While high profile court cases and social media are the visible manifestations of the assault on freedom of speech they represent a fraction of the scenarios where, across Britain in 2024, employees as well as members of clubs, societies and congregations are being brow-beaten into silence and compliance, forced to wear a mask in public where their true opinions and thoughts are hidden. We rarely hear about the plight of these victims although we are all those victims, oppressed by an aggressive tyranny which has captured our institutions. I would argue that the impact on our society of this ‘soft’ tyranny is far more damaging than even legislation and it is exactly the technique used to control the population in the post-Stalin period in the USSR.
I have spent the last 30 years working as a Human Resources Executive in some of the U.K.’s leading organisations and over that time I have seen, first hand, the creep of radical ideological politics into the workplace. In many organisations HR is blamed for this, but this misunderstands the function of HR. HR, like every other profession, has been ideologically captured by critical race theory and radical trans ideology, both of which have tenets that run contrary to U.K. Employment Law and the Equality Act 2010, which some organisations have discovered to their cost. HR is merely the means of enforcement. As HR used to enforce IT pornography policies, it now enforces woke ideology, but it only does so because the organisation, and those who own or run the organisation, demand it does so.
I am sure the following situation is not unique. You are in a work meeting and discussing a proposal – for example, mandatory unconscious bias training. There are 12 of you in the meeting. One person (always white, usually middle class) is passionately advocating the training. Everyone else is either nodding along or sitting in silence. But they are all thinking the same:
- Is it a good idea to effectively accuse the majority of our employees of being racists just because they were born in a white skin? Isn’t that, in itself, a bit racist?
- Hold on a minute. What do we do if someone refuses to attend the training? If we force them and they continue to resist then we may end up with a constructive dismissal case which we are likely to lose, to the cost of the reputation, share price and finances of the business.
- I’m uncomfortable with this. Are we not politically indoctrinating our employees?
- I’ve read that the psychologist who developed the principle of ‘unconscious bias’ has since dialled back his research and has specifically said it shouldn’t be used for ‘training’ as it is likely to have the reverse effect to that intended.
- I’d better keep quiet. I’m in my 50s and the chances of landing another job if I get fired are thin.
You look at your colleagues, they have a rather fixed expression on their faces, somewhere between mild constipation and zealous earnestness. You know that they all have these concerns. Why? Because they are professionals, most of whom have spent the last decades honing their skills in analytical thinking and critical analysis in a business or organisational environment. But when the proposer asks, “do you agree?” someone agrees, several others nod along, some may even outdo each other and enthusiastically prostrate themselves at the altar of the idea. But usually no one disagrees.
In one such meeting I was reminded of a line in The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn. During one of the Party Congresses in the 1930s, the applause after one of Stalin’s interminable speeches famously lasted for a very long time:
The applause went on – six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly… Nine minutes! Ten!… Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers.
While it is relatively easy to understand why a Party Delegate may not wish to be the one who stops clapping, the penalties for upsetting the Stalinist state are on record. Surely, it is histrionic to compare such with a corporate meeting on unconscious bias training? However, the point is that the behaviour of the audience is the same when the penalty for not demonstrating sufficient enthusiasm for a DEI policy is significant enough to ruin your life. That’s the point: disagreement isn’t countenanced; anything short of enthusiastic endorsement is unacceptable.
Why is this?
Cowardice is a very easy accusation to level if you haven’t got a family, mortgage, rent, cars to finance. Saying the ‘wrong words’ – a.k.a. your professional opinion – in these situations can literally destroy your life. Those of us who are at the level to make these decisions have increasingly specialised skill sets with limited employment options. Open your mouth and you don’t only lose your job – you lose your career as well as any freelance opportunities. There are literally hundreds and probably thousands of people on LinkedIn who have had their careers destroyed by questioning The Message. It is the new heresy and, in contrast to the Christian religion, humility, mercy, redemption and forgiveness are just not a thing.
Say the wrong thing as a white straight man and you are a racist. Say the wrong thing as a black straight man and you have been corrupted by ‘whiteness’. Say the wrong thing as a white woman, you’re a TERF, etc.
What is the ‘wrong thing?’ You thought that arguing against the motion was the wrong thing? Sorry, ‘silence is violence’, which means keeping your mouth shut won’t protect you. Unless you enthusiastically applaud the idea, you will be accused of causing physical harm to vulnerable people.
Now you might argue that it is the duty of us all to fight injustice even if that means poverty for your family, repossession, unemployment, etc. and, yes, the courts and employment tribunals often find in favour of the brave few. However, do not think that the justice system moves quickly. It also wants paying. It will usually take two to three years to bring a case. In that time, teenagers grow up, university courses are completed, marriages collapse due to the stress of unemployment. Yes, you may be vindicated in time, but at what cost? Look what happened to Graham Linehan. His ‘crime’? Suggesting that the transition of children might not be such a good idea. His punishment? He lost everything – his job, his income, his home, his marriage, his family. He is still being persecuted – banned from venues. His career as a comedy writer is over, although he may be able to rebuild it in time. He did nothing criminal, nothing wrong. He merely voiced an opinion that most people in Britain agree with. If they can do this to a high profile person like Graham they can do it to everyone, including a 50-something manager in a U.K. FTSE 250, especially if he’s white and straight. I could cope with my career being ended; I have other skills that don’t depend on my HR expertise. I have a strong marriage. But would I risk putting it under that amount of strain? Call me old-fashioned, call me ‘toxically masculine’, but my reason for existing is to be a husband, a father, a rock for my family. Without them I am nothing. Without them there is no reason to go on. I know myself pretty well and without my family I would self-destruct in a matter of months.
Of course, it was the DDR, East Germany, which perfected this psychological oppression. The Stasi and their masters realised that the mere process of the justice system could be used as punishment. Therefore, the mere threat of arrest or investigation over your words or thoughts was enough to enforce compliance. You didn’t have to be found guilty. The stigma of investigation would destroy your life as friends and clients turned their backs on you. Unemployment etc. soon followed. The East Germans even had a word for this: zerzertsung – punishment through process.
So, cowardice? That’s an opinion you may have in your 20s but put yourself in the shoes of others. Of course, employment law is meant to protect us from this, and to an extent it does. However, it’s extraordinary how many employers will happily persecute their employees for wrongthink because in their opinion it is ‘the right thing to do’ rather than in any way legal. Ten minutes perusing the pages of the Free Speech Union’s website is enough time to say: “What were they thinking?” These days, ‘progressive’ organisations act outside the law because they think it is the ‘right thing to do’ and never mind the cost. When you have the likes of Disney Corp losing an estimated $100bn in earnings due to its politicisation of content and alienation of customers, don’t be surprised if that regional building society you work for decides to break U.K. Employment Law and fire you because you’ve expressed a legally protected belief.
Even in organisations which do adhere to the letter of the law, don’t expect promotion if you hold ‘undesirable’ opinions. For at least 20 years, ‘Diversity’ has been a key performance indicator in the behaviour matrix that HR people use to assess someone’s suitability for a job. The question is couched in an open format at interview or appraisal. It used to be: “Give me an example of when you demonstrated your commitment to diversity at work?” In 2024, you are more likely to get: “What ally-ship activities have you taken part in over the last 12 months?” If you answer this with anything other than an enthusiastic litany of how your team celebrated Black History Month or how your entire team travelled to your nearest Pride Festival on a Saturday, then don’t expect to score well – and if you don’t demonstrate you’re On Message you’ll be marked as ‘problematic’. So you may not lose your job, but you won’t get promoted. If you are lucky, like I was, you may get parked in a role where you cannot progress anywhere, but where your critical thinking and project troubleshooting skills are needed when the real world comes to bite. But the moment you’ve mopped up another disaster caused by overzealous enforcement of EDI dogma, it’s back to career Coventry with you.
Don’t think you’re safe in a small business. In the business-to-business market, The Message is enforced through procurement policies. If you want to supply, say, cleaning services, paper clips or potatoes to an NHS Trust or a large private company then before you can even start discussing contracts, Procurement Policies are used to weed out any supplier who isn’t ideologically aligned (or says he is). Such organisations want to know that they are working with the right type of supplier. This used to be sensible: asking for a valid health and safety policy, for example, or ensuring there is an anti-slavery policy in place to ensure the supply chain is free from modern-day slave labour – these are sensible demands. But those of us who questioned whether this opened the door to increasingly demanding requirements 20 years ago were ignored. Time has justified this concern. Want to sell to some NHS Trusts? Well you’d better have an Anti-Racism Policy in place – which means regurgitating the precepts of Critical Race Theory.
The general public don’t know about this because such procurement is carried out under the veil of ‘Commercial Confidentiality’. But it is rife and it is how DEI is enforced in small and medium-sized enterprises. Don’t think that you’ll get away with providing paperwork to shut them up. The DEI teams at your customer want more than box-ticking – they want evidence. You need to demonstrate that you are On Message.
In his 2007 book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, Orlando Figes studied dozens of unpublished private archives and family memories of those who lived in the USSR under Stalin. The book focuses on how normal people actually lived and survived under the Government and cultural orthodoxy of Communism. How do you live in a society when your own children may betray you to the Cheka (Humza Yousaf take note)? Where children who grass on their parents’ wrongthink are lauded as child saints like the loathsome Morozov. The answer is you wear a mask. One diary of a man living in the Soviet Union in the 1960s discusses how you wore the mask. You wore it in front of children, you wore it in front of your young children, you wore it at work, you wore it all the time. If it came off, it was only to those in whom you trusted absolutely and only when in a remote place where no one else was around. Under Stalin, you would get shot if your mask slipped. Under Brezhnev, your career would be ruined, your social life over. You might even go to prison.
Wearing a mask is living a lie – being socially forced to act and agree with something that you fundamentally believe is wrong is no life at all. It causes stress, depression, ill health. But it also demonstrates the corruption of the state and society. A society where the truth is suppressed, where opinion is regulated and where speech is policed is not a free society and that society will wither – economically, spiritually and socially – until it collapses under the weight of its own bullshit. This is why people who lived under the heel of the USSR, across Eastern Europe, are so attuned to the slippery slope we’re on in the West. We are already there in our work and cultural lives. We are already living under the threat of zersertsung.
Happily, we are not yet at this stage legally. The law still protects us to an extent in the U.K., despite organisations deliberately ignoring it. Countries like Scotland and Canada, however, are swiftly trying to bring the law into line with the new quasi-religious orthodoxy. Culturally, we now live in a society where ideological conformity among our employers is at the Brezhnev level. If you don’t believe me, put a post on your intranet company forum like “All lives matter” or “Medically transitioning children is not a good idea because they are minors” and see what happens.
So, where do we go from here? Well, some of us have been fighting a rear guard action on this for years now. In my job, I’ve been doing this by pointing out the legal risks of excessively woke policies, as well as the business risks, evidencing these with examples from the big settlements the Free Speech Union has secured in the Employment Tribunal and the various examples of ‘go woke, go broke’, like Bud Light. However, it is no longer enough to rely on the courts to protect our freedom of speech. The system takes too long and the costs are prohibitive. While you may eventually be compensated, the damage to your life will already have happened. The best means of defence is deterrence and, thanks to the hard work of Free Speech Union, I can now warn employers and clients if they insist on firing an employee for ‘misgendering’ and point to examples of where the courts have sided with gender critical employees. Increasingly, I am seeing that mere membership of the FSU is enough to get an employer to back down, or at least pause to seek a compromise.
The insidious creep of increasingly draconian ‘hate speech’ laws is rapidly turning into a deluge, with Canada, Ireland and now Scotland all introducing laws which go way beyond the reasonable and which flout the very idea of a ‘law’ in the first place. Take Police Scotland’s patronising ‘Hate Monster’ who states in an advert warning the public (specifically 18-30 year old working class white men – wait, isn’t that racial profiling and breaking the very law it is designed to warn about?) that “before you know it, you’ve committed a Hate Crime”. One of the principles of a fair and transparent justice system is that you cannot break laws “before you know it” because the law is supposed to be reasonable, proportionate and understood. In this case, it is none of those things. Or take Trudeau’s even more sinister Bill C63, which introduces the concept of house arrest for ‘pre-crime’ Hate Criminals so if they think you might commit a hate crime they can lock you in your house and remove your online access. While this insanity is rapidly making headlines and, fortunately, causing a great deal of concern across the West, far more dangerous than Trudeau or Yousaf’s laws is the petty tyranny that woke has knitted into the fabric of our society through our workplaces and institutions and which forces us to wear ‘The Mask’ and live a lie.
What can you do to protect you and your family?
As an HR Professional, my advice to everyone is join the Free Speech Union. You cannot rely on your existing Trade Union to defend you – they have also been ideologically captured. As I said, I have seen companies back down when it’s pointed out that an employee they’re attempting to discipline or fire is a member of the Free Speech Union. Furthermore, I would urge students and anyone who is involved with an organisation, from the military to volunteering at a charity, to join.
The only way you can protect yourself and eventually remove masks from our society is to understand that united we stand, divided we fall.
C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot.
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The trickle has become a stream and will soon be a flood.
The accumulation of hard evidence will inevitably overwhelm ideological/political viewpoints.
…and the claims for compensation will overwhelm the Western economies. Target achieved……..
There should be an immediate ban on ALL modified messenger RNA “vaccines”.
Consider that the plan is for all vaccines to be mmRNA based. They are already in the pipeline.
So much money to be made you see.
However Joe Public is getting wiser.
So, the solution will be compulsory vaccination – in order to ease the burden on the NHS.
Alternatively they may consider a Rantzen – you can’t have any medical treatment on the NHS unless you’ve been jabbed.
Consider that the plan is for all vaccines to be mRNA based
Terrifying prospect.
Shouting into the void at this point. All who have realised have realised. The rest will carry on taking these things as long as they are able.
They’re beyond help – completely captured by the fear porn.
A chum of mine is currently at home “with covid”. I guarantee you he is not living in fear, but he has had all his boosters out of a sense of duty, because he believes that civil servants and “public health” officials would not be telling him to do anything that was unsafe.
“with covid”
How on earth do they know? Can people still get test kits? And why do they want to know which bug has caused their cough or whatever? I don’t tend to hang around in the pharmacy so they could have shelves full of them for all I know. I’ve never used one, but I’ve seen my daughter use one; looked uncomfortable.
I think a lot of people stockpiled them during “covid” when they were free – he has school age kids and I think they got given them. I don’t think he buys them. I think he tests himself because we were told to do so, and he cannot believe we would all be told to do something by “experts” if it was pointless.
AFAIK the do-it-yourself kits are for use when one has *no* symptoms.
AKA no illness
I was quite surprised to hear that a friend who was ill with a flu-like disease over this last weekend used a Covid lateral flow test and it came up negative. I thought they were designed to flag every random bit of DNA as Covid no matter what was put on the test spot including tomato juice and strawberry milkshake.
Agreed. I have one neighbour who is significantly vaccine injured with “Long Jab.” Our other neighbour, a woman in her mid-80s has witnessed the damage and knows that both I and the injured woman believe it was due to the jab, but she trooped off to get her Covid and ‘flu booster a few weeks ago “because her doctor recommends it.”
There will be millions like her who don’t think for themselves and still trust the medical profession. There’s no helping them.
Yes exactly. People that keep harping on about getting these things taken off the market are living in Cloud Cuckoo Land as it’s a pipe dream. Never going to happen, because that would mean there needs to be an acknowledgment that they do cause harms, over all these years and billions of administered jabs later. Can anyone actually imagine the fall-out and the flood gates that would open? As for the idiot jab junkies who keep rocking up for their next fix, I just put them on a par with anyone who wants to go ahead and stick heroin, cocaine, meth etc in their bodies. Their body, their choice, at the end of the day, they’re adults aren’t they? Let the fools get on with it. We’re not responsible for informing others or what decisions fellow adults make regarding their own health. And if anyone were to do a survey I’ll bet they all watch BBC.
I am fine with other people going to hell their own way, but these “vaccines” are paid for with my tax money, as are the “regulators” who pretend to keep us safe, as are the doctors and nurses who jab people.
Not so much the vaccine costs but the cost of treating those damaged by them. A neighbour has been put in a wheelchair by the vax. I volunteer with somebody whose husband has Behcet’s Disease which has all the hallmarks of being caused by the vax.
That is also a good point. But I would want to see the NHS go, too….
Sadly, I suspect you are quite correct. There’s too much at stake: profits, egos, reputations, not to mention horrific and unaffordable liabilities sheeted home to those in control who combined to deliver this abomination to the unthinking, trusting, public.
You only have to look at the number of MPs in the commons listening to Sir Christopher Chope on vaccine injury compensation (fewer than a dozen) to realise we have a very very very long way to go. But as they say it’s always darkest just before the dawn.
I hope you are wrong, but that hope may be in vain. One elderly neighbour who was deathly ill for months after taking the clotshot, nevertheless insisted on taking all the subsequent boosters that were urged upon him by helpful NHS staff. He’s still alive, no doubt because his batches happened to be the placebos.
Not placebos but because the batches are so badly made they vary greatly in active content and some have next to none.
Dear author/editor
The second of these two sentences doesn’t seem to me to follow from the first.
“An open letter to the General Medical Council of the U.K., written by Consultant Cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra and signed by several leaders in health, also makes reference to the petition of which he is a co-founder. They include the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Chris Whitty, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the British Government, Patrick Vallance, and the Secretary of State for Health, Wes Streeting.”
I presume the CMO et all are among the addressees of this “open letter”.
I had to go and read the open letter. It was cc’d to Chris Whitty, Patrick Valance and Wes Streeting.I thought the wording in the article suggested they were co-signatories.
Moderator here. Thanks for pointing this out, we’ve clarified the language in that paragraph
Thanks!
The Establishment doesn’t dare admit the truth. They are all implicated.
Our best hope is that Trump, RFK Jr, and Jay Bhattacharya lift the lid and apply the appropriate justice to everyone who orchestrated it in the USA, the 5 Eyes and NATO.
“Luigi, we got a few extra jobs for you.”
Under FOIA UsForThem has obtained the minutes of meetings held in Sept 2021 in which the UK’s four Chief Medical Officers agreed to overrule the JCVI to push through the vaccination of children for C19.
https://x.com/UsforThemUK/status/1866090967696077074
Was anything more wicked ever done? It was known by mid-21 that the so-called vaccines did not prevent infection or spread It was also known that children were at no risk from the supposed virus. What then was the medical, ethical or rational basis for jabbing children? There was none.
This is probably one of the most comprehensive & important articles on the DS ever.
There are quite a few people in my area I meet who are still plodding to the chemists with the ‘Get Your Covid & Flu Shots Here’ sign outside and getting spiked up. They could really benefit from reading an article like this. Even chatting to the chemist owner himself recently you can tell he’s uncomfortable and in denial but is probably only following NHS orders (or the money).
Toby, is there any way occasionally a vital article like this could be made free so it can be widely shared?
It’s the ‘money’ (like all of these pseudo medical professionals).
Jail! Jail! Jail! Jail!
There is the point that however ineffective these petitions are, they can now be on record against those they are addressed to.
I keep hearing, from numerous sources (radio call-ins, overheard discussions) incidents of how people have Died Suddenly, or have rapidly developed severe cancer or other similar serious conditions, and yet no-one in those conversations ever asks a simple question – had they just had a booster, or when was their last booster. You sort of suspect that is the question that needs asking, and answering!
I suspect there is extreme cognitive dissonance in play here, or it does just not occur to these people to even consider a possible causation or link!
Until everyone starts thinking like this, we will make no progress in getting these dangerous products stopped. I admire and applaud the people behind this and similar attempts, but we all know this will get nowhere, and not even be acknowledged.
But they will double down, and the NHS (whichever actual body) has already ordered mRNA “vaccines” for the highly touted Bird Flu, and the BBC had an headline a few days ago saying how the NHS is already seeing record hospitalisations for the “quad” of respiratory diseases, the fear is already being ramped up.
This is not going away! Imagine if they publicly admitted the problem, and god forbid they were wrong, and we anti-vaxxers were right all along – not happening!
I suspect there is extreme cognitive dissonance in play here, or it does just not occur to these people to even consider a possible causation or link!
Both of these. I’m not sure how you get people to think more deeply about their actions though.
I would guess a 100% association between listening to the BBC and taking the jabs.
Good point.
They are pushing lots of jabs including shingles and for respiratory disease. I do not touch them as I think it is the same MRNA crap relabelled.
However, it was interesting to hear that the 3 peeps who had taken the shingles jabs had all got real bad cases of shingles. So same repeat of Covid and the different toxicity of the batches.
I would like to see a list of all illnesses and diseases that can be directly linked to vaccines. We need to be knowing this.
Download, from Kindle, Dr Vernon Coleman’s ‘Anyone Who Tells You Vaccines are safe and Effective is Lying: Here’s the Proof’.
Opposing vaccination in England is like opposing the mafia in Sicily. You do not have a chance. Everyone is in for a piece of the action. Consider GPs in England. There isn’t one of them who doesn’t know the annually touted flu jabs makes no difference to rates of hospitalization and death. Not one. So, why the email and sms barrage – roll up, book your flu shot! – every November from your local surgery? The answer is depressingly simple. They’re totally in on the scam. Typical GPs makes £120K a year. If they get a practice clerk and nurse going properly – they won’t do a thing themselves, not even fill in the claim forms – they can each gross another £50K every year out of flu jabbing.
I agree, though at times the mafia have eventually been defeated.
Hallelujah!
This is fantastic news, and well done to Dr. Aseem Malhotra for launching that letter to the UK General Medical Council.
One statement of his is incorrect, however. He is not a “co-founder” of the HOPE Accord, though he undoubtedly signed it later. The following are the co-founders of the HOPE Accord:
“ON 3 JULY 2024, THIS ACCORD WAS AGREED AND SIGNED BY:
(alphabetically)
Dr Clare Craig, Diagnostic Pathologist, UK
Dr Suneel Dhand, Internal Medicine Physician, USA
Dr Joseph Fraiman, Emergency Medicine Physician, USA
Dr Charles Hoffe, Family Doctor, Canada
Dr Tim Kelly, Hospital Doctor and Systems Analyst, UK
Dr Jeyanthi Kunadhasan, Anaesthetist, Australia
Dr Dean Patterson, Consultant Cardiologist, Guernsey
Mr TJames Royle, CV Colorectal Surgeon, UK
Dr Jackie Stone, Zimbabwe
Dr Brett Weinstein, Evolutionary Biologist, USA”
Dr Malhotra has been a stalwart and well informed spokesman who has explained clearly and succinctly his legitimate concerns regarding the mRNA Covid vaccines. He has refused to be silenced despite threats and intimidation and has adhered faithfully to the GMC guidelines on the Duties of a Doctor and Good Medical Practice.
All doctors are bound by those guidelines but few practising doctors have had the courage to put their heads above the parapet.
The serious problems caused by the vaccines have become almost impossible to ignore yet most doctors have still failed to speak up to protect their patients.
First do no harm – “primum non nocere” – is the dictum that should be fundamental to ethical medical practice.
The harm caused by these vaccines and the silence of my profession is damning!
Oh look this is all over the front pages of the MSM. Oh it doesn’t seem to be anywhere that’s surprising!
“You can’t handle the truth!” I am convinced by this whole covid debacle that there are those who refuse to even consider the possibility there are those in positions of government and industry who are this evil. To do so would destroy their security and belief systems.
I completely agree with the letter and will not be injecting any mRNA products into my body for the forseeable future – which since I am 77 probably won’t be for very long 🙂
However I don’t see the value of the quote from Pat Cash. Very nice bloke, but is he now medically qualified or have any other relevant expertise ? Anecdotal data of this sort is what we are fighting against…