Readers of the Daily Sceptic may be interested to listen to yesterday’s UnHerd roundtable discussion conducted with Lee Cain (former Director of Communications at 10 Downing Street and a leading member of Boris Johnson’s ‘brain trust’). It is, as academics say, a ‘rich text’, with an awful lot in it to digest. But what really fascinated me about it – and what has really fascinated me about all of the General Election coverage so far – is the shoe that simply hasn’t dropped: namely, the biggest public policy decision since the Second World War, which was the 2020 lockdown.
Cain provides a very interesting diagnosis of what has gone wrong for the Tories since 2019. But it is only two thirds of the way into the conversation that the subject of Covid comes up. And it is discussed almost in isolation as though it took place in a never-never land – as though, indeed, it doesn’t touch upon almost every single thorny issue in which the Government now finds itself entangled: inflation, public borrowing, a self-entitled and unproductive civil service, NHS waiting lists, declining public order and civility, a backlog of criminal cases, excess deaths, huge increases in school truancy and behavioural problems in schools, and so on and so on.
It is almost as though spunking up to £410 billion of public money, deliberately stoking irrational fears amongst the populace, closing schools and universities for almost a year off and on, and telling people not to go to hospital for months on end was a series of actions that were always going to be consequence-free – a no-brainer that was just going to provide a sugar-rush of good opinion polling followed by a happy period of ‘building back better’. And it is painfully evident, listening to the Cain interview, that he remains stuck in that mindset, insisting that failing to have a lockdown in March 2020 would have been “against all the scientific evidence” and even doubling down on the insanity by suggesting that the main problem of Covid policy was trying to open up too quickly in the summer of that year.
It is like a cold slap in the face to have to reconfront the basic problem which has preoccupied all of us ‘lockdown sceptics’ since the beginning: the monomaniacal focus of the Establishment on ‘stopping the spread’ and the consequent total failure to see the bigger picture. It was as though lockdown was simply an inevitable response to an act of God – a freak weather event, which would require us to hunker down in a storm shelter for a period of time before emerging to rebuild – rather than a political decision that was made, and which involved the making of many foreseeable trade-offs that would have serious, long-term repercussions.
In a hundred years’ time, historians will be describing a pre- and post-lockdown era in the same terms in which they currently speak of a pre- and post-war, or a pre- and post-Great Depression, but our media commentators and political class behave as though it is an issue that is basically of trivial interest in understanding the Government’s chances in the next General Election. I suppose this is no great surprise to students of human psychology, who will understand very well the powers of cognitive dissonance and denial. Facing up to lockdown’s legacy would involve, for Lee Cain, a very painful process of self-reflection that he is understandably unwilling to undertake. But despite not being surprising, it is profoundly shocking and suggests we haven’t done very much collectively in the way of learning lessons or restoring a basic idea of what good government entails.
Nevertheless, it remains an interesting question to ask: what would the Government’s chances of winning this election be if it had stuck to the original plan regarding Covid and our position was now like that of Sweden? Maybe, just maybe, you guys should have listened to those of us who were suggesting it might be a good idea to hold your horses on the ‘We’re all going to die!’ routine?
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
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Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me. ———-As the old WHO song said “Won’t get fooled again”. ——-Nope, next time they won’t get away with it.
Next time they’ll blame the WHO. No, the other WHO.
That’s one of the purposes of the Pandemic Treaty …… “not us, Gullible Voters, the WHO made us do it.”
And likewise with the handing of decision making to unelected bodies of one sort and another for thirty years or more.
It has laid bare their gross incompetence, and they are not worth the cash we’re handing over to them. They might sound clever, but they haven’t got a clue when it comes to understanding the big picture.
Criminals. Fascists. Totalitarian wizards of incompetence. Paid of shills for criminal Pharma. Half wits pretending to be ‘the science’.
Guillotine them all.
I can’t forget Cummings wanted a death lottery where they wanted to inject people with god knows what and pay your family quote “2 million quid or whatever” if you died.
He also decided to test his eyesight by driving with his wife and child in the car and managing not to crash.
He is very odd
No. He is evil.
Indeed. He is both but the oddness is incidental.
‘A career psychopath…”
‘Nevertheless, it remains an interesting question to ask: what would the Government’s chances of winning this election be if it had stuck to the original plan regarding Covid…’
Did the government have a chance to stick to the original plan, or was it forced off it by the public sector unions?
Up to 10-Mar-20 the government was pursuing its original sensible herd immunity policy. On that day, medical GMB members threatened to strike, citing inadequate PPE for NHS workers. Other unions waded in. The RMT threatened a rail strike, UCU threatened university closures. The NEU waved the threat of national strike in schools.
This mutinous mayhem was cynically stoked by the national enemy known as the BBC. which for several days broadcast pantomime videos of chinamen flopping down and shamming dead in the Beijing streets. Next it, the BBC, switched the focus to Lombardy, putting out footage of sudden heaps of covid coffins, which later turned out to be the product of a Med marine disaster 5 years before.
Faced with this multiple mutiny of public-sector unions, Boris and Co began seeking pretexts to abandon herd immunity. At the 16-Mar-20 press conference, Ferguson’s preposterous ‘half-a-million-deaths’ forecasts were wheeled out.
On 18-Mar-20, Boris caved in to the NEU threats by agreeing that schools would close. This was the decisive step. Parents cannot go to work if their kids are off school. On 20-Mar-20, the whole economy went into lockdown.
On 04-Jan-21 the same thing happened again. The NEU held a zoom meeting with 400,000 of its members and decided not to return to work after the Christmas holidays. The government caved in again and declared lockdown 3, which lasted 6 months.
No.
The government acted under orders – Lockstep. Cock-up theory is sheer, bloody nonsense and I am sick of it being spouted. Those who fail to accept or understand this are in for a bloody shock when C1984 version ll is rolled out.
Indeed.
I am sure there would have been political pressure from various areas to lock down, but I doubt that this was the decisive factor. Whitty and Vallance I think had a little chat with Farrar.
Also I don’t think their whole 180 on C1984 can be blamed on the Unions. The Unions are mostly Marxists so this collective nightmare suited them perfectly. As Hitler put it, you only need to kick in the door!
Exactly. The treasonous Union leaderships and particularly the teachers who had clearly been bought by the WEF or subsidiaries thereof provided perfect cover for Bozo’s Lockdowns. It is beyond disgusting to claim that Bozo’s hands were tied by the Unions and particularly public servant unions. The teachers could have been warned … back to work or your wages stop. They wouldn’t have lasted two months.
I’m afraid that the combination of the transport and teaching unions was seen as too difficult an opponent by the government, that led to a serious if not fatal miscalculation. How much of that was down to Boris and how much other people in the mix I don’t know, but that seems to me impossible without the ‘coincidences’ mentioned by Allan Plaskett above which are entirely similar to Ben Irvine’s view of what happened. See his books about this, including the one about the Wuhan lockdown’s true causes.
Funny how almost every government on the planet reached the same conclusions without the help of British trade unions
Thanks tof.
Funny if they all made an independent judgement about the risk from covid, not so funny if they just followed us.
The messaging globally seemed strong and consistent from the beginning. The WHO certainly seem to have been involved, and people in the US. You’d expect it of both parties given what we know – the WHO is in the pandemic business and the US were probably doing the research, but what I don’t understand is why every government bar a few just did what they were told, given that the results of doing that were inevitably going to cause enormous harm.
No.
Lockdown happened simultaneously across the Western world, otherwise known as Lockstep. Your understanding is far too parochial.
Wake up.
Not a coincidence, either, that Tony Blair’s Institute for global change was extremely busy ‘advising’ governments world-wide in plandemic strategies.
I think the response to covid was a combination of cock-up and conspiracy. The drug companies were involved in a conspiracy to make covid seem much worse than it was, downplay natural immunity, cheap effective drugs such as ivermectin, etc. However I think the government cocked-up only taking advice from a very small group of scientists and they may well of believed lock down was the only “sensible” option. Group think can be very powerful and once a few governments locked down and the WHO advocated it most of the rest went along with the majority decision.
Realistically we’ll never know for sure exactly what Bojo and co. actually believed so everything else is just speculation.
You will never convince me that those in charge believed we faced a deadly threat- they certainly didn’t behave as if we did.
100%.
No one is interested in your gastro-intestinal reactions. Your only option in.a debate is to continue calmly and patiently stating and supporting your point.
You see?! This is precisely what happens when you allow women into politics. They naturally go on to make a right pig’s ear of everything!
Hmm, hang on a sec…
( So you allow women into politics, they make a right hash of everything…but during the Scamdemic, much like now, there were mainly men in authority, and they made a right hash of everything….
)
I can’t make it work!
But I’m fairly certain it would make perfect sense to those that inhabit the manosphere.
I don’t think it’s women per se mogs. It’s about more a society that becomes emasculated and overly emotional mainly because we rejected Christianity and started worshipping Paul McCartney etc. You can’t dump wisdom accumulated over thousands of years and restart society at year 0 =1960 without it undermining the good things about the civilisation. This isn’t a women thing per se it’s how the whole society has been trending since the 60s, putting the short term wonts before the long term. There is not a cat in hells chance lockdown would have happened in the 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s, but as we’ve moved further from a society based on christian values and it’s not even a memory stupidity became inevitable. I think the man Vs women paradigm is nonsense which mostly serves the purpose of the state controlling ppl by destroying the family. The data is clear btw on average female happiness has been declining since the 1960s because doing unfulfilling shixxy jobs, like most ppl have, is totally completely unrewarding.
Appreciate your reply, as I’m not used to getting sensible, well-reasoned and respectful responses. Just a gazillion little red thumbs, and the above post was an experiment in that regard. Plus a piss-take of the misogynists who hang out here, if I’m honest.
I agree pretty much. Personally I feel this whole woke mind virus shebang has one objective, and that’s to sow division. Hence how it’s integral to the Leftards plans and continued abuse of our rights.
It’s a shame that people come on here and resort to playing the blame game, reducing all of the world’s problems down to a ridiculously over-simplified male vs female paradigm, because all they’re demonstrating is their irrational hostility towards the opposite sex whilst they play right into the social engineers’ hands. But they’re too bitter and bent out of shape to realise they’re being played. I’ve said it a million times now, TPTB who are responsible evidently come in both genders. How is that so hard to accept and admit?
It’s funny because ages ago one of my loyal haters on here accused me of being a “misandrist” and a “narcissist”, ( whilst simultaneously ranting and demonstrating their hostility towards women) but I’m still waiting on evidence to support those accusations. As we know, like the famous quote says, once a person resorts to insults they’ve lost the debate, and that’s all the haters have. Nothing of worth in their arsenal, no intelligent counter-argument, only playground name-calling as they spit their dummy out. The irony being that it’s always the ones on here whining about how hard done by they are that accuse women of claiming victim hood. Well, nobody’s nailed the art of projection quite like the misogynists, I’ll give them that.
Men and women get it wrong. No one is infallible. I still can’t understand though, how so many people praised that nag in New Zealand for her tyrannical governance during the scamdemic – then again, she was following the convid script, like so many of her associates.
Totally, ellie. Bloody Sturgeon was another one. I think any reasonable and intelligent person, not blinded by their personal issues and an axe to constantly grind, would agree. It’s a bit like stating the biological reality that there are only 2 sexes. Well, globalists come in both sexes. Drop the mic!
It’s hardly a revolutionary statement of fact but there you go.
But it goes back to what I’ve previously said, I’ve never yet read a post by a woman on here disparaging men. Only vice versa. Make of that what you will..
“main problem of Covid policy was trying to open up too quickly in the summer of that year”
They also bang on about Boris being weak because we didn’t lock down earlier. This is the opinion of Cummins. Mr drive 200 miles to test your eyesight. No Boris was weak because he let the health fascists run the show. This was total abuse of the British public. There are many examples but one that sticks with me was the Traffic Light System where they would change the rules in a heartbeat making the country that they are vacationing in come under quarantine rules so people would have to drop everything and rush back to avoid having to spend two weeks in a quarantine Hotel and spend 1500 for the pleasure. That is a psychological war on the British public.
Ron, you are defaulting to cock-up theory.
The whole Scamdemic was orchestrated. Worldwide Lockstep. Bozo simply did as he was told.
This is the main problem we face. We elect what we think are Governments but it turns out they are just local administrators for the UN WEF WHO. They follow instructions—–covid, climate, migrants, equality, diversity, and all down the wokery list.
Exactly
It wasn’t quite worldwide. It’s noticeable that in the “democracies,” it was the 5 Eyes Nations and NATO who were moving in lockstep.
Sweden, which at the time was in the EU but not in NATO, didn’t lockdown.
I suspect the Order was issued by the American Military Complex (who Fauci served).
Johnson, who subsequently rushed off to Ukraine to scupper the Zelensky/Putin peace negotiations, would have complied with an Order from the Supreme Commander (Trump) who in turn would have been following the “advice” of the American Military Complex.
I agree, RTSC. Actually I think the reason the Americans ordered it was because they knew the virus was a product of their bio weapons research in Wuhan. They therefore panicked, or perhaps decided to test their biological attack response plans.
Anyone who thinks the coronavirus response was just a cockup should look at the 300 page Coronavirus Act, and seriously ask themselves whether it was written on the spur of the moment or pre-prepared.
The vast majority of the public seem to have no appetite for being reminded of what happened. I think most people know it wasn’t right but don’t want to face that fact. Sad.
I still get angry when I’m reminded about it and think about it for more than a few seconds.
It’s hard to describe how I feel about it exactly but I know what you mean
I am still dumbfounded how / why so many people didn’t question what was happening and seemed to just accept ‘government orders’. In their defence, they probably believed the tripe that the government’s partner in crime, that ‘national treasure’ – the NHS – spread, too.
A great disappointment.
I agree. I will *never* understand how so many people went along with it all, unquestioningly and obediently. How so many people allowed their inner fascist to race to the surface and report on other people. How so many people supported the idea of unvaccinated people being denied medical assistance.
I also agree with Stewart in still being angry. Truthfully and honestly, I have been broken by political events of the last few years. I got so angry and frustrated that I know something has broken inside me. I am permanently angry when I think of any political subject or hear any politician speak. My anger, contempt and bitterness now dominate me. I know how unhealthy this is for me, but I can’t stop feeling this way. I can’t stop hating those who instigated all of this or those who went along with it. Not that long ago, this country had the balls to stand alone against evil. My faith in the British public has all but gone, and that depresses me.
To a large extent I concur.
I consider people who advocate lockdowns as a extremely dangerous. They terrify me in the way that a mentally unstable person with a firearm would terrify me.
And Labour, the SNP and Welsh Labour all wanted even harder lockdowns and masking, etc. etc.
Ms Sturgeon banned single use plastic bottles while almost in the same breath mandated single use plastic face masks, and the rest…
With credible commentators saying from some of the highest vantage points that more people have been killed and injured by the jab than died and suffered in WW2 it is only a matter of time before the truth explodes on the scene with the power of the bombs that ended WW2. .
I fully agree with this article.
Maybe healing society will only happen if there is acknowledgment of this debacle.
To make sure this never happens again.
Until such time I remain distrustful of government.
Be careful what you wish for, friends. The Opposition’s criticism of lockdown was that it was too little, too late. In other words it would have been much worse. There is a chance to avoid such a thing by voting appropriately in the election on July 4th.
Cain obviously doesn’t know that the Government he worked for in a senior capacity had already downgraded Covid from a High Consequence Infectious Disease 5 days before the first lockdown started.
We are told it was because there was more data available and that casualty rates would be low.
That policy would have taken a minimum of 2 weeks to get in place and probably longer. The Governments Scientists would have produced the data; reviewed it; submitted their recommendation; it would have then gone to a Minister, who would almost certainly have challenged it; agreement reached; Comms process started; text agreed; implemented and published on the Gov website.
At least 2 and probably 4 weeks.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid#status-of-covid-19
If they’d “followed the science” there would have been no lockdown.
Absolutely right, David.
You can see the Establishment’s continuing commitment to lockdowns in Simon Case’s evidence to the covid enquiry yesterday, as reported by the Telegraph:
“Mr Case claimed that Boris Johnson had found the decisions to introduce lockdowns difficult, and said he had not initially understood that the prime minister struggled on a “deep ideological level” with the idea of “the mass locking up of the population”.”
So Simon Case, the head of the civil service, thinks it was bizarre and the product of extremist ideology to resist the mass locking up of the population.
Democracy, eh?
So many people blame many of our country’s current woes – lost businesses, lost education, lost cultural activities, long waiting lists, missed diagnoses, national debt etc. – on Covid or the “pandemic”. They singularly fail to appreciate that it was not the disease that caused these problems, but the way in which governments responded to it. The lockdowns, not the virus, have caused the most damage.