beyond the scope of this post. Instead, let me take you through the five key themes that emerge within them, as I see it. Each in essence boils down to a single fallacy, writ large.
1. The Managerial Fallacy, or, the idea that one could have reconciled all of the problems with lockdown and come to an implementation of the policy that could have worked for everyone if only one had done sufficient tinkering with it.
There is I think a universal feature of human psychology which prevents us from acknowledging that our decisions always involve trade-offs, especially when we agree with the decision that has been made. And so we see across the board blithe appeals being made to a fundamentally managerial ideal in which all of the i’s could have been dotted, all of the t’s crossed, and all of the loose ends tied – indeed, in which nobody actually needed to suffer any negative consequences of lockdown at all – if only sufficient technical knowhow had been applied.
Hence we could have “used an evidence-based analysis of impact… to avoid or mitigate any potentially negative impacts on children’s rights [from lockdown]” (p. 1,462); we could have used CRIAs to “gather and assess data” so as to “ascertain the extent to which individuals were disadvantaged during the pandemic” and “ensure a constant opportunity for reflection on human rights implementation… [gain] a deeper understanding… and drive future change” (p. 1,328); we could have “optimised the state’s ability to… contextualise the ways in which its policy shapes peoples’ [sic] lived experiences” (p. 1330); we could have lessened the impact of the lockdown on the mental health of children by “adopting a public health approach that takes account of wider social, economic and cultural factors when developing strategies” (p. 1,416), and so on. We could in short have magicked away all of lockdown’s ills when it came to children through more data and technical expertise – the implication of course being that we just needed more, and better funded, children’s rights experts and needed to listen to them more.
We could thus have had our cake and eaten it. We could have closed schools and made children stay at home and it would all have been fine if we had just applied ourselves better. This is all, needless to say, a fantasy – based on a fundamental unwillingness to accept that decisions have downsides and that there was no way that school closures would have ever been anything but an unmitigated disaster for many children.
2. The Listening Fallacy, or, the idea that one could have got to an ideal version of lockdown that would have been fine for children if only children’s own “views and experiences” had been taken into account.
Those who are unfamiliar with the literature on children’s rights are probably only dimly if at all aware that very much of it is based on the idea that we just need to listen to, and empower, children more. (To do otherwise is to engage in ‘adultism’.) This argument is on wide display amongst the contributions in question. The problem is routinely described as being that “young people’s views and experiences had not been meaningfully sought in developing emergency measures” (p. 1,322). Elsewhere, we are told that the problem was the “longstanding lack of investment in enabling children’s participation in public decision-making” (p. 1,465), and that “listening to the voice of children and young people with lived experience… had the potential to avoid, or at least mitigate, breaches of children and young people’s rights caused by emergency school closures” (p. 1,453). What we needed was in other words “children’s participation in structural decision-making” (p. 1,417). Then we would have had “mutual respect” between adults and children and hence better “information-sharing and dialogue” (p. 1,362).
It amazes me that children’s rights advocates, who are supposedly experts, can be so blind to the fact that children very often say things that they have heard adults say, or say things to please adults, and get most of their information from the adults in their lives. And indeed when you actually do listen to children they of course tend to say things like “My mum doesn’t really want us to go back [to school] because one, we’re not ready and two, we’re safer here [at home]” (p. 1,348). Or else they come out with things like “Get Boris [Johnson] out!” because they are Scottish and have heard how much their mums and dads hate the Tory Party (p. 1,350). What you can actually glean from “listening to children” therefore tends to in practice mean listening to the garbled views of their parents, who are inevitably themselves well-off and posh because those are the types of parents who put their children forward to air their views. How can purportedly intelligent people not recognise this?
But the wider and more important point is the abdication of adult responsibility that really underlies this fallacy. Nobody can deny that children’s interests were sidelined during the lockdown era and that we would have benefited from more sensitivity to the impacts on children. (It is notable that, as is pointed out in one of the pieces I am here citing, only one of the 87 members of SAGE – the Government’s advisory panel during the Covid period – had any professional expertise with relation to children.) But the point – and I cannot stress this strongly enough – is that sensible and responsible adults take the interests of the children in their society seriously to begin with. The problem was not that we didn’t have better participation by children in “structural decision-making”. It was that adults panicked, didn’t properly think through the consequences of their decisions, and children suffered as a result.
We didn’t, in other words, need children to tell us that closing schools was a terrible idea. A society that prioritises its children would have known that anyway. The problem was not, then, that we didn’t take into account the views of children. It was that we didn’t have the backbone to make tough decisions on their behalf.
3. The Instrumental Fallacy, or, the idea that learning lessons from the pandemic will somehow act as a platform for social improvement.
One was all the time told, during the pandemic, that we would “build back better” and that the lockdowns were an opportunity to reflect, rethink, and re-engage both politically and personally. (How is that working out in practice, three years on?) And so we get the same sort of idea here, in microcosm. Hence, the fact that children’s capacity to play was restricted during the lockdown is said to provide the “seeds of opportunity to sustain and strengthen our support for children’s right to play and to work toward restoring the everydayness of play for all children” (p. 1,382). We are told that the children’s mental health crisis, exacerbated by lockdown, provides us with an opportunity to develop “future strategies for children’s mental health” that “optimise… digital technology… to ensure child safety and equity of access for all” (p. 1,417). The widened and intensified levels of domestic abuse suffered by children during the lockdown era is said to give us an opportunity to think of “means to make visible the protection, prosecution, provision and participation rights of both child and adult victim-survivors” (p. 1,364). The closure of schools is said to prompt us to “reimagine education altogether” (p. 1,390). And so on.
It is perhaps churlish to chide people for wanting to find silver linings in the clouds, but the truth of the matter, for anyone who at the time had eyes to see, was always going to be that lockdown would make many bad things worse. The idea that it was going to be a springboard to a brighter future is like a bizarre perversion of the broken windows fallacy, which posits that we should all break all of our windows since it will provide more work for glaziers. And sure enough we have been mending broken windows really ever since. Some of the charts below give a flavour of this, but even the articles I am here citing can’t help giving us a glimpse of just how bad things have become on the bottom rungs of society as a result of lockdown. To quote just one illuminating passage (from p. 1,434):
[F]or those children who were already at a disadvantage… the long-term effects of poverty, lack of educational attainment, criminal records, reduced employment opportunities and the lingering effects of anxiety, trauma, bereavement and other mental health issues… are known risk factors for coming into conflict with the law.
The number of children who are absent from school more frequently than they are present has more than doubled in England from 2019-2023 and shows no sign of coming down – indeed, it is increasing (no doubt because school was made to feel optional by adult decision-makers in 2020). That’s, for the avoidance of doubt, a more-than-doubling of the number of children who have essentially no hope of making a positive contribution to society in the long term and are very likely to end up becoming involved in crime, drugs, prostitution and so on. Never mind ‘building back better’; we’re having to work very hard to stop the building collapsing altogether, across the piece.
4. The Ultimate Fallacy, or, the idea that lockdown was the only sensible option to begin with and therefore must not be questioned.
The founding myth of lockdownism was always that lockdown was the perfectly natural and logical thing to do in the circumstances – even though in the grand scheme of things it was of course a huge experiment that had never been tried before. For some reason, the precautionary principle was turned on its head to mean doing anything, no matter how evidently disastrous, in order to prevent a particular type of harm (i.e., the effect of the spread of the virus on the health service). Part of this picture was the long-term closure of schools, again something that had never before been tried for any length of time, and something whose downsides would have been as clear as day to anybody thinking carefully – and indeed something which was done on the basis merely that it might have an effect on stopping the spread of the virus.
Everywhere one looked, then, it was a case of accepting known or easily foreseeable, and massive, harms in the name of mitigating risk. And we see this written across the entire International Journal of Human Rights issue. Even while cataloguing the litany of harms that were inflicted on children – mental health crisis, lack of socialisation, heightened domestic and sexual abuse, educational disaster, family breakdown, collapsing economic opportunities, exposure to drug-taking, loneliness, lack of play time, and so on and so forth – at bleak and depressing length, the authors return again and again to the same theme: “The COVID-19 crisis required the U.K. and Scottish governments to act fast to safeguard the lives and health of the country’s population” (p. 1,458; emphasis added). The closure of schools was “prompted by the need to protect human rights to life, survival and development” (p. 1,390) and was “justified in human rights terms in order to protect the right to life” (p. 1,394). The response to the pandemic, we are told, “show[ed] the potential for the impossible to become possible” (p. 1,475), and involved a “well-intended prioritisation of health, survival and development” (p. 1,476).
We also get the familiar nonsense about how ‘the virus’ caused all the bad effects of the lockdown, rather than Government policy. Mmy favourite instance of this is the immortal line: “COVID-19 has exacerbated [problems], for instance, by introducing new offences which are more likely to criminalise already vulnerable children” (p. 1,436). Creating new criminal offences indeed – that really is some virus!
This blinkeredness results in evident absurdities and platitudinous thinking. Some authors obviously recognise the wood in amongst the trees. One, for instance, observes sensibly that “the available data would not seem to justify the global widespread school closures” and that ‘the evidence available… begs the question as to why, at least in the second half of 2020, once data emerged that children and young people were not at significant risk of contracting COVID-19, becoming significantly ill or spreading it to adults, was a policy adopted internationally of closing schools?’ (p. 1,445). But she cannot bring herself to come from this to the obvious conclusion, which was that schools should not have been closed at all. She is incapable of challenging the foundational myth, which is that in essence the problem cannot have been lockdownism itself. And so in the end all she can do is conclude, weakly, that the most important lesson to be learned from the period was “listening to the voice of children and young people with lived experience and experts and others advocating for children and young people early on and throughout the emergency has the potential to avoid, or at least mitigate, breaches of children and young people’s rights caused by emergency school closures” (p. 1,453).
The spade, then, cannot be called a spade. The fact that schools should never have been closed is the truth that dare not speak its name. And the reason for that is evident: it would mean conceding that possibly, just possibly, the entire edifice of lockdown itself was built on sand and that it was all a terrible, terrible mistake.
5. The Fairness Fallacy, or, the idea that the only real issue when it came to the implementation of lockdown was that it had unequal outcomes or affected different groups differently.
The final fallacy of course stems from the fourth. To people who are uncomfortable with the consequences of what happened during 2020 but who cannot quite admit it to themselves, the next best thing is to make the one socially acceptable criticism that can be made about lockdowns, which is that they had unequal impact. Thus, we see continual appeals made to the “diverse” effects of the policy. We are told that one of the core issues was “limited information [on] impacts for certain groups – such as Gypsy/Traveller communities, children with disabilities, children from asylum-seeking families, and children from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds” (p. 1,322). We hear time and time again that a central problem was “digital exclusion” (p. 1,433). We hear about impacts on children and young people with “additional support needs” and those “living in deprivation and poverty” (pp. 1,449-1,450). We are enjoined to wring our hands about how responses to the pandemic “exacerbated a range of troubling inequalities” (p. 1,475). We hear all about the importance of “equity of access” (p. 1,470). We even hear that children from deprived households “shouldered a disproportionate bereavement burden” (p. 1,432).
During Margaret Thatcher’s last days in office she skewered the Liberal MP Simon Hughes in the House of Commons by observing in him the unstated desire – evident to anybody who undertakes careful study of posh Left-wing people – for equality to trump prosperity. As she put it, “he would rather have the poor poorer, provided that the rich were less rich”. There is I think something similar going on with the rhetoric on the “unequal” outcomes of lockdown, as though there would have been nothing wrong with an outcome that was terrible as long as it was terrible for everybody and in exactly the same way. Nobody seems capable of making the logical leap from observing that the lockdown had negative impacts on certain groups to the additional observation that this only means it was less bad – i.e., not good – for everybody else. Clearly, the lockdown and associated Government responses had much worse effects for some people than others – anybody with half a brain can see that. But to conclude from this that the problem could be resolved merely by achieving a level playing field indicates a strange subversion of priorities, as though inequality in itself is the undesirable outcome, rather than the actual undesirable outcomes themselves.
The failure to really think things through, when it comes to the inequality issue, is frustrating, of course, but in this sense it is illustrative of the problem underlying all 11 of the contributions to the issue. It is deeply frustrating that people who were at the ‘front line’, so to speak, in spring of 2020, and who clearly were abreast of all of the miseries that would be inflicted upon so many children as a result of the first, strict lockdown, were so incapable of seeing things clearly. The point is not that we needed a more extensive and carefully calibrated managerial exercise in which rights were more successfully implemented and balanced, in which more data were gathered and more knowhow applied, and in which decision-making was better informed by participation. What we needed were people who were willing to stand up and say that, since children would not be severely affected by the virus and stood the most to lose from lockdown, it was imperative that adult fears should give way and that schools should be permitted to remain open. We just needed courage, in other words; but we didn’t get it.
The first lockdown was a radicalising experience for me, because it revealed to me an unpalatable truth: people like to say that they prioritise children’s needs, but societally we really don’t. A society that prioritised the needs of children would, like Sweden, have kept schools open throughout and allowed children to have opportunities to socialise and play. The contributors to the special issue of The International Human Rights Journal would have us believe that the circle could in some way have been squared and that we could have ‘saved lives’ by closing schools while at the same time making sure children did not suffer. This forces them to make out that the issue is awfully complicated. But I’m afraid to say it really is in the end very simple: children should never have had to go through the experience of lockdown.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. He is the author of the News From Uncibal Substack.
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/07/06/andrew-bailey-install-heat-pumps-bank-of-england-net-zero/
This Bailey Next Tuesday needs sectioning. He’s barking.
He’s just following orders, HP. All part of the playbook: highly visible institutions and people playing their virtue signalling games to get broad public consensus. Next, it’ll be that awful King Charles character announcing heat pumps for all royal households and other nonsense as in ‘we’re all in together’.
So true.
I know Bailey is following orders Aethelred but that does not mean he can avoid our derision.
Let’s not forget, wether it works or not, we are paying for it! Shame its not out of his personal pocket!
Absolutely Dinger.
Andrew Bailey to install heat pumps at Bank of England in net zero drive”
I really do wonder about the sanity of the Nett Zero warriors. Lets say for a moment that AGW is true and we ARE heading for a ‘tipping point’ at which the earths climate will be radically changed. Do they expect the UK to do all the heavy lifting while China and India continue to put billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.? Its a blind spot that all the climate commentators seem to have. No-one seems to press them on it either, but then the climate emergency is ‘somewhere else’ isn’t it.
Of course, CO2 is just plant food, and over the last 10 years 500 billion tons of CO2 has been produced by mankind, and the temperature hasn’t gone up at all. There’s proof of the lie right there. They are right about a tipping point, though, not for the climate, but the response of the citizen to the eco-lunacy. Air travel in about 2026 is my guess when everyone realises that its not being made more expensive. Its being turned off. I still fully expect that the citizens will have had enough of it. This date may come in a bit if Labour are in power we will be spoon-fed breakfast, lunch and dinner eco-mania.
I think the idea is to shame China into emulating our example. They will, of course, be enormously encouraged in this by calling Xi a dictator, accusing them of using slave labour for our products, and waging war on them over Taiwan.
China is an ancient civilisation and recognises true virtue when it sees it.
Shame China..? Are they suggesting that Chinese don’t love their children.? Same with India, or all the other countries that aren’t following this nonsense.? I get that there are people who think this is a real existential threat to mankind, but if it takes everyone in the world to be doing this, isn’t it utterly futile. The UK, through de-manufacturing itself, and moving to a renewables power model still produces 78% of the CO2 we did 20 years ago. At what point do you just accept that this can’t be achieved here or anywhere else and start thinking about alternatives, like mitigation of the ‘effects’.?
..it’s the last gasps of a dying hegemon, who are so busy feathering their own nests they are completely blind to what is happening in the bigger part of the world….which will get on fine without it….
we are at a real ‘Canute moment’…..
Konstantin Kisin slaps down Paul Mason on Politics Live.
Really..? Konstantin was doing the ‘talking over people, pitching strawmen arguments’ like a good leftie. Mason was essentially right what he said about international regulations and why banks act in their own interests. What Mason was allowed to get away with was how that relates to Yorkshire clergymen questioning why everything has to have a pride flag on having his account closed. Sorry Konstantin. I dont think you ‘murdered’ his argument at all. You ended up looking like the petulant one.
It’s interesting how people in these shows don’t really listen or take the time to understand alternative opinions. It’s all about who shouts the loudest and, in Mason’s case, who gets to smile as if he’s won the argument. If international banking regulations can ‘debank’ someone for an effin’ rumour, then international banking regulations (IBRs) need to be hauled over the coals. However, you know and I know that this is absolutely nothing to do with IBRs. It is about closing down a threat to the mainstream narrative. Not content with closing Farage down, it is now attacking GB News’ funding sources. Kisin could have been clearer about this but unfortunately Mason is a a darling of the commentariat, being a leftie and cultural Marxist stooge, probably with a shiny trouser bottom from sitting around in too many TV studios, and is well trained in opinion piece theatrics.
And the big news of the day, Rutte is out! Well I’m pleased to see the back of him but we’ll just get another WEF puppet in his place;
”Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said the “firmness” he showed this week during discussions with other Cabinet was not constructive, but that was not the reason for this fourth Cabinet’s collapse on Friday. He does not blame himself, saying only that he “could have presented his objections more kindly.”
Rutte said, “That was not the reason the Cabinet fell.” The current Cabinet will continue in a caretaker capacity, with elections likely in November. Rutte said he does not yet know whether he will be available again as party leader, and will take time to think about it. “If you ask me now, I would say yes,” the prime minister said, giving his standard answer. “But it’s also up to the party.”
Other parties did point their finger at the current VVD leader for the collapse of the Cabinet. CDA party chairman Pieter Heerma called his attitude bordering on reckless and “irresponsibly harsh,” when speaking to Nieuwsuur.
Rutte put pressure on the negotiations by grilling ChristenUnie over there position on the influx of asylum seekers, and threatening a rare roll call vote during the Council of Ministers meeting over the matter, sources said. Heerma thinks that “borders on reckless politics”.
https://nltimes.nl/2023/07/08/rutte-says-blame-cabinets-collapse-coalition-parties-say-otherwise
LOL..was just posting the article from the Telegraph..LOL!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/07/07/dutch-government-mark-rutte-ministers-clash-migration/
The Dutch government fell on Friday night amid deep divisions over plans to restrict the right of asylum seekers to bring their families to the Netherlands.
Mark Rutte, the prime minister, had called for a crackdown on family reunification, but that had infuriated two of the four parties in the ruling coalition of conservatives and liberals.
Mr Rutte said his coalition government was resigning as differences between the parties were “irreconcilable.”
There are deep divisions between the liberal D66 and centrist Christian Union, which oppose the crackdown and Mr Rutte’s VVD and the Christian Democrats.
Asylum applications in the Netherlands jumped by a third last year to over 46,000, and are expected to increase to more than 70,000 this year – topping the previous high of 2015 in a densely populated country of about 18 million people.
Mr Rutte wants to reduce the number of refugees to head off the challenge from parties such as the populist Farmers-Citizen Movement (BBB).
The BBB won a landslide victory in regional elections to become the largest party in all 12 Dutch provinces in a vote dominated by tractor protests against Mr Rutte’s plans for compulsory farm buyouts to meet EU climate targets.
Caroline van der Plas, the BBB leader, has called for a cap of between 50 to 100 asylum seekers per city council or regional authority, as she looked to consolidate her victory in a vote that became a referendum on almost 13 years in office of “Teflon Mark” Rutte.
Haha, yes we’re always in sync. Uncanny! LOL Yes it was all about the immigrants. This from yesterday;
”The ruling Dutch coalition has collapsed after failing to reach a deal over how to handle the number of asylum seekers entering the Netherlands, After days or talks between the key members of Mark Rutte’s Cabinet, they were unable to reach a compromise, sources close to the talks told NOS, RTL Nieuws and ANP.
It marks the end of Rutte’s fourth consecutive Cabinet.
A final attempt to reach consensus ended without result on Friday night. They were debating a last proposal from Eric van der Burg, the state secretary in charge of asylum policy.
Van der Burg reportedly put forward a proposal to prevent more asylum seekers from entering when the facilities set up for their reception becomes overcrowded. Such a situation occurred repeatedly last year, leading to international condemnation as asylum seekers were forced to camp outside the Ter Apel reception center in extremely poor conditions with limited access to medical care, clean toilets or showers.”
They’ve erected these brightly coloured box things next to the David Lloyd over here and I drive by them regularly. It was my daughter watching the news that told me what they were. They’re one room constructions for migrants awaiting housing, they have showers and toilets on site, like a camp site, and they have no cooking facilities so get meals delivered. They all have bikes outside, a basic necessity over here, lol. Anyway, its often reported that the conditions in these immigration shelters are substandard, people even having to sleep outside or on chairs, they’re using cruise liners in ports to house them, I mean, logic dictates you need to sort the present crisis not keep shipping more of them into the bloody country! And of course people cannot get onto the housing ladder due to the shortage. Of course there’s a huge impact on the Dutch and people already here, expats like us. It’s insane to just keep on going and hoping for miracles. Although I obviously do agree that kids should not be separated from their parents.
Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s tweet on the matter;
”After 10+ years of Mark Rutte’s globalist destruction policies, we now have a real chance of getting our country back.
From what I can tell about the situation now, I think the actual fall of the cabinet itself is all for show. The ‘disagreement’ about immigration that they’re mentioning as the deciding factor, is not the real issue, because all government parties are in favour of more mass migration, including Mark Rutte’s VVD.
Rutte just seems to think that he can trick the Dutch people into believing that he actually wants a stricter immigration policy this time around, and he thinks he can get re-elected again if he makes these false new promises.
Do not fall for it.
We cannot let him win again.
If the Dutch people stop falling for his lies and get rid of him and his globalist policies once and for all, we can actually turn things around, stop the expropriation of our farmers, push back on immigration, and take back our national sovereignty from organisations like the EU and the WEF.
In other words, this is a massive opportunity for us.
Let’s pray that enough people have woken up and will actually vote for change this time.
We will not get a second chance.”
https://twitter.com/EvaVlaar/status/1677431582884241411
We seem to have been here before..and we’ve seen horrible people get re-elected. I think people fear change perhaps..anyway
This will be so interesting….
What will the Dutch voters decide?
Continue immigration?
Stop immigration?
And what about closing farms?
I sincerely hope common sense prevails.
Really, what is there to say? Except they’ve all gone NUTS!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/07/refusing-fund-spouse-partners-transition-domestic-abuse-cps/
Spouses who refuse to fund their partner’s gender surgery may be domestic abusers, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) says in new guidance.
The CPS has listed nine types of behaviour which could amount to abuse of trans or non-binary people by their partners or members of their family.
These include “withholding money for transitioning,” which would include either spouse refusing to pay for gender surgery, counselling or other treatment in a way that amounted to coercive control or abuse.
Other behaviours could be “criticising the victim for not being ‘a real man/woman’ if they have not undergone reassignment surgery,” or “threatening or sharing pre-transition images,” or refusing to use their preferred name or pronoun.
Another means by which families can be destroyed. Maybe it is from crazy people but it certainly benefits cold, calculating collectivists.
Yes, I agree..just don’t have a partner..be free and single, let the rest of us pay for any children you have..just another reason to be selfish and irresponsible!?
With acts like this, it is plain to see that all institutions have been co-opted into the destruction of society, whilst appearing as champions of freedoms and rights. It is a well-worn path. Create division, break down the traditional family, pit partner against partner, race against race, religion etc etc etc. Look at the language they use: domestic abusers, victims, preferred pronouns. They are engineering a breakdown and the CPS are in on it as probably most of the judicial system. If they can break us apart so they we are worried about speaking the truth, are ashamed of our history, no control over our own finances (CBDCs) and are watched 24/7 and have to accept untold numbers of immigrants into our communities, they can create a subservient population.
That’s it Aethelred.
This is big as it is evidence of deliberate harm and fraud by pharma. Best to read the article as Kevin McKernon is explaining in plain English for a change;
”This DNA contamination is important as it is a result of a manufacturing change Pfizer performed after the clinical trial. This is evident in the EMA documents and published in the BMJ (Levi and Guetzkow). Process 1 used synthetic DNA for the trial. Process 2 was used to scale up the manufacturing and this required cloning of the vaccine encoded DNA into a plasmid for replication in E.coli. This process is materially different but was treated as a bio-equivalent.
A small 250 person test was performed comparing Process 1 to Process 2 and the results demonstrate higher adverse events in the Process 2 material and lower RNA integrity.
A recent analysis of Pfizer’s pivotal study (Levi and Guetzkow) found 1.5-3 fold higher rates of adverse events in patients after crossover and presumably receiving Process 2 material, compared with patients before crossover, presumably receiving Process 1 material.
From Levi and Guetzkow-
“The protocol amendment states that “each lot of ‘Process 2’-manufactured BNT162b2 would be administered to approximately 250 participants 16 to 55 years of age” with comparative immunogenicity and safety analyses conducted with 250 randomly selected ‘Process 1’ batch recipients. To the best of our knowledge, there is no publicly available report on this comparison of ‘Process 1’ versus ‘Process 2’ doses.”
The Vaccine Efficacy and safety was broadcasted to the world based on the Process 1 results. But the Process 2 vaccines are now known to have plasmid derived double stranded DNA in the vials. This contaminant was not part of the informed consent process nor was it present for the Process 1 RCT.”
https://anandamide.substack.com/p/executive-summary-of-the-fda-vrbpac?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Kevin McKernon was on Steve Kirsh’s Vsrf weekly update discussing this
https://www.vacsafety.org/episode-84/
And JJ Couey reviews the discussion on twitch
https://m.twitch.tv/videos/1865197062
JJ seems to think this is all a distraction encouraging us to believe there is nothing wrong with mRNA transfection as a medical treatment so long as you manufacture it properly.
Whatever. I imagine there is a reason why they didn’t use process 1 for the mass roll out. Speed and cost.
Thanks. Is this the one where Kevin debunks the theory that viruses don’t exist in 20 secs flat? I saw a clip but not got round to watching the full thing. Story of my life.
We know vax-generated spike proteins end up in the brain and this is a very good but scary paper that explains the mechanisms. Very worrying findings here;
”We have examined the extensive literature concerning the prion-like properties of the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein. Furthermore, we identify pathways through which the mRNA vaccines could be capable of delivering the spike protein to the brain, which we suggest happens via exosomes released from germinal centers in the spleen traveling up the vagus nerve, increasing the risk of neurodegenerative disease. Should this happen, it would be expected that the COVID-19 vaccines would shorten the time period before neurodegenerative disease manifests in susceptible individuals. We speculate that the age of onset of neurodegenerative disease at the population level will decrease in the future in countries where vaccine uptake has been high.
Particularly concerning is the evidence that CD16+ monocytes can continuously produce spike protein for months after vaccination, possibly through prolonged cytosolic presence of mRNA or reverse transcription of the mRNA into DNA. It has become clear that the antibodies induced through vaccination wane over time, necessitating frequent boosters to raise the antibody levels for sufficient protection from COVID-19. With each booster comes a compounded risk of future neurodegenerative disease. Fortunately, Omicron variant infection has a greatly reduced prion-like capability, and thus, with the cessation of mass vaccination, the expected increase in prion-like diseases could stabilize over the coming years.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9922164/
I feel pretty confident that by 2050 at the latest mandatory euthanasia will be introduced and the excuse will be increases in the numbers suffering from dementia. Canada is already testing the water in this regard.
And eventually there will be population caps.
I am not joking.
It won’t need to be mandatory. The behavioural psychologists will manipulate people into thinking killing themselves is better for society.
Mass culling is not a vote winner but having policies that make self-disposal quick and easy is legal and, after much propaganda, socially acceptable.
OK, I admit I’ve only read the Mail’s coverage of this paper – not the paper itself. However, the article suggests one of the main possible reasons for disparity in eye damage is disparity in exposure to UV in sunlight.
Any argument they can fabricate to support their main goals will be used. What they don’t mention is the much higher usage of mobile devices and screens (blue light), the usage of LEDs in car headlights and, well, most other lighting, including those ridiculously bright streetlights, and the fact that most people wear dark glasses when it’s sunny even when the sun is not in their eyes. The latter point is interesting. For some time now, I’ve stopped wearing dark glasses because, believe it or not, the subconscious message to the brain is that you are in the shade. Because of that, the body does not produce as much melanin as it would normally do – this might be small or it might be large but it has been noted. Then people apply a largely chemical cream to their skin to stop them getting sunburned while a massive radiation source, the sun, blasts the chemical cream with radiation. I wonder what would happen in that case?! Then people wonder why they develop skin cancers, moles etc. The answer is to limit one’s exposure to all those light sources, limit one’s exposure to the sun, stop using suncream, stop wearing dark glasses unless right in your eyes or wear a hat maybe. In the tropics, indigenous people sit in the shade. The climate change argument is a complete red herring – of course!
…not the fact then that on the Yellow Card, VAERS, and EUDRA..after the stabination
blindness and eye problems increased massively?
It’s getting harder to find info on this but up to December 2022 just on UK Yellow Cards there were nearly 27.000 ‘eye disorders’…..!!
Yes, of course, that is a major one, Gummy!
Makes a change from masturbation
“Now scientists say climate change is making us blind”
So between the tropics of cancer and Capricorn where its always hot and wet, everyone should be blind?
..something else that people who are now ‘awake’ see for what it is..there will no doubt be a ‘vaccine’ or ‘treatment’ coming soon…
(https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230131124430.htm)….
New vaccine targets life-threatening fungal infections, a growing health concernFungal infections cause 1.5M+ deaths each year, and there’s no vaccine to prevent them.supported by the NIH and CDC!…..LOL!
In which the poor Africans will be used as experimental fodder to make money..and ‘test’ their wares.
https://polioeradication.org/news-post/africas-largest-polio-vaccination-drive-since-2020-targets-21-million-children/
26.5.2023
The exercise, which will begin in Cameroon, Chad and Niger before being extended to the Central African Republic next week, comes in response to 14 detections of type-2 poliovirus in the countries so far this year: one sample from environmental surveillance in Niger tested positive; six confirmed cases were reported in Chad; and seven in the Central African Republic.
No cases have been reported this year in Cameroon.
wild type2 polio has been eradicated..the type two circulating now is vaccine derived,
but the WHO state this is because there is low vaccination uptake?
Can someone make it make sense why the WHO et all are pushing the vaccines…?
Seriously if there is a good medical reason I’m missing..what is it?
….or is it a ‘there’s no malaria in Florida..release the modified mosquitos..now we’ve got the first evidence of malaria..and there’s a new jab for that’ scenario…!!??
I would like to know more about these fungal infections and why people are dying from them, possible prevention and treatments etc. The assumption that a vaccine is the answer to everything is nonsense.
This week’s Highwire features a talk Del Bigtree recently gave to PERK which reviews the issues and cover ups on childhood vaccine efficacy and safety. He makes some strong points eg how herd immunity has been destroyed by mass vaccination, how measles is not especially deadly and how polio is now a disease perpetuated by the vaccines.
If it’s just started to sling it down where you are..as it’s pouring here..you could do worse than making a cuppa and have a listen to this…
Excellent discussion with Russel Brand and Tucker Carlson (his first interview since being sacked from Fox)….
Really great..and humane…discussion between two honest sensible adults…about …Trump, Fox, censorship, War, RFK, big Pharma…a bit of everything..I highly recommend it.
https://rumble.com/v2yqv78-live-tucker-carlson-world-first-interview-since-leaving-fox-russell-brand-0.html
I’ve been a big fan of Russell Brand for a long time, since he was sacked by the BBC and demonised by the mainstream media for something which was not at all his fault – it was the fault of Jonathan Ross and even more the fault of the BBC editors of the programme in question, which was not live.
But he didn’t point the finger at his friend, took it on the chin, created a hilarious stand-up show about it, and moved on to better things.
People who don’t listen to the lies of the mainstream media can see that he is a very compassionate and intelligent human being.
Yes he is…. I suspect in ‘real life’ he might be a bit more airy-fairy liberal than me..(LOL)….but I like that he champions difference….and wants and is open to inclusive discussions…..
I wish the conversation these two had was the norm..and it should be….sad that they are both labelled with the “misinformation” label by the PTB….!
Looks like a DNA & data collecting exercise…. Trust the NHS & government to have your best interests at heart?
The most powerful word we can use in these times is “No!”
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/everyone-over-40-england-sent-27234353
“Looks like a DNA & data collecting exercise…. Trust the NHS & government to have your best interests at heart?”
Exactly. And what’s the betting that access to medical services will be restricted or possibly even denied for those who refuse to comply.
Leaving aside the ulterior motives… they’ve learned nothing about the science of screening in the last twenty years, since the time we used to get urgent phone-calls at night from terrified patients who’d had a mildly elevated cholesterol on a voluntary screening at the chemist.
At the time the NHS were running TV ads urging people to get a test done, which might eventually get someone on useless statins for life. But they didn’t do TV ads urging people with acute chest pain to call an ambulance NOW and not wait until morning, as an hour’s delay can make the difference between recovery and cardiac death. Priorities set by fashion and Pharma, I suppose.
I concede that the latter ads would be completely useless now as it takes 24 hours for an ambulance to arrive and get you to the hospital.
..they can bugger off….! If I get one it’s going in the bin….!
Why don’t they just ask quacksinated or unquacksinated…..then bother the former with their heart health tests!!??
I propose we refer to the current period as “the Endarkment” or the end of the enlightenment.
wherever you turn all public discourse seems to be brainless. Whether it is doubling down on windmills or cricket commentators or interviewees telling the audience about how batters (UFH) want runs and bowlers want wickets.
it is all infantile.