In America, Prof Jay Bhattacharya, the lockdown sceptic once derided by NIH chief Francis Collins as a “fringe epidemiologist”, is about to take over as NIH head in truly sweet karma. But five years on the UK is still mired in denial, say Molly Kingsley and Allison Pearson in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.
This week, in a committee room in Washington, DC, witnesses observed what may turn out to be one of the greatest vindications in the history of medical science. Jay Bhattacharya, a Professor of Medicine, Economics and Health Policy at Stanford University, appeared before a Senate nomination hearing en route to confirmation as Director of America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH). Hollywood would struggle to come up with a more stunning story arc for this mild-mannered hero.
During the Covid pandemic, the man who is about to become the most senior health official in the United States was a pariah. In October 2020, along with two distinguished colleagues, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Sunetra Gupta, a Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya published the Great Barrington Declaration.
The trio argued that lockdown would cause “irreparable damage” and made the case for “focused protection”; the elderly and the infirm would be sheltered while younger, healthier people got on with their lives (no social distancing, no masks, no quarantine) and built up immunity in the population. The manifesto proposed the lifting of restrictions which were plain silly (shutting children’s playgrounds, limiting exercise outdoors) and others which were deeply damaging (closing schools, cancelling hospital appointments) or merely economically disastrous (paying healthy people to stay at home, suspending hospitality and transport).
In an interview with the Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, in 2021, Bhattacharya warned of an “unseen” mental health crisis. Lockdown, he said, would come to be viewed as “the single biggest public health mistake of all history in terms of the scope of the harms that it’s caused”.
For daring to challenge the global groupthink, Bhattacharya endured vile personal attacks and censorship. Twitter suppressed the visibility of his posts while Google and Facebook, acting on requests from the Biden administration, no less, buried any mention of Great Barrington.
Four days after the declaration was published, Francis Collins, then the head of NIH, wrote an email to Anthony Fauci, who led America’s Covid response, warning that Great Barrington seemed “to be getting a lot of attention” and that “there needs to be a quick and devastating published take-down of its premises”. Bhattacharya, Gupta and Kulldorf, he sneered, were “fringe epidemiologists”.
Collins seemed to be casting himself as the infallible pope of science and Jay Bhattacharya was the heretic who must be burnt at the stake. Well, from next week, that heretic takes the pope’s job. Karma rarely gets much sweeter.
Five years on, Americans are getting to grips with the fact that Great Barrington was pretty much spot on, and the lawsuits are flying. Lockdown has indeed had horrific and indelible consequences. We can all see that, can’t we? Developmental delay in infants, a mental health epidemic, poorer exam results, lethal waiting lists for hospitals which closed their doors to non-Covid cases, a spike in avoidable cancer deaths, difficulty coaxing people back to work, not to mention economic catastrophe (a deafening £450 billion was printed to pay for furlough, PPE and other measures. On this the British political class are silent).
In the US the reckoning is huge. The guilty men are being named and the former heretic Bhattacharya is elevated to the highest office. But here in the UK we are still mired in delusion and denial.
Take Sunday, which is the official Covid Day of Reflection. It’s billed as “an opportunity to come together to remember those who lost their lives since the pandemic began and to honour the tireless work and acts of kindness shown during this unprecedented time”. The heart sinks. While those who lost loved ones to Covid deserve our sympathy, many who died were already in God’s waiting room and could just as easily have been carried off by flu. The day sounds like another opportunity to wallow in soft-focus sadness when what is called for is a tough, hard-headed appraisal of how our pandemic response led to tragic consequences for the living, and what we must avoid – like the plague, funnily enough – in future. We do not need a day of quiet reflection: Britons should look back in anger.
In stark contrast to the US’s determined uncovering of pandemic mistakes and lies, the UK’s Covid Inquiry, led by Baroness Heather Hallett, seems glacial, myopic, evasive and absurdly expensive (it’s on track to cost more than £200 million, although some say half a billion is more realistic, with a stupefying £55 million set to be squandered on up to 150 lawyers).
Where other countries got their Covid reports done and dusted years ago (Lady Hallett’s Swedish counterpart, Mats Melin, had completed his final report four months before the terms of reference for the UK hearings had even been agreed), our inquiry has taken on an Alice Through the Looking Glass pointless perversity. How painstakingly it confirms its own prejudgments and prejudices while studiously avoiding anything contentious.
The core question the British public may have hoped to have answered was whether the staggering costs of the Government’s population-wide interventions outweighed the benefits. With some nine million people now economically inactive in the UK, upwards of 7.5 million languishing on hospital waiting lists, and marked rises in obesity, mental health issues, alcohol-related deaths, substance abuse and disability all traceable back to 2020 – don’t we have to ask: seriously, was it worth it?
With Sweden standing by her decision to avoid draconian mandatory lockdowns and restrictions on personal liberty, a view which the Swedish inquiry called “fundamentally correct” (albeit indicating that certain venues should have been closed earlier), an influential (bipartisan) Congressional report on the pandemic emphatically concluded: “The prescription cannot be worse than the disease, such as strict and overly broad lockdowns that led to predictable anguish and avoidable consequences.”
Academic papers suggest only a negligible benefit of lockdown in terms of saving lives. So why is the UK inquiry dodging those critical issues altogether?
From the outset, Lady Hallett’s inquiry has largely accepted the necessity of unprecedented, authoritarian interventions in a country we were told was facing an existential threat to its entire population. (The fact we knew quite early on that Covid was a remarkably age-stratified virus, with the risk of death to the elderly a thousandfold what it is to the young, is never mentioned. The average age of death in Italy, where the European chapter of the pandemic began as garment workers returned from China after the holidays, was 82.4 years. Not much different from the average life expectancy for a British man.)
“There was no real argument as to whether, for good and obvious public health reasons, these measures had to be contemplated,” said Hugo Keith KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, to Michael Gove on the topic of lockdowns. “They were matters of life and death. So there wasn’t really a thesis and an antithesis position here, Mr Gove. All the public health advice on a public health crisis was pointing in one direction.”
Unfortunately, that is a typically smug, complacent contribution to this inquiry. It also happens to be untrue. The UK’s pre-existing pandemic plan never featured lockdowns because everyone knew how ruinous they would be. (Granted, the plan was based on an H2N2 influenza pandemic, but both viruses spread rapidly and kill by causing acute respiratory illness.) Also, in science, there should always be a thesis and an antithesis.
When he gave his evidence, the then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak (who became alarmed as Chancellor at the vertiginous and mounting bills), was shot down in flames when he had the temerity to reference a study that suggested more quality-adjusted life years would be taken by the first lockdown than the virus itself. “I don’t want to get into Quality Life Assurance models [sic],” sniffed Hugo Keith, betraying a surprising lack of familiarity with a standard public health assessment metric which is used to weigh costs for every single medical treatment. But not Covid.
Worth reading in full.
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Since when has the Grauniad been airing a variety of views?
To he fair, not that it deserves it, the Graun does permit a variety of views to stand in the comments section of its yootube channel.
They can even be a bit one sided against the Guards point of view, dunno why
“the Graun does permit a variety of views to stand in the comments section of its yootube channel“
A strictly limited range of views that don’t offend against its pc dogmas, unless it has changed a lot from when I used to be regularly censored and banned.
I beg to differ, in the friendliest way.
I posted the attached 2 days ago and by chance kept the screenshot.
It relates to the Graun report on an anti compulsory vax demo in Copenhagen, not only are the comments contrarian they are still there 2 days later. This is not uncommon and I thought at the time perhaps the Graun is preparing to jump ship or at least hedge its bets.
Ancient history in the black hole of YouTube commentary.
Now try posting something that offends against pc (“woke”) dogmas.
If you make a sustained, coherent case for such taboo opinions, you will absolutely be censored and probably banned, unless it is really very different from the old days. The odd comment might slip through.
Nope, I dont spend much time there but SomeTimeS large numbers of contrary views, some very contrary, are left up maybe because they skimp on employing sufficient mod staff while sympathisers can’t be arsed to do it free of charge.
.
Perhaps they took such a dislike to your views they automatically modded you out which I would take as a compliment.
I was far from alone, I know for a fact.
The way it usually worked was that you would get in a debate with some lefty sjw type, who would get frustrated and emotional and report you to the moderators.
Sounds like fun but if you choose to play a game where the rules are set by lefty sjw types don’t be surprised if the one you are taunting with reality gets all upset and unhinged so goes sneaking off to Sir to grass you up for being mean to it.
They do offer a variety of crosswords (Quick, Cryptic, Prize etc).
But it peters out after that.
Nobody reads the Guardian. The Mirror group is influential not the Guardian.
The BBC and governing establishment of the country read the Guardian. It is the house magazine of the elite. This is why it produces very small numbers.
Exactly. As with the NYT, it exists to tell the elites what they should say and do in order to signal their own virtue and status to each other.
It publishes enough copies to cover the demand created by public bodies ranging from Universities (50-100 each?), minor lefty charities to Whitehall, even bosos office probably gets a couple of copies a day.
They still shift about 10 million copies a day of The Guardian in Brighton and Lewes
I expect the ruling Green Junta distribute copies free of charge to all the children so they know what to think before they can vote.
At least 0.0001% of the population (trans activists) read it, dunno why the daily fail likes to give the trans a spotlight too, no such thing as bad publicity.
Because it gets their readers gander up.
Wait until the Mail publish a piece about the left starting to support MAPs again; Harriet Harman better take cover, again.
All publicity is good publicity, don’t let it fool you, its the boiling frog exercise, eventually people will just accept it as the norm. It was a Tory MP who started the whole trans narrative, It was a Tory PM who legalized/normalized same-sex marriage! (apologies for US spelling)
How about the MAP issue raised in todays Roundup?
Harriet ain’t gonna welcome that publicity.
The peedo files.
That’s no way to refer to Monsieur Micron.
It is read by people who think they are opinion influencers to keep abreast of the latest acceptable opinions so that they can repeat them, round and around in self perpetuating circles of ‘correct think’ with the added bonus of not having to pay for it.
People in the Soviet Union used to read Pravda for the same reason but more to prevent getting arrested for thinking yesterdays truth was the same as todays truth. Most had to pay for their copies.
It’s not about physical newspaper sales any more – it’s website subscriptions. They probably do alright with those – they sure ram it down your throat every time you visit and on every article.
The media are just whores. The role of the press to act as the “fourth Estate”, to hold power to account, has totally gone. Totally. Not a trace left. Our ruling class is a media/political/oligarch class. They are the same people, go to the same dinner parities, holiday in the same villas, their kids go to the same schools, they marry each other.
And we are cattle.
They are also members of the same private clubs – Bilderberg, WEF, Chatham House, Club of Rome, Atlantic Council etc. Our so called democracies are a facade. This is where they secretly plot and scheme out our future.
Richard Madeley isn’t going to be a Celebrity anymore, apparently, having recently left the show after being taken ill (reasons unknown).
Top right of the attached shows Richard shredding an Official Leaflet publicising the Yellow Card Vaccine Injury report card having just rubbished it on air with Dr. Hilary Jones.
h/t Hugotalks.com
‘Your not famous
Your not famous
Your not famous anymore
Your not famous anymore’
As they sing on the football terraces
This is for you Richard Madeley.
Should have been a straight red
The MHRA scheme should be renamed the Red Card scheme, given how serious all the reports are.
BBC
The UK cannot take a risk over a new coronavirus variant identified in South Africa which may be able to evade the protection of vaccines, the transport secretary has said.
What protection would that be then?
Will the Health Secretary shortly be making a pronouncement on train timetables?
Well done! You beat me to it.
Since most of the road traffic might soon be ambulances transporting myocardia cases, perhaps it’s a bid to merge the two departments?
They might have to re-re-designate the emergency Covid morgue, currently the Regional Booster Station which is in a inconvenient location if you dont, or can’t drive, has lousy public transport but is right beside a trunk road so ideal for gathering all the corpses again.
Banning flights from South Africa to try and stop B1.1.529(?) entering the country. Have those fools at SAGE, SAGE+, Counter SAGE, SAGE Unhinge or all the other experts learned nothing in nearly 2 years?
You might delay a virus for a short while by shutting down transport at incalculable cost but you can’t stop it.
4th wave was predicted to begin in SA starting beginning December months ago. Amazing coincidence! Tourism is a huge part of the local economy, and as usual the poorest will suffer the most, not to mention the large number of people with UK and European connections again being kept apart from their families. Wonder if say the US would have been cut off for having a few new mutations of a virus that naturally mutates. It will obviously spread anyway. Our scientists need to find something useful to do with their time. Currently the Western Cape, with a population of 7 million, has 7 day averages of 44 positive tests and 2 deaths, lowest since the beginning of the 1st wave. Even so the politicians are drooling at the thought of ruining Xmas again. This can only end badly.
To cover up the deaths and injuries from the ‘vaccines’, the new plan is to introduce a new ‘deadly’ scariant that will start killing people and blame the deaths and injuries on Omicron. And bingo, the ‘vaccines’ are not killing and injuring people at all, it is Omicron!
I think it’s more because the champagne sippers are starting to realize that similarly to how quickly support and pot banging for the NHS stops at the point when they realize that they will be the ones paying more taxes for the cause it has probably begun to dawn on them that their double vaxx is not going to save them from the agenda. All me me me I can assure you. The virtue signaling stops when they realize they have to pay
“It all adds to the impression that lockdowns were implemented frenetically, without sufficient regard for individual rights, let alone overall costs and benefits.”
It all adds to the impression that the media were got at, either by governments or other forces, or that they saw once Italy had gone mad that there was an opportunity to implement health fascism and control in “democratic” countries too.
A few years Before Covid there was what turned out to be a minor terrorist incident in my small city.
They instigated what came to be called Local Lockdown (even though the single perpetrator was in custody within 10 minutes or so). Closing down an ever expanding perimeter of shops, offices, educational, public transport and cultural amenities, forcefully evacuating the occupants thereof.
Local radio media spent all day hyped up about ‘escalating developments’ hours after it was all over.
It started about 10am but in the early afternoon we were being told about emergency vehicles converging on our secondary ‘High Sreet’ because of another ‘suspect device’.
Friends I was on that street at the time, not only was there no second device there were no converging emergency vehicles either.
The city’s large 6th Form College (its scope is much larger than that title suggests) at the othe end of that street was ‘locked down’ at 4pm, 6 hours after the initial event only half a mile away.
I concluded that once they had initiated their Lockdown Protocol they let it run until all the bigwigs could get together in the nearby County Hall Emergency Command to take charge, and thus the credit, for its successful implementation.
Supplemental.
The following morning Local Live Online (mirror group news) was full of reports about the previous days excitement. Prominent were those with pictures of all the bigwigs gathered around computers at Emergency Control trying to look decisive in a Captain Mainwaring way.
The rest consisted of quoting Gladys et al from the outlying ‘troubled estate’.
” I didn’t know what was going on, I was I didn’t know what to do, I had the radio on all day I nearly brought the kids home from school !”
Accompanied by a pic of sad Gladys and forlorn kids in their scruffy front garden.
“the first did note that citizens are “willing to cede their liberties” once the state “takes responsibility”“
And that is the heart of the collectivist, statist essence of lockdowns and coercive “healthcare”, that makes it inherently attractive to the left. When the collective has power and individuals and families have little or none to resist, it can impose radical change on people very easily, so all that is needed is for a “vanguard” of politically woke people to take charge. As the Unherd piece linked here yesterday noted:
“Most people on the Left believe that neoliberalism has involved a “retreat” or “hollowing out” of the state in favour of the market. Thus, they interpreted government activism throughout the pandemic as a welcome “return of the state”, one potentially capable, in their view, of eventually reversing neoliberalism’s allegedly anti-statist project. ”
The Left’s Covid failure
“the first did note that citizens are “willing to cede their liberties” once the state “takes responsibility”“
Worth returning to this to emphasise the nasty incoherence of this view. that is so commonplace on the political left – that the greater good and consent (usually manufactured) of the majority justifies anything they think suits their ideological goals.
Let’s just remind ourselves that being “willing to cede your liberty” on an issue is not about you yourself doing what you have been persuaded is necessary. It’s about coercing others who dissent into compliance, and giving tyrannical power to those who can manipulate the executive.
Human rights? Not too many left now are there? Once bodily autonomy is gone it’s done with altogether. Great success!
Human rights were always worthless when they could be overruled by government dictate, a.k.a legislation.
It’s claimed government can’t stop the dinghy people, all they had to do was make a law, why didn’t they? Why do they still drag their feet? Because immigration is part of the neoliberal plan to destroy country/community/family to increase dependence on the state.
The Tories aren’t conservatives! The EU are neoliberals! It’s about global communism!
Demanding governments make more laws is the root cause of the situation we face now; an increasingly authoritarian government.
We should be demanding they are removing more laws from the books than they are making whilst decreasing the number and size of government and civil servant departments.
And off topic, but I’ve always wondered why there is no public gallery in either the HoC or HoL. They are televised now which is better than it was but it’s still not the same as being directly scrutinised.
As far as the illegal immigrants are concerned, what laws can be passed to stop them? No amount of laws make a bit of difference in the middle of the English Channel.
How can we enforce our laws in France? Impossible I’m afraid.
How do we return immigrants back to France when they refuse to take them? Even were the UK to reach agreement with France on shoreline patrols it’s impossible to secure that amount of coastline. It would undoubtedly help but the French obviously don’t want to cooperate. They have just refused to speak to Priti Patel after Boris published a letter on Twitter. It’s a feeble excuse to cease seeking a diplomatic solution, but the French will use any excuse.
Unlike America we can’t build a wall in the middle of the channel and we can’t pluck the migrants from the sea and just sail into French waters to drop them off at Calais, I suspect we would be met by a gunboat.
Stop giving the French £54m a year? It’s a token. It’s also extortion, but stopping it would just make matters worse. We would have no leverage whatsoever.
This is an intractable problem the EU should be dealing with directly as it’s their open border policies that are causing it.
It’s one of the few things I have sympathy for this government over as I don’t imagine for a moment any other government could do any better.
“As far as the illegal immigrants are concerned, what laws can be passed to stop them? No amount of laws make a bit of difference in the middle of the English Channel.
How can we enforce our laws in France? Impossible I’m afraid.
How do we return immigrants back to France when they refuse to take them? Even were the UK to reach agreement with France on shoreline patrols it’s impossible to secure that amount of coastline. It would undoubtedly help but the French obviously don’t want to cooperate. They have just refused to speak to Priti Patel after Boris published a letter on Twitter. It’s a feeble excuse to cease seeking a diplomatic solution, but the French will use any excuse.
Unlike America we can’t build a wall in the middle of the channel and we can’t pluck the migrants from the sea and just sail into French waters to drop them off at Calais, I suspect we would be met by a gunboat.”
It’s not a matter of laws, the laws are there. It’s all about enforcement, and that’s all about political will.
The problem is one of misplaced sentimentality. These people are falsely painted as refugees, when nobody who is in France can claim to come to England as a refugee. It is a falsehood. In some cases it is believed, by the stupid, the sentimental and the gullible. In others, it’s a cynical, politically motivated lie.
These people are criminals, and the only people responsible for their plight are themselves and their enablers.
Once that realisation properly sinks in, then the solution becomes practicable – simply do whatever is necessary to stop these boats entering British waters, and whatever is necessary to exclude them if they do get past (eg make an irrevocable rule that nobody who enters illegally from a safe country can ever again be considered for legal entry, set up holding camps in far off foreign locations (Albania has been touted as one) for any who are apprehended en route or after arrival), and put the blame for any consequences on those responsible – the illegal migrants, the traffickers and the countries who fail to police their own borders.
In reality any harsh measures would not be needed for long. Most of the reason there is a problem is precisely that it is a practicable entry route. Change that, and the numbers would drop off to almost none quite quickly.
“The problem is one of misplaced sentimentality.”
It’s about humanity. I don’t like illegal immigrants any more than you do however, once they are here we are obliged to treat them humanely. I think 4* hotels is a bit much but what else do we do? Build internment centres for them? That really wouldn’t look too good that we were segregating and imprisoning a section of humanity like the Third Reich.
Even the government refers to most of them as illegal immigrants. The left mostly claim them to be refugees, but anyone with half a brain understands that is nonsense.
“simply do whatever is necessary to stop these boats entering British waters”
What would you suggest?
“eg make an irrevocable rule that nobody who enters illegally from a safe country can ever again be considered for legal entry”
I think that’s pretty much the case now. The problem is, we have nowhere to send them.
“set up holding camps in far off foreign locations”
See above…….
“Albania has been touted as one”
Who by? the Albanians? Sure, they’re just going to accept the UK’s problem. Who pays for these internment camps BTW. Who staffs them?
How much will all this cost considering the Albanians will demand a nice profit for their troubles? How long will it go on? And being that the Albanians are profiting from it, would they ever want it to stop?
“and put the blame for any consequences on those responsible – the illegal migrants, the traffickers and the countries who fail to police their own borders.”
We already blame the migrants. How do we blame the traffickers when, to date, we haven’t been able to catch any and France certainly isn’t looking for them.
The current spat between Macron and Boris is over just who is to blame for this.The French aren’t interested in taking the blame, so what do we do about that?
“It’s about humanity. I don’t like illegal immigrants any more than you do however, once they are here we are obliged to treat them humanely. ”
Humanity does not require that you give attempted burglars, however needy, some of your silverware. Why would it require letting people who have chosen to leave a safe haven in France (if they are genuine refugees) to break our law, a reward? Humane treatment means not executing or starving them, not giving them the rights of UK citizens and a UK standard of living.
The rest of your post is a litany of defeatist excuses and evasions that suggest you are looking for reasons not to act. Yet Australia has followed basically this process, successfully:
How does Australia deal with migrant boats? What the approach involves and how it could apply to the UK crisis
NB, by the way, in response to one of your assertions above:
” The latest Government plan for immigration reform takes elements of the Australian approach, stating that for the first time that “whether you enter the UK legally or illegally will have an impact on how your asylum claim progresses”, with those deemed to have entered “illegally” having limited rights.”
[bold added]
Cost is clearly not an issue. If we can waste the trillions we’ve wasted on covid panic responses, we can afford to solve this kind of problem.
The point is, once you’ve run it for a few weeks and made clear you are committed to it, the numbers will drop to almost zero coming across the Channel, because we have the capability to intercept pretty much every single small boat on those waters. Once it isn’t profitable, the criminals running the operation there will go elsewhere.
Again, it’s a matter of political will, not capability, and the main reason we don’t solve the problem is people finding excuses not to, either because they are too sentimental, they are just not bothered enough, or because they want it to continue for self-interested or ideological reasons.
And those three descriptions apply above all to the “Conservative” regime members supposedly elected to tackle these issues.
“Humanity does not require that you give attempted burglars, however needy, some of your silverware. ”
Pointless and ridiculous analogy.
“Humane treatment means not executing or starving them, not giving them the rights of UK citizens and a UK standard of living.”
How does one not provide a UK standard of living when they are in the UK?
From your link:
“Anyone who attempts an unauthorised boat voyage to Australia will be turned back to their point of departure, returned to their home country or transferred to another country,”
And none of those options are open to the UK? Of course they are, we can return them to France, but we can’t. We can return them to their own country, assuming we can establish where they come from, and that country want’s them back, if not, what do we do, drop them out a plane?
And when that country explains that their citizens are free to leave the country, and if they make a bee line to the UK, perhaps the UK government ought to question why the UK is so attractive to migrants. What’s the argument against that?
There is a big difference between us and Australia. Illegals arriving there do so in large, ocean going vessels, so are easier to identify intercept and turn round. We have dingy’s crossing a few miles of channel. We can’t see half of them never mind risk their lives by harassing them to turn back.
The other difference is that Australia is heading toward a totalitarian country considerably faster than we are. Their covid policies are ample evidence of that.
“Cost is clearly not an issue. If we can waste the trillions we’ve wasted on covid panic responses, we can afford to solve this kind of problem.”
I entirely and wholeheartedly agree with that. Neither of us are happy about this. Our government wailed about saving the NHS, but we could have built numerous hospitals with the money spunked on covid, it enrages me. But the immigrant problem can’t be solved with money.
If we can’t turn the RIBS back, if France won’t play ball, if their country of origin won’t take them back, if we can’t even catch half of them before they hit the beaches, what do we do?
Do we want to be seen by the rest of the world as a nation as brutal as those from which these people escaped. I’m no bleeding heart liberal but I don’t want to see people drowned.
The fact is, our welfare state is our own worst enemy (on many levels, not just this) but god forbid anyone whispers ‘NHS privatisation’ or anything criticising council housing or welfare payments, the country erupts in indignation.
But these are the things attracting these people. Not ignoring the fact, of course, that we are still one of the freest nations on the planet.
In many ways, the draw of our country to these people, risking their lives in the most stark circumstances, might be considered our badge of honour.
This isn’t a case of just abandoning people in the middle of the Channel with miles of razor wire along our coastline. This is a challenge of the intellect and political bargaining. Indeed, it’s a problem of the EU denying Brexit and doing everything to keep the UK tied to it. They are desperate not to lose the UK and trying everything they possibly can to convince us we are still required to conform to their laws.
There is no easy solution here, but we can’t kill people.
Again, you are approaching it from a defeatist point of view.
The key is a robust and determined attitude. As I keep pointing out and you refuse to take on board, the problem here is a profitable trade for criminals. That will only stop when we take the profit away by making it an unattractive option for the buyers. The flip side of that is that it will stop as soon as we do make it an unattractive option for the buyers, and we should do so by using every avenue of attack we have.
In fact, it’s perfectly possible for us to spot every single one of those small boats. Unlike Australia we don’t have thousands of miles of open ocean to police, just a few miles of coastline where the crossing is short enough to be practicable in very small boats.
There’s nothing that Australia did that we can’t do here, and Australia’s covid totalitarianism is irrelevant to this issue. We absolutely can try to turn the boats back if they are detected outside our waters, and we must assert uncompromisingly that we are not to blame if they sink. As we are not to blame. They are.
We should do so, and in every case where we are unsuccessful, we should take the occupants of the boats and intern them in unattractive and minimally humane conditions with no possibility of release into the UK, ever, and treat them as foreign criminals. Where we can persuade France to take them back, we should do so, and that’s a matter for diplomacy. If it’s not possible now, it might be in the future, it just needs to be a sufficiently high priority. In every case where the country of origin can be found, the migrants should be returned to it, and diplomatic pressure should be used to the maximum to make them take their people back. We should accept no responsibility for what happens to them there.
We will of course face hand-wringing accusations of inhumanity from the usual suspects – the stupid, the sentimental, the cynical leftists etc. So did Australia. But those accusations are based on falsehood, and they can be defeated if they are stood up to, as Australia proved.
If you start out as you do here with a conviction that “it’s impossible”, and a determination to look everywhere for reasons why it must be impossible, then it’s hardly surprising that you will achieve nothing.
You misunderstood my point. I don’t demand any laws, i’m all for anarchy, i’m pointing out how Tories are lying disingenuous ****’s.
Of that there is no doubt, but no politician is any better.
The left never learn, all for it until they realise it means them too
They just learn and follow rules from an instruction book they are given.
The rules don’t have to make sense, change from day to day, and contradict each other.
The problem is they have taken over our schools and this is how our children are being taught. Told what to think, not taught how to think.
the timing and wording of the relevant articles clearly raises questions about the intellectual basis for lockdowns…
Lockdowns were pragmatic policy. They were ‘something to do’ while a vaccine was being prepared. So an intellectual basis was neither needed nor sought. Pragmatic solutions are only justified if they are effective or not, and you need to try them to find this out.
In this case they did not work, but this could not have been known beforehand. I suspect that the third of Sir Humphrey’s excuses below applies….
Jim: Five standard excuses?
Sir Humphrey: Yes. First there’s the excuse we used for instance in the Anthony Blunt case.
Jim: Which was?
Sir Humphrey: That there is a perfectly satisfactory explanation for everything, but security forbids its disclosure. Second there is the excuse we used for comprehensive schools, that it has only gone wrong because of heavy cuts in staff and budget which have stretched supervisory resources beyond the limits.
Jim: But that’s not true is it?
Sir Humphrey: No, but it’s a good excuse. Then there’s the excuse we used for Concorde, it was a worthwhile experiment, now abandoned, but not before it had provided much valuable data and considerable employment.
Jim: But that is true isn’t it? Oh no, of course it isn’t.
Sir Humphrey: The fourth, there’s the excuse we used for the Munich agreement. It occurred before certain important facts were known, and couldn’t happen again
Jim: What important facts?
Sir Humphrey: Well, that Hitler wanted to conquer Europe.
Jim: I thought everybody knew that.
Sir Humphrey: Not the Foreign Office.
Jim: Five?
Sir Humphrey: Five, there’s the Charge of the Light Brigade excuse. It was an unfortunate lapse by an individual, which has now been dealt with under internal disciplinary procedures….
“Pragmatic solutions are only justified if they are effective or not, and you need to try them to find this out.”
I think lockdowns are wrong in principle and should never be legal under any circumstances. However, assuming you don’t disagree with them in principle and think there are circumstances that justify them, you are advocating a global experiment where the damaging consequences were easily predictable and obvious, and the benefits unknown, and the experiment was never even contemplated by decades of pandemic planning globally. Even now, there’s been no honest attempt by governments to take stock of the experiment to see if it was worth it – because they know very well it wasn’t.
There isn’t really any “left wing” or “right wing” media any more.
There is “globalist funded media” and “everything else”.
All of the mainstream media is essentially pushing the same narrative – on COVID, on climate change, on identity politics, on US politics (Trump bad, Brandon good), on China (mostly good), Russia, India and Brazil (bad).
And all politicians are pushing the same policies once they get into government regardless of the platform they campaigned on – because they are all owned by the same globalist interests.
Voting or buying a different newspaper isn’t going to change anything.
Personally I think the only thing that will change anything is complete economic collapse and a hope that something better will emerge from the rubble.
“There isn’t really any “left wing” or “right wing” media any more.
There is “globalist funded media” and “everything else”.”
Globalism is leftism, and globalist funded media is left wing media. Just consider the likes of George Soros, or the way international pressure is routinely used against “conservative” governments around the world.
Internationalism has always been at the heart of leftist radicalism. World government is the ultimate dream of the left – only one power centre needing to be taken over, no multitude of small nations where people might have different ideas about having their way of life crushed into the radicals’ mould of the greater good, allowing for the easier suppression of any and all conservative resistance to radical “reforms” and removing any possibility of the kind of examples of a better way of doing things that did for the Soviet radical left experiment.
We aren’t far off it, in truth.
“All of the mainstream media is essentially pushing the same narrative”
Yes, pretty much. Fox News in the US and Sky News Australia are two notable exceptions.
Oooops!!
Cardiff and Scarlets trying to fly home as South Africa goes on Covid red list – BBC Sport
Dear Santa,
Please can I have a Sombrero for Xmas?
yours
Wilf Johnson
Dear Wilf,
No. It’s cultural appropriation, you’d flatten it and only keep it for three weeks.
Up yours
Santa
Yeah, because furlough ended & now they’re starting to see the consequences, 20% inflation, for one and we’re only at the start of the beginning! Wait until we have to start paying back the money stolen by Tory cronies, for all those pointless mitigation measure contracts.
My god the media propaganda machine is running on full steam this morning. As someone in finance I use bloomberg and my my you should see it. Cases,lockdowns, new variants, pregnant women are good to take vaccine, who is vaccine hesitant and why etcetc
For the Left, covid and soon climate Lockdowns together with the consequent economic degrowth is the pathway to full Western societal collapse. Only then will the West be on a par with the third world. Only this will satisfy their desire for ‘sustainable equity’.
I recall reading something proposing Chinas “pandemic” started much earlier that the first reported case, it was based on working backwards from the US “first wave” graph, arguing it took something like 20 weeks, while Chinas first wave was only ~8 weeks, but if you worked back ~20 weeks there were some anomilies that mite indicate it was much earlier. A large drop in Chinas Co2 output, a dispapearence of thousands of users from their mobile phone network, and a bunch of suspicious investments from certain elites in stocks that would surge in the event of a “Pandemic” Bill Gates investment in Moderna was one that sticks out. (this is from memory, numbers mite be off, can’t find the piece, it was one of the number cruncher guys on substack)
If we think back to the scarey propaganda from Wuhan right at the beginning, all those fake videos of people dropping in the streets (unconcious people don’t try to break their fall), video proporting to be piles of bodies lining the streets (that turned out to be homeless people sleeping). Snatch squads in spacesuits, welding people inside apartments, blocking road tunnels with piles of sand, trucks spraying neighbourhoods etc. It was all a big show.
And now, with hindsight, we can see most of the early policy responses had no real scientific basis for the good of health, and in fact probably made things worse (lockdowns, clustering the most susecptible in care homes feeding them Midazolam, removing profilactics from Dr’s toolkits, banning alternative treatments, ventilator protocols, etc.)
We can now clearly see the only logical reasons for all this are global financial shinanigans to put the global money system into ICU and over-medicate it by “going Direct” (see Fed & Blackrock advice paper) injecting $Trillions into a lifeless corpse.
Then we come to the real reasons for implimenting lockowns, to slow “Money Velocity” in oder to hide and control the inevitable hyperinflation, until they can perform the planned financial coup d’etat via CBDC which will most likely be rolled out via UBI.
With all that in mind, it’s easy to see why the “left” media did a voltface.
BTW, there is no “Left” or “Right” anymore, they’re just “othering” labels to keep us divided and confused, there is only Up Vs Down.
Ok but for this to be true they would need to be a bunch of dishonest corrupt crooks
Surely not
I’m on the fence
I guess they forgot China IS LEFT WING.
You have to be pretty illiterate to think that the Groan and the NYT are ‘left wing’ by any rational definition! (The former campaigned consistently against Corbyn and has supported the LibDems). – Ref. Nick Davies : Flat Earth News re. the collapse of the Scott Trust.
Oh – hang on. It’s Noah! – the one who comes up with frantic pseudo-analyses of establishment memes and data without clocking what they are. Pat on head and kindly smile time.
I’m amazed at the degree of naive political ignorance and definition that there is around after all this experience of the current coup. No wonder the rats have taken over so comprehensively.
“You have to be pretty illiterate to think that the Groan and the NYT are ‘left wing’ by any rational definition!“
Same old falsehoods, refuted here time after time..
There’s no point in yet again posting the direct refutations of this assertion – eg Peter Hitchens’ informed (and the very opposite of illiterate or irrational) explanations of how Blairites (who are the people who run the publications in question) certainly are leftwing radicals.
For anyone who is interested in why the likes of RickH (and all of the “old left” faction) constantly push this trope that the radical leftist Blairites are not actually leftist at all, the situation is broadly as follows.
There was a split in the left, after their utter defeat in the 1980s, between those who stuck with the older, failed leftist notions of how you overthrow resistance to your radicalism, even after those approaches had clearly been defeated permanently by the 1980s, and the modern, slicker, media-savvy and dangerously competent leftists represented by the Blairites. Both factions came from the same communist youth and student groups. The latter won the civil war within the leftist organisations (such as the Labour Party), and both sides were happy to pretend that the Blairites were “not really real leftists at all”. The old lefties because they thought it would allow them to delegitimise the Blairites within the leftist orgs and win back control, the Blairites because they – being much sharper and more cunning – understood that the way to win actual power was to have your media fellow travellers and operatives (such as far left Andrew Marr, whom the BBC thought it was perfectly acceptable to employ as Political Editor and is still regularly misrepresented as an honest, politically moderate face) pretend you are “centrist” and “moderate”.
But the only substantive change the Blairites made was to drop the old, failed obsession with “capitalism” and the ownership of the means of production and focus on undermining and breaking (“reforming”) all the institutions that stood in the way of their radical social engineering agendas.
That’s why you see the real hatred in each direction, for Corbyn and the old left on the part of the Blairites, and vice versa. It’s the vicious sibling rivalry of brothers squabbling over toys they each believe they have the right to and want to control – the parties and institutions of the political left, and the reins of political power.
Are Corbyn and Abbott no longer campaigning for a policy of zero covid?
I too am very surprised that people commenting on these pages can be so perceptive when it comes to media agendas and smears, but don’t understand that Corbyn was the most obvious recent example of the establishment, and so called ‘mainstream left’, closing ranks, and working with newspapers like the Guardian to ensure the establishment view was protected.
His treatment in the so called mainstream left papers was appalling, especially after the election was too close for comfort in 2017. I think you are correct, papers like the Guardian are not left, they are firmly centrist with an unhealthy dose of identity politics. They don’t want real change for working class people – they despise them and are a paper of the professional middle classes For this reason they hate both the left and the right. I genuinely think that if they’d had to choose between Corbyn and Johnson they would have picked Johnson, and the campaigning against Corbyn along with the blatantly untrue anti-Semitism smears demonstrates that palpably
Go to 21 minutes of this vid to see the UK Veteran telling you how to fuck up the police in protests where they think its ok to start assaulting people and inflict violence.
HE SAYS THE BEST TACTIC IS TO FILL BALLOONS WITH BLACK PAINT AND OIL AND GREASE AND PELT THEM SO TO WRECK THEIR VISION AND DISABLE THEIR WEAPONS. IT FORCES THEM TO RETREAT. THIS WOULD BE A GREAT TOOL TO USE IN KETTLE SITUATIONS AS WELL.
Clip at 21 minutes
A Genocide is Happening in Northern Australia
https://www.bitchute.com/video/gTB57EJXOz4H/
How much money does Bill Gates give the NYT?
Fears of ANOTHER Christmas lockdown as No10 scientists warn super-mutant Botswana variant ‘could ALREADY be here’ and Africa travel ban might be too late — amid concerns new strain can dodge jabs
Hahahaha Hahahaha Hahahaha Hahahaha
Wait for the mutants, mutants to mutate & have babies.
“Tackling variants” is like trying to tidy leaves with a leaf blower in Hyde Park on a windy November day.
Especially if you have “vaccinated” everyone with a “vaccine” that doesn’t work, thereby gifting a massive evolutionary advantage to a mutation of the virus that can bypass the attenuated “immunity” conveyed by said “vaccine”. However, as my unvaxed scientist friend put it the other day, I feel “strangely resilient”…
Violations of fundamental human rights do not become more acceptable as more information comes in. Wrong is always wrong and cannot be finessed away by “experts” who only know what governments and their globalist masters want them to know.
We are now in a situation where governments across the globe will have no hesitation in locking their people down, whenever they get the urge. Even worse the “success” of lockdowns has emboldened some of these tyrants to go further and introduce even more draconian measures such as mandated injections with clearly dangerous experimental agents, which clearly have little or nothing to do with preventing infection and much more to with control and depopulation. Other governments are watching and wondering if and when they can get away with doing similar or worse. We live in the very strangest of times.
I don’t think that it’s just the left-wing MSM who have done this sort of thing – much of thw so-called ‘conservative’ media, especially in the UK, are STILL supporting of mask-wearing for ‘COVID protection’ despite knowing full well that (and likely printing articles over the last 20 years to prove it as well as now NOT printing studies that also do) they are useless outside of the carefully-controlled medical setting by medical staff and using N95 masks.
With lockdowns, only now are some of these outlets beginning to come around, and only allowing a few of their columnists – not the full-time ‘journalists’ reporting news (but who invarably stray into propaganda [see DT Global Health Security section [sponosored by the you-know-who Foundadtion]) – to publish contrarian pieces. On 95%+ of the (still) propaganda pieces in favour of the authoritarian measures, no reader comments allowed.
Just in case any pro-cloth mask-wearing people are reading this, why is it that the COVID wards use N95 masks but no other, given the prevalence of COVID in hospitals (i.e. people who catch it after they go in to a non-COVID ward/area for treatment, despite all the restrictions on entry now).
Scientists reject pundits’ vaccine ‘theory’ after three footballers collapse in a weekWigan’s Charlie Wyke hospitalised while Sheriff’s Adama Traore went down clutching chest and Sheffield United’s John Fleck fell ill in games
Leading scientists have rejected speculation that the Covid vaccine is linked with recent on-field collapses of three footballers, as sporting pundits came under attack for fuelling hesitancy of the jab.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2021/11/25/wigan-striker-charlie-wyke-becomes-third-footballer-collapse/
At least the subject is being discussed…
I used to be a regular, paying Guardian reader mostly because I’m German, moved to the UK late in 2010 after carefully checking under which circumstances I was allowed to do so and then, everything was torn to shreds to due Brexit and the BBC was too much in favour of this for my tastes. I quickly grew a dislike for the more unhinged nuLeft commentators, but since I can tolerate standpoints I don’t agree with, I largely just ignored them or read these texts for their entertainment value. But since 2020, not anymore. I don’t appreciate being lied to to my own detriment and while I could have respected wokesters sticking to their own values, this doesn’t extend to wordsmiths-for-hire without any.
Money talks. Bill Gates subsidises the Guardian, and bungs numerous other mainstream news (sic) outlets, as well as journalist organisations and training programmes.
Since the shamdemic began, advertising revenue from Big Pharma and governments is equivalent to life support for the ailing morally and financially near-bankrupt legacy media.
Arguably more concerning than their deserved fate is the threat to independent media sources posed by the new online harms and policing Bills, due to be squeezed out any day now by the Mother of Parliaments.
If ever there was a stone-bonker case for compulsory abortion. . .
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Check out the Latest News page. Lots of interviews with local and international supporters such as this former Portuguese judge.
https://www.reignitedemocracyaustralia.com.au/rui-castro/
It all adds to the impression that lockdowns were implemented frenetically, without sufficient regard for individual rights, let alone overall costs and benefits.
Good Lord. Where do people get such ideas?