This is the fourth chapter of a novel that will be published in serial form in the Daily Sceptic. It’s a dystopian satire about the emergence of a social credit system in the U.K. in the near future. Read chapter one here, two here and three here.
Afternoon. A break from work, jogging.
The morning’s drizzle having given way to a full blown fog, Ella could just make out the shape of the path ahead, carving its narrow course through the fields as it followed the bend of the river. It was her usual running loop, and, however much the landscape had been transformed over the years, still, just about, enough of a space to think and just ‘be’.
Her mind drifted. You had to hand it to them, the way they’d masterminded it had been sublime.
Originally marketed as a purely voluntary scheme, the Health Efficiency Programme (as it had originally been named) had at first dangled common sense, appealing rewards and prizes–- free trainers, subsidised gym memberships, contributions towards e-bikes and the like. “Well, we need to get people exercising somehow,” she had said to her mother-in-law one weekend as they were pacing across some muddy field.
“A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished,” her mother-in-law might have replied, but did not, instead nodding enthusiastically: “Yes I think so. They have to get everyone fit again somehow, don’t they?”
Reaching a fork in the path, Ella very deliberately took the low road.
That one clung to the river, and the route, though longer and much muddier, lent at least another few minutes of undisturbed nature to her run. The path higher up led out into what a few years back had been open farmland but whose last verdured remnants were now eclipsed by The Complex. Every time she ran this way, without fail she took the river route; along this path it was still just about possible to pretend she was still in countryside, at least if one blocked out the roar of the motorway to the left and the sight of the distant solar farms glinting on the horizon.
It hadn’t been long until rewards and freebies had became more overt nudges. Even then, though, the scheme had still largely been welcomed. “I like to see it as a promise, not a threat,” the ‘Right Honourable’ Minister for Opportunities, a weaselly little woman called Mrs Surrey, had soothed, her smirk barely perceptible, doing the media show-rounds.
To the extent that awkward-squad enclaves of freethinking dissidents urged caution – what if the scheme was extended to areas beyond ‘simply’ health, what if it became mandatory, what if nudges turned to sanctions and penalties – they were no match for the rest of those all-trusting know-it-alls. In a world where most had had blissfully little reason not to trust the Government’s word, that word prevailed.
“I can confirm that there are absolutely no plans to extend the Government’s ‘Good Health Rewards Scheme,” Mr. Wahazi, the Health Minister, had declared in Parliament around the same time, ostensibly putting the matter to rest, most people simply too busy with the treadmill of their lives to think too hard, or indeed at all, about the philosophical questions of Mill versus Rousseau and whether in this ditty little scorecard there might not lie the gateway to a fascist hell.
Jogging the last few paces of the field, she turned the corner.
From here, the dark, monstrous mass of The Complex could be made out, the towering, clinical symmetry of the Zeeta building and the huge oval structure of Demerna’s headquarters, its sharp, jagged edges and haloed centrepiece of spiked towers piercing the fog. However many times she ran this route her revulsion never diminished on sighting the colossal form springing up from the fringes of what had, only a few years before, been an expanse of countryside so peaceful and undisturbed that the first time she’d accidentally stumbled over it after moving up from London and realised it was only a stone’s throw from the house, she’d wept: actually wept, with the joy of understanding that there was a space so green and vast and sacred so close to where they lived.
A shuddering sneer. Like finding half a caterpillar on your dinner plate, or standing in dog poo, it was a reflexive reaction of which she was barely conscious and unable to control.
Shirles, to be fair, got it from the very first moment.
In Ella’s kitchen the day it was announced, Shirles had been listening to the lunchtime show on ADFREE News.
“Earlier today, Government announced its plans for the ‘Be Healthy’ voucher scheme. We want to hear your reaction,” the presenter was saying, as ever her straight talking Geordie accent sparking up their kitchen. “Do you think this is a good thing? Do you have concerns? Will you use it? Tweet us your thoughts.”
There was a bitter poignancy in thinking back to the days of phone-ins and free opinions and social media and presenters who were allowed to say what they thought and come to think of it entire TV channels broadcasting anything other than The Efficiency Agenda.
“I’m really not sure about this,” said Shirles, half watching, half chopping potatoes and shaking her head in a way that certainly had nothing to do with the potatoes. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
“Hmm, I dunno,” Ella had replied, launching into a moralising lecture about how there was a serious obesity crisis in this country and too many people who wouldn’t take responsibility for their own health and how at some point people who couldn’t make good decisions surely needed to be coaxed and if they couldn’t be coaxed then surely a little push was okay.
Listening indulgently, Shirles had eventually chimed back,
“Yes, but they make it bloody impossible for us, don’t they? All those e-numbers and crap in the food. Everything in the shops is packed with rubbish. Most people don’t have time to do anything about it. Why don’t they start by fixing the food? Then people could chose for themselves.”
Before Ella had had a chance to interject, Shirles was off again.
“Watch my words, it’ll not be weeks before they start demanding something in return. I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could spit them,” she added, a final shake of her head sealing the matter.
Shirles, of course, was right.
A few short years later and benevolent aunt had morphed to oppressive patriarch, all the while slowly stewing us all in a soup of our own naïve, blind consent.
Now up against the boundary of The Complex, Ella could see clearly now the endless state and industry buildings in their awful grim glory — achromatic turrets of science labs, an array of concrete blocks the size of football pitches each competing to be uglier, more brutal, less welcoming than its neighbour, incinerators with furnaces 50 foot high; the whole thing slowly metastasising, a cancer devouring the countryside.
Shivering at her dreadful naïvety she checked the time. 2:45pm. The light was starting to go. If she got back now she just might be able to squeeze another hour of work in before she had to collect the kids. Turning on her heels, she jogged back the way she’d come.
A couple of hundred metres or so along, she glanced back over her shoulder. A tractor ploughed the last remaining field. Set against the metallic monstrosity behind, it looked tiny and forlorn, an insignificant anachronism in a world moved on.
Look out for chapter five next week.
M. Zermansky is a pseudonym.
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The problem with the WHO is that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and (The Bill Gates funded) GAVI are its chief funding source(s).
Therefore Gates’ agenda of Global vaccine rollout and digital compliance becomes the WHO’s agenda, and Gates will become the principle beneficiary of this initiative as the software used in digital ID (see ID2020) is created by Microsoft.
In the early months of the ‘pandemic’ there were a number of video conferences involving Bill where for some reason he was the ‘go to’ person for advice on pandemics. On one he held up a hand written sign saying ‘work from home’ and on another he expressed his pleasure at how well MS Teams was working.
It’s also worth remembering that not long before the pandemic, the media, particularly the BBC, gave air-time to environmental activists that were demanding we all work from home to ‘save the planet’.
“As WHO represents all of its 194 Member States, each country should have a turn helping to run things, just as large countries like China and India should have a commensurate influence on its decisions.”
No merit of skill then?
Perhaps we should adopt the same principle when flying, so that each passenger has a turn at flying the plane?
Wrong. The primary concern of national leaders is like everyone else’s: themselves.
They are looking out for their careers all the time. If their personal interests and those of the people are aligned, great. If they aren’t, then you can be sure that their personal interests will prevail.
Any leader who stands up to a major global bureaucracy these days is signing away all their career prospects going forward.
If throwing national sovereignty is required to advance or protect their careers, so be it.
They have plenty of bogus but plausible arguments to defend their self interested positions. That’s not hard at all.
“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
Thomas Sowell
“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems – of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.”
Thomas Sowell
Great stuff from Sowell, as always.
However, it’s slightly outdated, I think.
To me, public office these days seems like a stepping stone to lucrative positions in corporations or NGOs. The power of public office may not be the ultimate goal or ambition any more.
It’s a continuation of the aims of people like Jean Monnet who was one of the founders of what is now the EU, a supranational organisation run by people who no longer need to be elected and take decisions without any interest in the people who are no longer asked to vote for them and their policies.
And to further clarify where politicians sit:
“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.”
Richard Feynman
Wrong. The primary concern of national leaders is like everyone else’s: themselves.”
I think both these statements can be true. Politicians are obviously working for themselves. They are meant to work for us. But in order to advance their own interests they may choose to align themselves with other groups or movements. I think you’ve kind of made this case yourself in your reply below. What we don’t 100% know is whether some of them believe some of the claptrap they spout.
I reckon they do. Most of us believe what is convenient for us to believe.
I don’t believe very much in the archetyoe of the movie villain who is comically devoid of conscience or compassion and gets perverse pleasure from being evil.
I expect you are right. The capacity for doublethink is probably a necessity for most of them.
I think this is why we should be very suspicious of anyone that tries to impose things on us “for our own good”. They are much more dangerous than obvious thugs or crooks.
A good article, and a well made point. It doesn’t matter, at all, that North Korea has rotated around to being on the board….anyone saying anything about the fact that they are on the committee with Afghanistan, Cameroon and Belarus….?
The worrying thing, as others will point out, is the 80% Bill and Melinda funding…the BigPharma funding, the disproportionate influence of different countries..and no doubt many other things….. the fact that this supranatural, unelected body, is being given power over the health of ‘the world’ is tremendously worrying.
I don’t doubt we would all have had to be jabbed for monkeypox if they had had the power they are now seeking..and been given….that is our future..
“On the 5th of this month The European Commission and WHO launch landmark digital health initiative to strengthen global health security”…..THIS is the problem….the unelected insane asylum calling itself the EU …willing to hand over everything to another unelected set of nutters..while we seem to be able to do very little about it..
https://www.who.int/news/item/05-06-2023-the-european-commission-and-who-launch-landmark-digital-health-initiative-to-strengthen-global-health-security
The EU has been planning vaccine passports for over a decade. The timeline for rollout started in 2018.
https://health.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2022-12/2019-2022_roadmap_en.pdf
It would be a mistake to assume that the EU and WHO haven’t been collaborating for a very long time.
It depends what they actually mean by the term “vaccine passport” and how it would be used. It’s not a new idea to have personal records on a portable device for such items that could be useful. However, when I started using one (in 1996) it was just a printed A6 booklet made by one of the Pharma firms, and all hand written form entries. It has a list of all the known products at the time, and a few blank rows etc. Names of products used, dates administered, and recommended renewals etc.
I did actually carry it alongside my British Passport, in case it could have been useful on some global trips, but that isn’t the same thing as having to do so for any other reason.
Having hand written medical information is not a problem because it’s voluntary and is not recorded in official databases.
Once it is a digital record, connected to your social credit score, you’re on the hook and you will never be allowed to wriggle off.
With North Korea in the board, perhaps they can be blamed for bad decisions if there is significant complaint against the WHO.
It’s both things that are a problem, North Korea being involved on the board is bad in itself, it’s made worse by the abdication of responsibility for using our own brain cells on the part of western governments.
Freedoms were paid for with the blood of our forbears, the WHO has plenty to do with genuinely severe disease problems, it doesn’t need to declare a lockdown for a new sniffle, but it will because that’s easy and visible while the hard work is not and there is much less press coverage.
Don’t worry our Government won’t sign up to anything that would infringe the democracy we think we’ve got !
Governments, or at least the powers pulling the strings behind them, of Communist dictatorships and the freer states of the world perhaps have more in common that many would like to believe. Governments have always used fear to control populations, presenting themselves as virtuous defenders against some great evil, which they frequently had a hand in creating. Lockdowns and associated restrictions, under the pretext of protecting people from the threat of a virus (or maybe another virus or maybe Climate Change or maybe Institutionalised Racism or maybe Transphobia or maybe Russia or maybe yet another virus), provided a powerful control mechanism for suppressing dissent and controlling capital flows in the inevitable collapse of the debt-based monetary system, a collapse resulting from demographic decline and sheer weight of fraud. But ultimately they only delayed the inevitable: as the financial collapse is now upon us, the truth is becoming harder and harder to conceal.
Fully agree with your comments.
However, the fact that North Korea (as well as some other suspects) is now on the executive board should be a red flag.
I have been actively fighting against these new WHO proposals. Most people don’t have a clue this is happening. At what point will people engage? How far can people be pushed before something awakens?
Will it be a single incident which changes the dynamics or will it be a slow realisation?