The U.K. has been consumed by a scandal involving the use of faulty accounting software, Horizon from Fujitsu, used by the Post Office to accuse postmasters and postmistresses of stealing funds. Under U.K. law, the Post Office is empowered to prosecute alleged offenders directly. Between 1999 and 2015, an astonishing 700-750 hardworking and conscientious managers of local community post offices, often the pillars of society and the very backbone of small businesses in the country, were convicted. Their protestations of innocence and suggestions of glitches in the software were dismissed: the computer does not lie, the courts were told and they accepted the infallibility of technology. Many were coerced into pleading guilty because they could not afford to fight a state behemoth. They lost the respect of their peers, many were ruined financially, several went to jail and some committed or tried to commit suicide.
It was only in 2019 that High Court Judge Peter Fraser cleared the postmasters and pinned responsibility for the financial discrepancies on the software. The Criminal Cases Review Commission has described the scandal as the “biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history”. But the scandal wasn’t over yet. Their efforts to overturn the wrongful convictions and receive reparations have been painfully slow and around 70 claimants died in the interim with their names still not cleared. As of January 2024, just 93 convictions have been reversed and only 30 people have received any compensation.
Although the scandal has been bubbling away under the radar for more than 20 years, a four-part ITV dramatisation that screened recently finally caught the public attention, and then some. Mr. Bates vs the Post Office tells the sorry tale through the eyes of one brave man Alan Bates, unflinchingly supported by his wife Suzanne Sercombe, who kept fighting the entire system and establishment to clear his name, exonerate their colleagues and indict the senior executives. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pledged to introduce a bill this year to exonerate all the postmasters convicted through the dodgy Horizon-based evidence.
The Metropolitan Police has launched an investigation into potential fraud, perjury and perverting the course of justice.
There are many parallels of this scandal with the Covid saga over the last four years. In what follows, I draw in particular on comments on the Horizon scandal in two recent articles in the U.K. Telegraph by columnists Allison Pearson (which attracted nearly 5,000 online comments) and Allister Heath (2,600 comments), and a third article in the Conservative Woman by Professor Angus Dalgleish.
The first obvious parallel is the blind faith in computers and technology that was untested in the real world. The two equivalents in the case of Covid are the elevation of mathematical models to science and the use of unreliable PCR tests, especially with elevated cycle threshold counts. The PCR machine can be made to run multiple ‘cycles’ (like a washing machine) to keep amplifying the target viral material in the sample to make it detectable. The Ct value, the number of cycles it takes to detect the virus, becomes increasingly less accurate beyond 25-28 Ct yet in some cases it was raised up to 40 and those who tested positive were treated as Covid cases.
Another parallel is in the awarding of state gongs to the perpetrators of mass cruelty. The then-CEO of the Post Office Paula Vennells got a CBE for her services to the Post Office (she has since bowed to public pressure to hand back the honour), while the number of health officials and scientists receiving honours have been sickeningly high.
A third is in the refusal of ministers and parliamentarians to listen to the ordinary people desperate to get their honour and lives back.
The Post Office Minister at the time, Sir (another one) Ed Davy, refuses to accept responsibility and instead blames it all on civil servants: they lied to him on an industrial scale! In fact it is the complicity of all the top institutions and their smug and self-righteous senior personnel – from cabinet ministers to judges, lawyers, executives, investigators, the Post Office board and the Fujitsu board, the engineers and technicians – that has been so sickeningly repeated in the Covid years.
It seemingly did not occur to anyone to ask why over 750 managers with hitherto unblemished records were suddenly all committing financial fraud at the same time, which coincided with the mass rollout of a new accounting software to Post Office branches across the country. No one seems prepared to stand up for the victims of the wrongs and the harms.
And no one still today is prepared to inquire into the dramatic explosion of reported adverse events and excess deaths that coincide with lockdowns and mass vaccinations. They too have encountered unconscionable delays in having their cases investigated and compensation awarded. In a related vein, very few countries seem prepared to take back healthcare workers and civil servants dismissed for refusing to comply with vaccine mandates.
A fourth commonality is the role of Andrew Bridgen MP, crying in the wilderness in both tragedies that something wrong was happening to the Horizon- and vaccine-injured that needed to be looked at. While his name has become familiar in the time of Covid, he had the conviction and the courage to act on it in trying, in vain, to highlight the plight of the postmasters for many years.
A fifth common theme is the class divide, where the rapacious political, bureaucratic and business elites got the financial and social rewards but the harms, pain and suffering were borne by the workers. The rewards – promotions, bonuses, honours – for ruining so many innocent, decent, honourable lives really stick in the craw.
A final common theme is that justice will not be seen to be done and the sense of justice will not be appeased unless many of the top people responsible are put behind bars. There will be no emotional closure for the victims and their families and no effective deterrent to future wrongdoing by jumped-up and condescending members of the ruling class without full and transparent criminal justice accountability. As Heath writes, the postmasters, “the best of Britain, were persecuted by the worst of Britain: the overpromoted corporate-bureaucratic class, the useless apparatchiks of Britain’s Kafkaesque bureaucracies, the unaccountable arms-length bodies, the out of control lawyers, the civil servants and the subsidy-hungry corporations”.
What we need to close this particular circle is both a proper inquiry and a human-interest personalised TV dramatisation of the Covid-related injustices inflicted by the unholy collusion between the different components of Big State, Big Pharma, Big Tech and the mainstream media.
Ramesh Thakur, a former UN Assistant Secretary-General, is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Senior Research Fellow at the Toda Peace Institute, and Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. His new book, Our Enemy, the Government: How Covid Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power (Brownstone Institute, 2023), is out now. This article was first published by Spectator Australia.
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Explains a lot. This is institutional child abuse. People have been arrested for less…
Savile was knighted and was sought after for marriage advice. His client’s brother frequented on Massad funded sex islands in the Caribbean and in New York.
By jove, I’m spotting a pattern…
“in which she lauded teenagers for their stoical refusal to “bellyache” and “moan” about mask requirements“
Absolutely, we should all look down on those who “bellyache” and “moan” about dictats that they really ought to just put up with in good, obedient spirit.
What does it actually cost someone to sit at the back of the bus, or wear a symbolic badge? Nothing much. People should obviously just obey orders from authority.
Just wear the damn mask/buckle up the damn seatbelt/take the damn injection….
Excellent nanny state stuff from the Guardian, as usual.
The Left regards even their own children primarily as being ‘machines’, as we learnt from Justice Sotomayor a few days ago.
I would love to see this poll question of a cross-section of a nation’s population:
Did you personally know any person under the age of 40 who has died from COVID in the past two years?
This poll question will never be asked, but if it was, and people answered honestly, probably 90 percent would answer “no.”
So the vast majority of the world’s population did not know any person under the median age who died from COVID.
What does this tell us?
Would this have been the case in 1918-1919 of the Spanish Flu?
I doubt it very seriously. Most people would have known several people under 40 who died of the Spanish Flu. In fact, I just read that the average age of a victim of the Spanish Flu was 28. The average age of a victim of COVID in most Western nations is 80 or older.
If you asked did you personally know anyone under the age of 21 who died from COVID, probably 99 percent of world inhabitants would answer “No.”
Why did we turn the world upside down when hardly anyone knows any person middle age or younger who has died from this “dreaded” disease?
Typical modern lefty. Loved the lockdowns. Her kids were no doubt all baking banana bread in between playing out in their nice garden while the poor were going round the twist in their tiny inner city flats. Easy to say kids are resilient when they have a piss easy middle class upbringing.
After working in a modern lefty environment for 8 years ( UK university) after spending 25 years working as a CNC machinist in a factory I found the modern lefty to be just awful. They say they are all for supporting those worse of than themselves but they will turn at the drop of a hat
Bounce Back Better.
It has to be laid bare, the sacrifice of the innocents. Only in such stark relief can we be forced to confront this malign influence. And of course there are even more serious interventions – the ministrations of Mr Spike. His name will not be in the shadows for much longer.Intelligent teenagers aren’t any different from adults this information has spread.
Zoe Williams lauds those who just got on the Train east to their new Jewish home outside Germany.
Bounce back from that one if you can.
eh?
Good old Zoe Williams. In a 2011 article on the London Riots she attached the sobriquet ‘Rat Lady’ to a poor shop keeper who had the temerity to refer to the yobs who ransacked her baby-wear shop as ‘feral youths’. Another example of her callous disregard for the suffering of individuals. Since then I always think of Zoe Williams as ‘that Rat Lady’.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/10/uk-riots-vigilantism-big-society
She’s and many of her ilk, are deluded if they think kids are going to just “bounce back”! Just shows how bloody blinkered and accepting of the narrative they are. Well, in my experience children ARE showing a degree of maturity when many of them come up to us at events to ask questions, because they now know they’re being manipulated and lied to!
I would have thought the skateboarding mum was referring to her sons ability to carry on after a nasty fall, not his psychological ability to survive pointless mandates.
The youngsters who do work their way through the horror they have been forced to endure and understand what is happening and what is coming will be far from the future compliant slaves TPTB desire.
I don’t really understand what happened to the Scottish. Maybe it’s Celtic enrapture to a great leader. But if that’s your fucking masot then you really do live in an age of diminished expectations.Snap out of it.
I have just come back from two days in Scotland, principally Edinburgh, the compliance was utterly depressing.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/11/the-people-who-brutalized-children-to-grab-emergency-powers-are-not-experts-theyre-evil/
Critically assess what’s said by an authority figure or a person wearing a uniform? Mustn’t have that!
And to go off only slightly on a tangent, I thought this opinion poll from France about reaction to Emmanuel Macron saying he wanted to drag “vaccine” resisters “in the shit” was interesting.
60% thought he was “wrong” or “very wrong”; 40% thought he was “right” or “very right”. (There are no “don’t knows” or “won’t says” in these or the following figures.)
Among the vaccinated, the figures were 56% and 44%.
It’s only when you get to those who have been “boosted” that the majority are favourable: 49%-51%.
Among those who describe themselves as supporters of a political party or grouping, the only section favourable to Macron’s statement are those who sympathise with “Ensemble Citoyens”, his own alliance.
BUT…
when asked whether they were in favour of putting restrictions on the “unvaccinated” to encourage them to get “vaccinated”, 60% were in favour.
Clearly there is an element of “It’s not what Macron does; it’s the way that he does it“.
The question is…can such an incumbent win an election?
Macron news
1) Daily Mail: “Brigitte Macron ‘received anonymous phone call saying her husband was with a gay lover’, French documentary claims”
They’re saying that whoever did it used the resources of an intelligence agency.
2) The Times are having a laugh. Macron is apparently in a “pole position”:
“Macron has pole position — but that’s no guarantee of French election success”
Soon the identity of the other man present when the “pole” was engaged will be revealed.
Guess what – Macron may not even run for re-election.
And I thought Macron wanted to shit in their general direction…
Well, let’s have a picture of Zoe Williams of The Guardian!
“When my father died, he left a stack of oral morphine by his bed, and my brothers, sisters and I all took it to see if we would get high. We didn’t. “Maybe it only works if you’re actually in pain,” I said. My sister replied: “I am in pain! My dad just died.” And we all laughed for a really long time.”
Zoe Williams
Below: Zoe in her trendy cannabis outfit.
Don’t have nightmares.
The correct quotation – my emphasis.
When my father died, he left a stack of oral morphine by his bed, and my brothers, sisters and I all took it to see if we would get high. We didn’t. “Maybe it only works if you’re actually in pain,” I said. My sister replied: “I am in pain! My dad just died.” And we all laughed for a really long time, so maybe we were a little high.
I don’t know if you have ever lost someone close to you but semi-hysterical irrational laughter is quite a common response even if you are not high.
What’s known as “a bit of a sinner.”
Williams’s willful blindness to the fact that those between the ages of 11 and 19 are actual individual people, with names…. and faces… and thoughts and feelings and achievements… of their own.
…….
Williams replays a conceit of the Left, which likes to render concrete realities into abstractions, to be designated by big concepts, arranged by big theories and administered by big policies, with little compassion for actual individuals.
It looks like generalisations are a bad thing when applied to teenagers but OK when applied to the left. Actually of course you can’t really make any useful statement about a group of people without some kind of generalisation.
Williams writes for the guardian – that’s all you need to know.
Welcome to the tyrannical ‘vaccine’ culture, organised by AI, and loved by The Guardian cult. Being human, and a rebellious teenager, is so 20th century…
I run the debating society at my school. This afternoon I had to endure the pathetic spectacle of a group of highly motived and enthusiastic 16 year olds debating their motion wearing crisis props on their faces, struggling to hear each other’s muffled points, and occasionally pulling them away from their mouth so they could breathe properly; they had had them on constantly for seven hours.
Zoe Williams
The wearing of these scientifically ridiculous and dehumanising props has been internalised by children across the world who now think that following orders, no matter how nonsensical, is the right thing to do.
So yes. Zoe Williams is asking us to look the other way while children are abused, demeaned, poisoned and brainwashed ready to join her sterile fuckwitted dystopian cuckoo land where facts don’t matter as long as everyone is appeasing their new corporate gods and brain dead communitarianism.
Excellent work CG.
I’m pretty sure that kid couldn’t remember who she was, or give a shit. You reap what you sow.
They get in everywhere if you let them and poison everything. I remember in 1983 this force was chasing me and I spent my teen years and twenties fighting the fucker. You can call him Wendigo or whatever but this is a spiritual force and you should just fight it regardless. My first experience in England was being held down on a bed and being injected with something and I struggles but they got it in anyway.
There really is no point replying to Guardian articles; it just indicates more respect than they deserve. Leave the sewer of the world’s press where it belongs (alongside Bozo and the fake Conservatives) – in the gutter.
Patronizing is the typical attitude of these people towards everyone, not just towards so-called teenagers.
It’s a different world for me. That parents would suggest it and children would adhere to it. I remember my teachers in Belfast and some of them loaded their canes with lead Which was fine. You fucked up and you paid for it. If there is any meaningful political struggle in the decades to come it will be the struggle against centralisation.
Children bounce back, it’s true.
But that doesn’t make it okay to beat them up for no reason.
It’s a joke a population of bloated baby boomers thinking that they control the minds of the young. It isn’t like that at all just wait and see. You can call them fucked up kids but they see more clearly than anyone.
Reasons not to cover faces
A random 10 minute search on Google will throw up a dozen reasons why covering faces is not progress. It seems that eye contact and communication by facial expression go to the very heart of what it is to be human. Therefore anything that prevents that for no good reason should be avoided. I would go further and say that for very good common sense reasons the following are not encouraged in most civilised but particularly British society. It just not the way we have done things, at least in the old normal. Basically in our very open culture there is an expectation that people can see each other’s faces.
* Wearing a motor cycle helmet in a bank, or petrol station – threatening
* Carrying on a conversation while wearing sunglasses – just plain rude
* Wearing a mask when entering someone’s house – a good indicator until very recently and maybe still that you are a burglar,
* Wearing a scarf over your face when going on a protest march – sure sign of extremist group membership and that you are up to no good
* And more recently, wearing a surgical mask which provides no protection from virus transmission.
For all of these reasons I believe that facial covering of any kind should be banned unless there is a good reason for it. I certainly will not engage with anyone whose face I cannot see if they are wearing a full face helmet, sunglasses, or a face mask. It is offensive and not British. To be be able to see someone’s face while interacting with them is part of what it is to be human being and stretches back into the mists of our evolutionary and social development. To cover faces deliberately and for no good reason denies that fundamental humanity. I was in a hospital not long ago. Masks were mandatory and I didn’t want to get into any confrontations so I complied. I was wearing a baseball cap with the peak pulled down, as it was raining outside. I caught a glimpse of myself in a darkened internal office window. I looked very threatening, and certainly unrecognisable. Mask wearing is not progress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGXlTth6rro
My anxiety over the last couple years reminded me of something. That is how I felt through my childhood. In both cases it was due to a lack of control over my life.
Children don’t have a lot of control over their lives and that alone is stressful. They’re the worst affected by this entirely political covid nonsense which reduces their control much more.
MSM is trying to make fun of people wanting to protect themselves with cheap and proven drugs. Ivermectin has been FDA approved for human use since 1996. It also beats Pfizer’s new wonder drug hands down, and costs next to nothing. Ivermectin doesn’t make tons of money. So they know the Covid shot is on its final gasp, so they take it add something different to it, rebrand under another name and charge 20 times what they would for ivermectin. I cannot wrap my head around this nonsense. When I explain this to my relatives they label me as crazy and ask me if I know better than science. I don’t make up these information out of my ass. All this information is true and proven. For some people it is near impossible for them to wake up. They are comfortable in their clown world life. If you want to get Ivermectin you can visit https://ivmpharmacy.com
While in general, the assertion that children are resilient may arguably be true, and that adversity can “toughen them up”, the nature of what is being required of them here is depriving them of the tools needed for developing resilience. And pretty much deliberately so, viz. the Bob Moran cartoon – “Mummy, I’m frightened . . . That’s the spirit!”
Zoe Williams!!
What on earth do people expect?
Dr Murphy mentions examples of fit and healthy athletes collapsing.
To this I would add that in the last couple of months I’ve read about 3 premiership football matches being delayed due to “a medical emergency in the crowd”. I don’t read a huge number of match reports, but prior to last Autumn I can’t recall ever having read about a match being delayed for this reason.
Are more football fans having medical emergencies than a year ago? If so what possible explanation could there be other than covid vaccines?