Metal cages were used in the tarmacked playground to kettle the children in their bubbles during break and lunchtime. The field was off limits. Some of the students went berserk in their containment and invented a new playground trend: attacking children with crocodile clips. My then 13-old nephew was stabbed in the neck. Fun times from the ‘Stay Safe’ brigade.
When the Guardian revealed this week that NHS referrals for anxiety in children are more than double pre-Covid levels to 500 a day, I remembered the thundering injustice of lockdown policies on children and felt that white-hot rage all over again. Lockdown, now three to four years ago, can’t take all the flack for what’s happening to the mental health of our children but it bears the lion’s share of responsibility, for the simple reason that it presented other people and the outside as dangerous. For the anxious, this mindset is a catastrophe.
I know this to be true because I work with school refusers and those who have been expelled, with a view to encouraging them back into educational settings. We focus on simply getting outside, ordering food in cafes, learning how to cross the road, understanding that the world is not to be feared, before attempting academic work. The stories these wonderful children tell are familiar: primary school went well but lockdown happened and when they returned to secondary school, they couldn’t cope: “I hated the crowds”, “I threw chairs around”, “I thought I was going to get sick”.
When two of my children returned to their state secondary after lockdown it was like a zoo. The teachers had lost control of the children and the children were not keen on reverting to compulsory rather than optional education. And when stabbings with crocodile clips, unruly behaviour and dystopian queues for nasal swabbing and face mask wearing were thrown into the mix, it’s no wonder that some children marched straight back home to the safety of their bedrooms.
We keep forgetting about the fact that there is a ‘persistent absence’ rate of 20% from schools; before lockdown it was 13%. It’s easy to remain unmoved by statistics, but not when the individual cases are known.
I asked my sons for a quick rundown of their most badly affected friends:
- The girl who wore her black face mask right up to the bridge of her nose, grew her black fringe below her nose so her face was entirely covered. She changed her name to Keith and when eventually she took off the mask, a tic had developed.
- The girl who developed agoraphobia and has just ‘disappeared.’
- The girl who made herself tutor-hand-sanitiser-monitor and whenever someone, usually a boy, splashed it around, she’d run screaming and hide under her desk shouting “Germs!” Her tears of fear were genuine.
- The boy who spent lockdown gaming, attempted to return to school where everyone noticed he’d got enormously fat, retreated to his house and has rarely been seen since.
When I hear Dominic Cummings on the Chris Williamson podcast talking so insouciantly and confidently about lockdown policy and how his actions saved thousands of lives, I am stunned. Surely he must now know this is not true. Computer models are not real life. I wish he could meet some of the children I work with. I wish he could sit in on these NHS referrals for anxiety and understand the downstream effects of his rotten decisions. Now that Mark Zuckerburg has apologised for enforcing White House demanded Covid censorship, maybe people like Cummings will apologise for contributing to the deep and ongoing damage to children.
Incidentally, my crocodile-clip-stabbed nephew received nine grade 9s in his GCSEs this summer.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
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OK, Watson and Abrahamovitch, what have you personally done since February 2020 to try to fight the fear-mongering and hysteria that allows the regime to get away with these impositions?
With a few very honourable exceptions, industry and business have done nothing to resist, but plenty of whining about getting taxpayer subsidies for themselves. If you’re among the aforementioned noble exceptions, fine, but otherwise, go put some money and influence behind campaigns resisting the fearmongering, and have some words in politicians’ ears about how you’ll support their rivals if they don’t back off.
Luke Johnson, Hugh Osmond and to an extent Tim Martin. Can’t think of anyone else, though I expect there are a few more, but not many.
Grind will be Ground Down. Sorry.
Agreed…I said this last year….last year for goodness sake…… I’m doing my bit, if you want me in your pub, do yours. Do what the Co-Op did, if they make masks mandatory in pubs don’t enforce it…..if they want QR codes, don’t enforce it, same with vax pass…put your heads on the block like the rest of us and stand up and fight. If you don’t you’re going out of business anyway…I will never use a ‘pass’ of any kind for a pint, it’s cheaper to go to the supermarket, and I can drink in my jammies!
Stories about pubs closing are sad indication of the symptoms but not the cause. This site needs to step up on the causes and stop pretending it’s some bumbling idiots being overly cautious. What is happening is deliberate and evil. They push until they hit protest, then push some more stupid rules, then stop for a while and now are pushing again. Wake up. This is disproportionate bullshit. Enough. Take action yourselves, no white-knight is coming to help, do not comply with any of it, no masks, no showing your jab status if you’ve been jabbed, no taking tests to get into places. Enough. Do not consent to this system of coercive control. Look where we’ve come from to where we are now. And for what? Is it proportionate? No, it’s not. It’s got to stop, now! Toby you’ve done a great job in setting this site up but events risk overwhelming the original purpose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL00v2YjWKI
As Boris says the jabs don’t stop you catching it and don’t stop you spreading it.
If a venue requires testing then EVERYONE needs to be tested the vaxpass is pointless.
Wonder why no journalist has not asked him this obvious question?
I would love to believe this but unfortunately it is not. Every country is moving in lockstep and the evil is in the smartphone. Show me a society that bans QR codes and I will believe this is a cock-up, until then it is evil.
I work as a family photographer for Americans on vacation. As you can imagine with restrictions on travel, lollipop rules and things to do when in London and enjoy time with loved ones (especially when they can go to Florida) has cut my earnings off dramatically.
Even the coffee shops, bars and restaurants families would regularly visit aren’t the same anymore. The staff have changed, nobody knows each other by name. Funny, as when Brexit began my trade actually went up, it was the coof that killed 90% of the foot-flow in Westminster and 80% around Tower Bridge.
Good time to buy commercial real estate I guess if you know what I mean. Especially when interest rates are so low. It times nicely with excessive money printing and higher ups access to free/cheap money.
PS. The Stafford Hotel, Claridges, The Connaught and The Ritz will be fine as they don’t need to make money to stay open. They are trophy assets for Middle Eastern Investment vehicles on behalf of the Royal families.
Middle Eastern and Oriental. The Yuan buys you a lot these days, and with containers coming into the UK full and going back empty, on what else are they going to spend all the money we send them? Not goods and services, that’s for sure.
It isn’t only pubs.
Don’t forget us folks, training companies who deliver face to face training.
Zoom sessions are no substitute for personal interaction. As the lead in training the defence industry in the management of large, complex project lifecycles we haven’t worked since February 2020. This evil policy has killed our business that took 20 years to build up.
When we’re gone, we’re gone, and we’ll take our wisdom and experience with us.
And by the way, WFH is a con. Used in an isolated and exceptional manner it can work, but must not become the norm, a skiver’s charter.
One of the many things the technocrats want to do is to prevent you from meeting other people in order to stop you plotting against them and their fascist schemes, technocracy is in effect digital slavery.
The police and crimes bill will prevent you from doing this in protests (effectively making them illegal – except for global warming protests of course). The online harms bill will prevent ‘virtual’ meetings in sites such as this, and killing the hospitality industry will prevent you from meeting like minded people down the pub. It is all part of the plan.
Later on they will introduce stringent travel restrictions (again in the name of preventing man made global warming) which will prevent you travelling more than a few miles from your designated place of residence and further restrict the possibility of human contact and spread of information contrary to the agenda.
Sir Kneel Starmer is a fully paid up member of the technocrats club and therefore probably public enemy #1, Bojo isn’t quite sure what he is except a tool for others to easily manipulate (or perhaps just a tool).
The net tightens but still the fish swim round in circles.
Are there any pub calendars for 2022 where they show everyone inside standing up wearing face masks, and everyone seated not wearing a face mask, in the interest of preventing the spread of a highly contagious virus during a pandemic?
https://www.rosecalendars.co.uk/olde-worlde-inns-calendar
Didn’t most office work outside London get farmed out to out of town office parks? Do shop workers not eat lunch or can they not afford to eat out?
All going as planned, then?