The following is the text of a speech I gave at the Margaret Thatcher Centre Freedom Festival yesterday.
Since arriving in the House of Lords, the most disheartening thing is how often a Government Minister is able to reply to an excellent point made by a member of the Opposition by saying: “But the noble lord will recall that this was the policy of his own government.” I’m thinking of the Football Governance Bill, in particular, but there are dozens of other examples. Turns out, the Conservative Party didn’t do anything particularly conservative in the years 2010 to 2024. True, there were some exceptions – education reform, Brexit, the occasional good person elevated to the House of Lords. But not many.
So my subject today is why do Conservatives abandon their principles in office? Why did Margaret Thatcher’s ministries turn out to be the exception and not the rule?
I thought I’d take as my case study the decision of Boris Johnson’s Government to tell everyone to remain in their homes on March 23rd 2020, five years ago tomorrow.
As Lord Sumption pointed out, the lockdown is the greatest interference in personal liberty in the history of these islands, yet it was imposed on the country by probably the most freedom-loving Conservative government we’d had since Margaret Thatcher’s last administration, led by a libertarian conservative and with a majority of 80.
Now, many people here no doubt supported the decision to lockdown five years ago and, even if you think now, with the benefit of hindsight, it caused more harm that it prevented, you may still believe the government at the time had no choice, given limited information in the face of a terrifying, existential risk. Michael Gove, who was one of the key decision-makers in March 2020, made this point eloquently in the discussion we had about the first lockdown at the Spectator last week.
I disagree obviously. I was one of a tiny handful of journalists to oppose the first lockdown – and I’d like to briefly remind you of the case for not locking down at the time.
First, the Government had a carefully worked out strategy in place to deal with the outbreak of a respiratory virus, distilling the lessons learned from how we’d reacted to previous pandemics and epidemics, in the hope that they wouldn’t repeat those mistakes. It was called the Pandemic Preparedness Strategy and among the critical pieces of advice it contained were: in the event of a viral outbreak, do not quarantine the healthy as well as the sick; do not force non-essential businesses to shut down; do not close schools. Unfortunately, it was disregarded almost immediately – consigned to the circular file – binned.
Some will be quick to point out that I’ve left out a crucial word. In fact, it was called the Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy and this wasn’t an outbreak of influenza.
But that’s a poor excuse. The authors of the strategy made it clear that in the event of a SARS-like viral outbreak, the plan was adaptable. It actually said: this plan can be “adapted and deployed for scenarios such as an outbreak of another infectious disease, e.g. SARS”.
Happily for those scientists and officials who developed this strategy, not to mention the tens of millions of pounds that paid for public inquiries into earlier viral outbreak, it wasn’t a complete waste of taxpayers’ money. A Swedish Pandemic Preparedness Strategy, along similar lines to ours, was enthusiastically put into action by Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s Chief Epidemiologist.
As you are no doubt aware, Sweden did not impose any lockdowns in 2020 and experienced one of the lowest, if not the lowest, rate of excess deaths in the OECD in the years 2020-22.
Some will say Sweden is not like the UK, but in fact 88% of Swedes live in urban areas, compared to just 84% of the population of the UK. And Stockholm is no less densely populated than cities in the UK.
So why did our Government abandon this strategy? One reason is ministers were panicked by a paper produced by Professor Neil Ferguson, a physicist-turned-epidemiologist from Imperial College and a member of SAGE, which predicted that if the UK didn’t lock down, 510,000 people would die from COVID-19 in the course of the next few months.
SAGE duly digested this paper and described Ferguson’s prediction as a “reasonable worse case” scenario.
Now, you might think: what Government wouldn’t have locked down if the deaths of 510,000 people was a “reasonable worst case” scenario if it didn’t?
Needless to say, a ‘reasonable worse case’ isn’t something with a high likelihood of occurring, one reason the Government hadn’t troubled itself to carry out a cost-benefit analysis of ‘lockdown’ before the pandemic hit.
An article in the FT in July 2020 included interviews with some of the people involved in the decision to lock down at the Cobra meeting on March 20th 2020, where each of the leaders of the different nations that make up the UK decided to collectively endorse a UK-wide lockdown, and Jesse Norman said he was the only person to ask whether a cost-benefit analysis had been done. Michael Gove, who was chairing the meeting in Boris Johnson’s place, gave him a look of mild astonishment, shocked that anyone could be so naïve as to ask that question.
In Michael’s defence, he could have argued that a cost-benefit analysis might well have shown that, in all likelihood, the harm caused by locking down would be greater than any harm it prevented. After all, the chances of 510,000 people dying from COVID-19 over the next year if they didn’t lock down was not high. And we have good reason to believe that had our Government not locked down, 510,000 people would not have died from the virus. Ferguson’s model predicted 85,000 Swedes would die over the course of a few months if Sweden didn’t lock down. In fact, the death toll from the virus in Sweden by the end of August 2020 was 5,800, with half of those deaths in care homes who would likely have died even if Anders Tegnell had recommended a lockdown.
Nevertheless, Michael might have said, if there is a risk of a catastrophic scenario materialising, it is the duty of a responsible Government to do everything it can to mitigate that risk. Risk aversion is not irrational. We all wear seatbelts, after all.
But how likely is a ‘worse case scenario’ to materialise? We know from Ferguson’s previous work that he had a tendency to exaggerate the deaths likely to be caused by a viral outbreak. The most famous example is the bird flu pandemic of 2005, which Ferguson said could kill up to 200 million people worldwide. In fact, it killed 74.
Scientists and mathematicians involved in disease modelling are reluctant to define what they mean by a ‘reasonable worse case’ scenario, but the UK National Risk Register defines it as the “worst plausible manifestation of that particular risk”. In 2017, the same register defined “plausible” as having “at least a one in 20,000 chance of occurring in the UK in the next five years”. If my maths is correct, that would mean a worse case scenario has a one in 100,000 risk of occurring in a particular year.
So, to extrapolate, if we treat Neil Ferguson’s prediction as a ‘reasonable worse case’ scenario, which is how it was described by Sage, that means the chances of 510,000 people dying from COVID-19 over the course of the next few months in the event of the government doing nothing were one in 100,000.
I would accept that if there was a 10% chance of 510,000 people dying if the government didn’t lockdown, locking down in March 2020 might have been a responsible thing to do – even a one in 20 risk. But one in 100,000?
What makes this so hard to understand is that the harm caused by the lockdown was entirely foreseeable. When the government did get around to publishing a cost-benefit analysis on April 8th 2020, two weeks after the horse had bolted, it estimated that a 75% reduction in non-emergency healthcare alone would result in 185,000 deaths.
A second report published on July 15th revised this 185,000 figure down on the optimistic assumption that treatment would be postponed rather than cancelled because the NHS would find the capacity to work through the backlog post-lockdown and catch up.
Last time I checked, the NHS waiting list was 7.5 million.
Some will say, “Well, maybe the risk of people dying from the virus was exaggerated, but what about the risk of ‘our’ NHS being overwhelmed? Surely that was higher than one in 100,000?”
I would accept that it was higher than that – considerably higher. After all, intensive care capacity in Lombardy did reach saturation point in early March 2020, although predictions of how long that would remain the case were exaggerated. But how high?
Once again, we turn to the Swedish example: in spite of not locking down, health services in Sweden were not overwhelmed.
Another thing to bear in mind is that the rate of infection was actually falling by the third week of March in 2020. Chris Whitty, then the Chief Medical Officer of England and the Government’s Chief Medical Advisor, admitted as much under questioning by the Health Select Committee in July 2020. He said the coronavirus pandemic was probably already in retreat before the full lockdown was imposed on March 23rd 2020, i.e., the R rate was below one.
Nevertheless, true blue, freedom-loving conservatives, the sort of people we would have wanted to be in charge in the event of a viral outbreak, decided to lock everyone in their homes almost exactly five years ago. They prioritised safety over liberty. They were responsible for the greatest interference in personal liberty in the history of these islands to avert a one in 100,000 risk of 510,000 people dying.
So, why did they prove so spineless? I should point out that it wasn’t just conservative politicians, but lots of conservative journalists, too, who heartily endorsed the lockdown. Even people in Right-wing conservative think tanks, people on our wing of the movement – members of our tribe! – became lockdown enthusiasts. At the time, I called them ‘Libertarians for lockdown’. I won’t name names because I’m still friends with some of them and in most other policy areas we are still comrades-in-arms.
But why did so many people in this movement – our movement – embrace this catastrophic policy?
I can think of three reasons.
First, I think it was a yearning for the approval of the metropolitan liberal intelligentsia. Being at odds with the BBC, most national newspapers, the Civil Service, the majority of the political class, the Great and the Good, etc, in almost every public debate isn’t as much fun as it sounds. Being cast as evil Tories, as not caring about the poor and the dispossessed, of putting profit before people, of shilling for the oil and gas industry – it takes its psychological toll. With the pandemic, here was an opportunity at last to be on the same side as the chattering classes, to bask in their approval. “See! We’re not as evil as you think. We don’t want to kill granny either.”
I fear that for many of our friends, that opportunity was irresistible.
Second, I think doing nothing in the event of a national crisis – Neil Ferguson literally described the scenario in which 510,000 people would die as the “do nothing” scenario – is extremely difficult for politicians and policy wonks, however committed they are to small-state conservatism. After all, what is the point of them if their years of toiling in the think tank mines means all they can recommend is that we ‘do nothing’ during the biggest national crisis of our lifetime? Doing something – anything – that will enable them to show off their policy chops is infinitely more appealing.
Finally, I think the reason Cabinet Ministers abandoned their commitment to liberty is because, in the words of the other Lord Acton, power tends to corrupt. Imagine, if you will, how soul destroying it is to be a politician in the normal course of events. You finally arrive at the top of the tree after years of soul-destroying grunt work as a party hack and discover that – you’re essentially powerless. You pull the levers and nothing happens.
I remember when my children were younger having a fake steering wheel that we would attach to the back seat with a suction pad. As I was driving along, a child in the backseat would gurgle with pleasure as he yanked the toy wheel this way and that, imagining he was steering the car. That’s what it’s like being a minister of state. After a while, it becomes obvious that you’re the toddler in the back seat – someone else is driving the car. And that must be frustrating.
But here, at last, was an opportunity to grab the steering wheel and put yourself in charge. Suddenly, the decisions you are taking – “You must stay in your homes”, “You must keep two metres between you and the person next to you at all times”, “You cannot drink alcohol in a pub unless you’re having a substantial meal”, “A scotch egg is not a substantial meal” – have real world consequences. When you dreamt about one day having power, this is what you fantasised about. Advisors hanging on your every word. Officials running and dashing. The police arresting people for disobeying your edicts. Again, the opportunity to finally exercise power – to ‘make a difference’ – was irresistible.
So what’s the lesson here? I’m reluctant to draw any conclusions because, as we saw with the Pandemic Preparedness Strategy, lessons aren’t learned – they’re abandoned the moment it becomes politically expedient to do so. But if there’s one lesson here I hope that at least those in this room can take to heart it is that if, God willing, you ever find yourself in power, or in a position of influence, you remember that sometimes the wisest thing to do is to do nothing.
I am grateful for the help of Will Jones and Clare Craig when preparing this speech.
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How sad must our political class be that the height of their ambition is to be able to instruct 50 million people to order something more substantial than a scotch egg with their pint.
Sadly lessons are rarely learned. They may be written down but shuffled out of sight by more present ‘events’ in politics.
Perhaps the collapse of the Conservative party is partly due to the informal ‘lessons learned’ by the electorate?
I’m glad that Lord Young took this opportunity to make the case once again.
Rona. Medical Nazism. Plandemic. Viruses don’t exist, scream and yell your ‘science’ all you want. I worked at the HSA on Rona reporting. My simple question to the idiot class at the HSA, ‘show me the virus, isolated, from the bat’….crickets. Nothing.
30-55.000 old people murdered in spring of 2020 during LD1. I don’t hear a god damn thing about it. No one cares. Then I have to listen to pious arselings tell me how clever they are, how smart, how caring, how tolerant. F Off. The most intolerant little fascists imaginable made themselves visible during the Medical Nazism of Rona.
And yet..
The same people who are supposedly so moved to try to save half a million people don’t seem to have any moral qualms pushing for Ukrainians to keep fighting against Russians for many years to come, with the implication that hundreds of thousands will die. And they aren’t eviscerated in the media as morally bankrupt monsters for suggesting it.
So it would seem, and history will confirm as often as is needed, that there are some causes for which leaders, the commentariat and the population at large are quite happy to sacrifice lives. Hundreds of thousands of them. Even millions.
Alas, freedom doesn’t seem to be one of those – at least not for many. I am a bit surprised Toby Young isn’t one of them, though.
It seems to me the cost of not stopping the Russian will be much more expensive than Covid.
“….the cost of not stopping the Russian” doing what and where ?
Stopping the Russians protecting their country he might mean.
In that ridiculous worldview NATO-US should be allowed to swallow the non-existent country of the Ukraine, install nuclear missiles pointed at Moscow, putting them beside the 40 illegal biolabs run by the CIA.
You know, logical thinking.
If you are a retard.
A Ukrainian country existed long before the Grand Duchy of Moscow which begat modern Russian and its territory didn’t become Russian before the Polish partitions of the 18th century. Parts of it became again Polish after the first world war and remained so until Stalin annexed it again and ethnically cleansed it to remove the sizable number of Poles who had been living there for centuries (who were moved westward and settled in territories where Germans had been living for centuries after they had been ethnically cleansed away as well).
Doubly hypocritical seeing that grannies are fighting for Ukraine at this point.
I too differ with some of TY’s views, but respect what he has contributed.
The same people who are supposedly so moved to try to save half a million people don’t seem to have any moral qualms pushing for Ukrainians to keep fighting against Russians for many years to come, with the implication that hundreds of thousands will die.
People in Ukraine will stop dying from this war the moment Putin’s troops stop fighting and withdraw. Or the moment Ukrainian people chose to accept their fate and stop defending themselves, which is equally possible. However, demanding that they must stop so that they no longer get killed by the invaders in order to ‘protect’ them is disingenuous.
Demanding? Who is demanding anything?
Certainly not me.
I think the ones doing any demanding are those who try to browbeat, ridicule and shame those who advocate peaceful resolution.
In any case you miss the point. Are you going to argue that the establishment that acted to (supposedly) “save” 500,000 from covid death, isn’t the same establishment that seemed quite happy to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands to overthrow Sadam Hussein? Just as an example.
Are you going to argue that these people don’t sacrifice people when they deem it necessary and convenient for them?
They’re not too keen on talking about excess deaths too, ask Andrew Bridgen who they threw out of the Conservative party to save face.
You’re comparing apples and oranges in various ways. The decision whether or not the fight in Ukraine will continue rests with the involved parties and it can – at best – be indirectly influenced by supporting either of them.
Even assuming the decision was actually one for this establishment to make, they’d still be deciding in favour of other people’s possible deaths instead of – crucial difference – their own. By choosing to prevent 510,000 COVID deaths, they were also choosing the safest course for themselves.
You’re obviously correct that sacrificing other people is always an easy decision to make and will usually be made readily (for COVID, think people in care homes) but this was bad example.
We know for a fact the people forced us into lockdown weren’t afraid for themselves.
As demonstrated by all their transgressions. Ferguson, going off to see his bit kn the side, Newson having meals in restaurants, Pelosi going to the hairdresser, Cummings driving across the country to deal with some family issue (while others couldn’t say goodbye or bury their relatives). Etc etc. And those are the ones we know about.
They dis it to cover their asses so nobody could accuse them of having let people die. Which is why they are all too happy to send people to die for them in wars if they think it’s safe politically.
Cummings literally fled from Downing Street 10 (he was caught on film while doing so) after a couple of politicians he had been in daily contact with had ‘tested positive’, drove across the country like a madman and hid with his parents(!) aka ‘self-isolated’ in a cottage there. The mad maskers, Michie and Greenalgh, were certainly also mainly afraid for themselves and the same goes for a great many less visible “COVID people”. In early days of COVID, the leading people, all preciously close to the age for “vulnerable people” were probably also afraid that they might need to be hospitalized because pneumonia and then what if “the health system” had broken down and social unrest broken out (rumoured to happen soon at the time Cummings fled from the capital as access to all kinds of everyday necessities became ever more difficult to secure due to panic buying of crazed mobs who’d literally fight each other over toilet tissue).
I think they were still afraid later, although probably less about COVID and more about what might happen to them should the public ever learn about the real size of this scam. That’s why they kept the hysterical shit show rolling for as long as possible and actually, still haven’t really stopped it. There’s still in inquiry whose purpose is to make sure that nobody ever learns or at least, that nothing is ever officially admitted.
What Toby fails to mention in his speech is the fact that the vast majority of other countries in the world thought lockdown was the right way to save lives and Sweden was an outlier. Also cost benefit analysis with regard to life and death on one hand and financial loss on the other doesn’t work. Finally nobody knows nor can know what would have happened if we had not locked down. Not a remotely balanced speech.
“the vast majority of other countries in the world thought lockdown was the right way to save lives and Sweden was an outlier”
I think Sir Desmond Swayne correctly called that “herd stupidity”.
Regarding the cost benefit analysis, you are missing probably the most important element – both the “cost” and “benefit” calculations need to include the value of freedom, and the cost of being deprived of it. You could “keep everybody safe” by locking them in little rooms forever, but that’s not really living. No analysis of this kind can be purely financial, and I doubt many here think it is just financial. You are missing the point.
“Finally nobody knows nor can know what would have happened if we had not locked down.” SWEDEN, South Dakota, Belarus, there are probably others.
Anyone who wanted to “save their life” was welcome to wear a mask, stay at home, get “vaccinated” for as long as they wanted. Just don’t expect me to do it. I’m not responsible for other people’s health.
At most it could have been advice.
If you are concerned about this so-called infection, by all means stay at home, wear a mask (on your own in your car if you are mentally ill), and take every medication and injection available. Under no circumstances should you doubt anything anyone in “authority” says, or investigate or question anything , ever!
Just don’t expect anyone else to follow your example, nor expect to live an enjoyable, fulfilling or long life!
If you bothered to do the slightest bit of research you would have seen that Lockdowns had no affect on Covid spread whereever they were used. You might want to look at Peru and Chile in 2020. Very harsh lockdown conditions and yet ended up with some of the highest death stats in the world.
But no, people like you just ‘feel’ lockdowns and masks must work, “because they should innit”! I bet your main source of news was the BBC.
Florida completely abandoned all forms of lockdown in Oct 2020. California kept going for years. Florida (with an older population) had a lower death rate. So much evidence, but people don’t want to read it.
In the very rare event that Covid & lockdowns are mentioned in the circles in which I move, many people, ex-arch lockdowners, say that they were always against them. They claim to have carried out minor acts of rule- breaking. All nonsense of course, but accurate memories of their compliance have been flushed away. It’s like trying, in 1946, to find one of the 93% of the German population, who’d voted for Hitler in 1937.
My experience has been slightly different. I know almost nobody who has changed their Covidian position. At the time, a fair few of our Covidian ex friends mentioned “breaking the rules” but they (unlike others) did it sensibly. I never got the impression many of them were especially concerned about catching “Covid” – they claimed to be doing it for the greater good.
Or to find a single socialist in the west after the end of the USSR who would admit that their promotion of Russia and defence of their excesses was, perhaps, a little misjudged.
The last free elections in the Weimar Republic took place in 1932 and the NSDAP got 37.3% of the vote, which means 62.3% of the electorate did not vote for it (the SPD came second with 21.58%).
How many of that 62.3% of the non-NSDAP electorate did not vote at all?
The question makes no sense because that’s percentages of the votes which were counted. According to Wikipedia, turnout for this election was 84.1%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1932_German_federal_election
That’s what I wanted to know, the 62.3% of votes counted not for the NSDAP were 52.4% of eligible voters vs 31.4% that were. A higher proportion of the eligible voters than voted Labour in the 2024 UK General Election.
Well, so what? As the NSDAP got almost 40% of the vote, it obviously must have had a higher vote share than Labour had in 2024. But this still means that 68.6% of the whole electorate didn’t vote for the Nazis at this election and there wasn’t another before the NSDAP had taken over and had started to send its political opponents to prison camps (starting with the KPD, the communist party).
The German term for this is Machtergreifung, seizure of power, and that’s what it was: A coup in everything but the name. And it didn’t happen because a majority of Germans had enthusiastically embraced Hitler.
The last election in the 1930s in Germany was in 1933 and the Nazi Party got 44% of the vote, more than double the next party, the SDP. That was 17 million votes for the Nazi Party out of a total of 39 million total votes.
Just for perspective, that’s more votes for the Nazi Party than votes for Labour (9m) nd Conservative (6m) COMBINED in the 2024 general election. It is also a higher percentage of the votes than Labour received (33%) to be declared a “landslide” winner.
But don’t worry, COVID showed us that every country is more or less the same and the majority of the people are capable of acting ike Nazis and waving through totalitarianism.
Quoting Wikipedia, emphasis added:
Federal elections were held in Germany on 5 March 1933, after the Nazi seizure of power on 30 January and just six days after the Reichstag fire.
The election saw Nazi stormtroopers unleash a widespread campaign of violence against the Communist Party (KPD), left wingers , trade unionists, the Social Democratic Party and the Centre Party.
But there’s obviously no way this widespread campaign of violence could ever have influenced voter behaviour. No, no, no, this cannot be!
We were all bombarded with alarmist statistics in the early stages of the pandemic. One of my colleagues would begin his day by looking at a website that quoted the number of people infected, the number of people seriously ill and the number of people who had recovered. The last number was about a quarter of the number of people infected for several days in a row. He stopped coming into work and disappeared into his own lockdown before the “official” lockdown.
Also as well as the rate of infection beginning to fall as lockdown started, one of the finest springs on record – almost unbroken sunshine through to the end of May – began. The lockdown was supposed to last as long as it took to flatten the infection curve. With the rate of infection falling and the sun shining lockdown should have been ended by at least mid April and probably earlier. Remember the pictures in the press of Stockholm’s population in bars and parks enjoying the sunshine whilst millions in the UK cowered in their petri dishes of high rise flats. Shame on all those responsible for lockdown and the disastrous consequences of it with which we are still living today.
Shame & eternal damnation.
Long live Vitamin D, LED lamp-posts for Naked Public Health Emperors, the British Broadcasting Commentariat and gullible GOV.UK to swing from.
Vitamin D3 5000AU.
How can you get people to take the experimental when everything is back open.
Utterly surreal at the time. The following morning, with my son (rescued from a panicked university and hall of residence the previous week), I engaged in “permitted food shopping” at our nearest retail park.
Like a movie set – security taping lining the walkway from the car park and entrance to the shopping mall. We queued in the line of trollies, handles about to be dutifully sanitised to stave off an airborne virus.
My son was counted into M&S Food, I was counted into Tesco. No shoppers were casually dropping dead. Trollies danced the two-metre two-step to Stop the Spread. We drove home on a near-deserted dual carriage-way, with a police car stationed on the central reservation ahead of the main roundabout.
That afternoon, we did our “permitted excercise.” A laminated sign at the entrance to the footpath beyond the woods, purporting to be from the local constabulary, asked:
“Why are you here today?”
And instructed us, “You should not drive away from your address to carry out excercise.”
All to combat a respiratory virus already anticipated in informed circles to have an age-fatality profile comparable to general mortality.
It was the State that killed Granny.
To be remebered here: This text is a lying. The government had always just issued guidance and never any real orders.
Try pointing that out to brainwashed citizens who have just found purpose in ordering people around.
Some of the regulations were pretty clear, others vague. The one hour a day thing was indeed just guidance.
I remember reading through this a great many times and the behaviour rules were all just guidance.
I think the regulations closing businesses were not guidance, ditto regulations about gatherings.
That’s why I wrote behaviour rules. Technically, there was never a mask mandate in the UK. People were just strongly urged to wear one if at all feasible. A lot of stuff which was mandatory didn’t really come from the government but were on premise rules for customers/ visitors which were privately enforced by businesses blackmailed by the government.
Eg (example slightly off) in Germany, during the height of the 2G, 2G+ etc stuff, hospitality businesses were free to serve unvaccinated people provided they’d accept masking and social distancing for everyone. Or they could “voluntarily” deny service to these and operate (almost) normally. That was a trick SPD politicians came up with they considered extremely clever at that time.
Indeed – everyone could have just declared themselves “exempt” from wearing a mask. The Blackbelt Barrister posted a video on masks and possibly other covid regs, during the “pandemic”, which was pretty wishy washy (he has since become a lot more forthright) and I asked in the comments how any court could possibly decide who was “exempt” – on what basis – as there was nothing in the regs that I could see that could possibly be of use in determining this. He never answered me.
This was always a decision for everyone to make — you were exempt from wearing a mask when you chose to be. That’s what I did after the Michie interview about her holiday in Japan when she discovered face masking.
I had a single run-in with supermarket security guy who clung to his mask long after almost everyone had stopped wearing them. That was immediately after Johnson had declared a renewed mandate in fall 2021 and I had decided that I wouldn’t be wearing one again unless physically forced to. The guy came after me after I had entered unmasked and moved to demand something from me but I was totally pissed off at the time, cut him off with “No, no, no, no!” and left him standing.
That sounds similar to a mate of mine who wore one most of the time, but late in 2021 had enough. When the supermarket security guard approached him, he just said I told you the other day I’m exempt. I myself got tired of saying I’m exempt in a Coffee shop and he refused my take out drink. He was polite etc but I just told him he will be wearing them for five years, don’t know where that figure came from but sounded good at the time.
Not on the London Underground – it was a legal requirement to wear a mask.
TfL issued 4,365 fines. Out of those 1,285 people were prosecuted. The average fine was £754.
You could still be exempt. I did not wear one and was never challenged or fined.
That would explain how that trucker who took legal action and lost, when arriving at a security gate was asked to wear a mask, which he refused.
Then again, look what happened to public Gyms when the owner tried to keep them open. They had the plod around. Remember the Tattoo shop in Bristol anyone. He quoted Common Law but was ignored and dragged out. The law only counts if enough people use it.
What with Covid and the climate scam it would appear that science has fallen into disrepute. It’s healthy to be sceptical about scientific reports but generally laymen should treat scientists with some respect and listen to them, albeit cautiously. I can’t help thinking that the media, especially the Guardian and BBC do not produce balanced reporting.
This in many ways has been going on for years, the media gleefully report scientific health findings which are then picked up by celebrities, the celebrities, often women, very beautiful and super fit who make pot loads of money telling people what to do. What all of them fail to report is the basis of the scientific studies which are frequently very limited in scope. Then years later the fad dies out and they come up with another scam to cheat people.
Then we have the dumbing down of the education system, where youngsters are not taught to question and analyse, instead they are fed a diet of left wing multicultural claptrap. I’m perhaps being discursive but now they are trying to convince people that we have to prepare for war. Maybe they will use the imported young and fit mercenaries to coerce our young into fighting. Let’s hope the younger generation wake up to what is going on, the potential of losing your life to slogans like the “coalition of the willing” will hopefully give them a wake up call.
‘Science’, ‘scientists’. Translation, frauds, philosophers, quacks, charlatans, criminals, half wits. I have no time nor interest in the bullshit called ‘science’.
I don’t need ‘the science’ to build, do or create a god damn thing.
If there is a war, it will probably be patriots vs the dinghy divers.
“Now, many people here no doubt supported the decision to lockdown five years ago”
Not here they didn’t, not on Toby’s great lockdownsceptics.org (now dailysceptic.org)! Oh no, not on your nelly! There aren’t many lords or ladies I’d so much as nod at, but now “we” have Lord Toby Young on the red leather.
It wasn’t just ministers who were enthused by their power to command imperiously.
It could be seen in police officers clearing lone walkers off of parks. It could be heard in supermarket checkout staff giving curt commands to shoppers to ‘distance’. It could be seen in local authorities removing deck chairs from seafronts; as if something deadly could be transmitted on the salt-laden atmosphere.
It could be seen in mask-wearers keen to display their rectitude in public. Basically, I’m channelling the power of ministerial authority, so f*** you. And doubly so in those wearing rainbow masks.
It was apparent in the glee with which round labels costing £11 each were laid down in their thousands every few feet on railway platforms and in every room and corridor in hospitals, even in areas where the public were not allowed, such as libraries and laboratories. Meanwhile, businesses in China made a fortune supplying the bulk of the hand gel and masks to the NHS.
Then there was the flock of the willing. Banging cooking pots in a display as primitive in its psychological impulse as tribes banging gourds during a solar eclipse. The metaphor of sheep can have a positive meaning. In the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth is described as having compassion on the crowd for they were like sheep without a shepherd. But the sheep in 2020 would have tried even divine patience.
The whole Covid episode one of national disgrace at eviscerating the freedoms that the BBC perpetually remind us that the Few and the D-Day veterans fought to preserve for us. On that evidence can we finally put an end to the era of Churchill?
“…remember that sometimes the wisest thing to do is to do nothing.”
“No” is usually the hardest word.
Hear, hear, Toby.
There were many elements to this most horrific episode in human history. But the most shocking to me was to see just how ready people are to beg for something to be done by politicians. Truly terrifying.
14 elderly people died on the Diamond Princess. It was obvious that covid 19 was not going to kill half a million.
That was the clue wasn’t it?
I remember clearly but as I recall it was kept out of the general debate even though it was surely about the most important thing that happened before the madness kicked off.
According to https://www.statista.com/statistics/1099517/japan-coronavirus-patients-diamond-princess/, the ship was quarantined until 19th February, 2020, all guests disembarked by 27th and all crew left a few days later. Statista registers zero deaths until 6th March, when 6 deaths are counted, rising to 13 on 16th April.
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_Princess) confirms that by 1st March all passengers and crew had disembarked. Then Wikipedia reports:
Two passengers died on 20 February and a third on 23 February, all three of whom were Japanese citizens in their 80s. A fourth passenger, an elderly Japanese man, was reported on 25 February to have died. The fifth fatality, a Japanese woman in her 70s, and the sixth fatality, a British national in his 70s, both died on 28 February. A 78-year-old Australian national, who was evacuated from the ship, died on 1 March in Australia, making him the seventh …
How ridiculous is all this? One should not forget that Covid ‘cases’ were decided using the totally unsuitable PCR test, nor that poor souls diagnosed with Covid received medical treatment which no person should receive. Finally, all concerned were probably frightened to death with all the propaganda and publicity of presumably having caught a fatal disease.
This was the beginning of the disgusting behaviour of so many governments, completely conned by the WHO and its nefarious sycophants.
The UK lockdowns ruined our economy, caused a mental health crisis, wrecked our children’s education, accelerated the national debt, cancelled essential healthcare, and dehumanised an entire population. The long term impacts are far worse than the coronavirus that the lockdowns were supposed to defeat.
However, at least for some of the time, the weather was fine and my wife very much enjoyed being paid by her company to stay at home lazing on a sunbed.
I do wonder if the weather from April to July had been less favourable, would the first lockdown have continued for as long as it did.
“Sometimes the wisest thing to do is to do nothing.”
Thank you, Lord Young – Well-structured talk and wise words indeed to conclude with.
I don’t know who said it first but I think I remember President Reagan saying “Don’t just do something, stand there”.
And of course, “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore it must be done.”
Wasn’t it also him that quoted as a warning….”I’m from the Government and I’m here to help”. Heed the warning.
Toby you let off the politicians too lightly and the bureaucrats deserve a full spit roasting. Ferguson should never be given another penny of tax payers’ money and his words should be prohibited at all crisis meetings.
There are additional points:
1 however high the forecast death rate and whhatever the probability the financial cost needs to be calculated. One more Covid lockdown and our economy will be unable to support the elites in the style to which they have become accustomed, for ever.
2 we need to know who were they, specifically and by name, that proposed and encouraged the decision to abandon the prepared plan.
3 if Ministers are powerless, and Liz Truss described her experience well, then it is their choice. Individually and through their pressure on the PM, Ministers must make sure their policies are carried out. They have to be more vigilant and more determined to ensure this happens. How many cases are emerging of policies, appointments, decisions, preparations and arrangements generally of which we were not aware but which Tory Ministers presided over and now seek to dispute. Ranging from the Post Office scandal (what’s happening there?) to Chagos Tory Ministers failed.
4 you seem to excuse Gove’s eye brow raising. Perhaps he is a mate of yours? From your description what is clear is he had no intention of taking into account the wider costs and social and economic consequences. Like most in public life he seems to deal with issues one dimensionally.
I am sure there is much else to discuss but your wwords are welcome as far as they go. Toby you must not allow personal friendships to silence necessary criticism or to moderate your words. The web tells me the words “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” were written by Karl Hess, for barry Goldwater for his Republican convention acceptance speech. Goldwater would be dismissed as below the salt by the likes of Gove – I hope not also by you Toby.
That is a good quote there. As for finding out who ordered what etc, that is what Reiner Fuellmich was looking into with his class action on the whole Plandemic. He is now a political prisoner for some jumped up fraud charge. Gove needs reminding of the Nuremberg Code and what happened to people who violated in in living memory. But as we know, that was convenient to the victors, yet the industrialists who profited from both sides were given a free pass.
“Masterly inactivity” was taught at my medical school, but as quickly forgotten by the doctors in seats of power as the pandemic plan was.
I have a near neighbour with 2 daughters, now aged 15 and 12. The older girl has not made any progress in academic results in the 5 years since lock-down began, the younger girl has turned inwards and no longer socialises at all outside of school. I only became aware of this dreadful state of affairs very recently, I am almost speechless.
This began in its most serious phase with the NEU demanding that the government close schools in early January 2021 after holding a mass Zoom call with its members, the government was held to ransom and did not have the power to resist. Close schools, parents cannot work as the law does not permit their children to be left alone and it wasn’t permitted to allow non-working adults to supervise them.
Utterly deranged behaviour on the part of the establishment and government ministers and yet this happened over 9 months after the original lock-down instruction that by then should have been clearly seen to be totally ineffective.
I despair.
“A Swedish Pandemic Preparedness Strategy, along similar lines to ours, was enthusiastically put into action by Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s Chief Epidemiologist”
And many parts of Africa that Lockdowns were not practical, they didn’t seem to have a spike in excess deaths. Also, places like Peru where they had some of the harshest Lockdowns didn’t seem to contain it anyway. As others have mentioned, the spike in deaths was in April that was obviously iatrogenic with the death protocols. NG163.
There is also the question of NATO and Sweden was not a member at the time. So Tegnell gets all the credit.
“Now, you might think: what Government wouldn’t have locked down if the deaths of 510,000 people was a “reasonable worst case” scenario if it didn’t?”
But the Pandemic Preparedness Papers was for a mortality rate of around 600K was it not? and did not recommend the Lockdown fascism.
“. In fact, the death toll from the virus in Sweden by the end of August 2020 was 5,800, with half of those deaths in care homes who would likely have died even if Anders Tegnell had recommended a lockdown”
I wonder if they had the same Medazolam protocols, that would’ve bumped up the mortality numbers like it did here and US.
“Michael might have said, if there is a risk of a catastrophic scenario materialising, it is the duty of a responsible Government to do everything it can to mitigate that risk”
Silly wan*er, a true CONSERVATIVE Government would only advise, it is not their job to stop me catching a virus, cold, flu or whatever.
“in spite of not locking down, health services in Sweden were not overwhelmed.”
We have been overwhelmed every winter for the last decade with Hospital beds reducing. How is the bed capacity going, when you consider this was one of the main excuses used to go into Lockdown. You would’ve thought bed capacity would be a priority so as to NOT go into Lockdown again, but it’s pretty obvious that was just an excuse to carry out the orders from their puppet-masters in WEF NATO etc.
“do nothing’ during the biggest national crisis of our lifetime?” LOL!
But if there’s one lesson here I hope that at least those in this room can take to heart it is that if, God willing, you ever find yourself in power, or in a position of influence, you remember that sometimes the wisest thing to do is to do nothing.
Or, in terms used by software programmers, never change a working system.
But, especially in a position of influence, plain common sense is definitely a virtue. In such a position you will always be bombarded with people trying to influence your decisions. So, if someone comes along and claims half a million people will die if you do not do X, then surely the person of influence will retort, “OK, pull the other one!” or some such remark.
A look out of the office window would have confirmed the street outside is not filling up with dead bodies. A person of influence could phone his GP and ask if his surgery is filling up with patients. Or he could phone a local hospital and ask the same.
But the WHO claimed there was a pandemic. And governments caved immediately, without asking any such questions. Hospitals mistreated people on the basis of unreliable test results, or they simply closed their doors and refused to treat people altogether. Governments acted like the most brutal dictatorships and the rest is history.
The only sensible decision Boris Johnson made, that would have made sense if there were a true pandemic, was to set up the temporary Nightingale hospitals. And they remained empty – which, in itself, was a very clear indication there was no pandemic.
Oh but there was not enough staff for the Nightingales they say!
As for the WHO, as bad as they were, and are, they never recommended Lockdown, that was pushed by Fauci and the CCP.
At the time there was a video of a ‘Nightingale’ hospital in Brazil, if I remember correctly, showing masses and masses of empty beds with nurses sitting around wasting their time.
WHO recommends even today mask wearing and self-isolation. And the WHO’s director, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (always have to look that up!), was originally recommended by China when the West could not agree on a suitable candidate.
China recommended a Marxist, who’d-a-thunk it!
I signed up to Lockdown Sceptic pretty quickly after my elder son directed me to it in those surreal early weeks. Required reading ever since. My numerate son also worked out infection rates were going down before lockdown was imposed.
The Diamond Princess example had everything you needed to know about the disease. Elderly, likely overweight with co-morbidities travellers, enclosed spaces & effectively a floating island. It wasn’t Ebola (or super Ebola whatever that might be Mr Gove). Yes it was & is a nasty virus with some long term damage (I personally have almost no smell & little taste – never to return – after catching the bug from someone attending a big Agricultural show in Yorkshire in 2021). Others have much worse lingering heart/eye & respiratory problems. Almost certainly lab made.
They closed the country down – they really did. They set neighbour against neighbour, destroyed relationships both embryonic & mature, completely toasted our economy & destroyed children’s lives then & for the future. What the then government did was go to war on the population. So many didn’t seem to mind. What have we become?
I wouldn’t say so in terms of popular opinion. There was an article in The Spectator today where the writer asked, am I the only one who is nostalgic for lockdown? Consider the debasement of spirit that is required in order to be able to feel this and consider this a tendency writ large. So many people I talk to look back on it like it was the finest time of their life. You want to consider the implications of this wallowing in babyhood as if we are capable of nothing better.
My son got letters from his works to ‘permit’ him to travel to work. He doesn’t drive so I drove him. I’ve met several people who didn’t believe such a thing occurred. We never had to show the letters to anyone but I’ve kept them to show as evidence to such people who doubt the country could go so mad.
The dreadful Gove did eventually recant, and admit that a Scotch egg was a substantial meal in its own right. It was the very height of his wisdom and power……
The nature of mainstream science is to challenge, question, learn new things, adopt them, and move on from there. That is how science works. If we learnt of the existence of gravity one day, we factor it into everything thereafter
Liberal arts people seem to thrive on saying that they have ‘learnt lessons’ (‘socialism doesn’t work, you always run out of other people’s money’), and then trying the same thing again, and being surprised at the outcome
Science is a harder task master, but at least it always moves forwards
Well, you hope it does. Remember that the scientific process only works if the scientists who disagree are not censored and airbrushed out of existence.
Boris demonstrated with both lockdown and his support for net zero that his grasp of basic scientific principles was weak to the point of being non existent. But then he is not alone amongst those sitting in the House.
Well Covid was in this country by October 2019. I can say this for certain because I attended on Sunday, October 27, 2019, an event titled “Friday Night Is Music Night: 80s Classical” at the London Coliseum. Followed by a walk around Chinatown.
Within days of arriving home a cough developed the like of which my partner and I had never had before or since went on for weeks and which fitted all the later descriptions of covid
And I cooked for a family do for a dear friend because she was completely felled & bed bound by a cough/bug after coming back from a gardening holiday away from the UK in late Nov 2019 with a lingering cough that took many weeks to go. I’m certain it was Covid too.
Great speech.
It would be good to explore why the madness continued for 2 years.
Doubling down because they did not want to admit their decisions had caused more harm than good?
Drunk on the power they had?
An interesting exposition, but I believe only the second reason you propose holds true. The other two imply that there was some rational analysis of motive, and I don’t in retrospect see anything other than blind panic. Just recall the TV appearance of Hancock when a viral variant pitched up. He was almost hysterical. I thought he was going to weep. I said early on that if things went horribly wrong without a lockdown the government would be held to account, and as no other country (except Sweden) locked down it was a simple case of follow the others. I also pointed out that a full lockdown was impossible, as key workers such as hospital and care staff, delivery people and others were still out and about. But the panic was such that any rational suggestion, such as a cost benefit analysis, never entered the collective mind.
The question I have is – why was the analysis of a non-clinician with a track record of prediction failure preferred to an existing strategy of management constructed by experts. And why did those experts cave in?
One of the good things about the corona era was the fact it woke a lot of people up to the mind games that governments employ to manipulate societal behaviour. When Toby and James Delingpole were still speaking to each other in their weekly podcast conversations there was always this friction between them as to whether the government’s reaction was cock-up -Toby’s view, or conspiracy – James’s view. The longer those government ministers and public health officials responsible at the time fail to acknowledge their mistakes the stronger the argument for conspiracy emerges. There is a deafening silence amongst them and I’m surprised that Toby didn’t acknowledged this fact in his speech yesterday.
The lack of contrition on their part is appalling.
Yes you can murder thousands of the elderly with impunity.
Too true and the scale of that scandal has yet to be revealed. I believe Jacqui Deevoy is making a documentary about it.
“Finally, I think the reason Cabinet Ministers abandoned their commitment to liberty is because, in the words of the other Lord Acton, power tends to corrupt. Imagine, if you will, how soul destroying it is to be a politician in the normal course of events. You finally arrive at the top of the tree after years of soul-destroying grunt work as a party hack and discover that – you’re essentially powerless.”
Real discipline and strength comes from restraining both oneself and others from exercising prohibitive power over individual liberty and lives. In a crisis, it takes somebody in a position of power who has the moral courage, clarity, intelligence and conviction to proclaim that NOT prohibiting liberty is the very pinnacle of “do something” pleas.
Sadly for us and billions of people in the world, there were precious few who had the strength of character to do just that. The overwhelming majority proved themselves to not be up to the task.
Would have been good to mention the power of the nudge unit to back up the craziness e.g. ads like “ Act like you’ve got it’ and all the NHS propaganda and media outlets like FB to push the correct narrative. Politicians must have felt giddy with all these levers.
Spot on Toby
Lots of policies are driven by the need to be nice ,DEI being one of them and as a consequence nice only applies to the minorities.
Not the NICE Guidelines NG163 PATHWAYS. Nothing nice about them.
It’s a lot simpler than that, Toby.
The lockdowns were part of the government’s plan to respond to a biological warfare attack. Once it found out that the virus had escaped from the bio warfare research programme in Wuhan, the bio warfare response plan was put into effect.
Or perhaps you think that the 300+ page Coronavirus Act was drafted in a couple of weeks as part of a response to an unforeseeable event?
Also, please stop talking about cost-benefit analysis. The government simply doesn’t have the right to impose a compulsory lockdown on innocent people. It was a clear breach of human rights and meets the definition of a coup.
Exactly that….In the past when they had that China pandemic in the 1960s they didn’t impose Lockdown, why do you think that it, and would people of the 60s put up with it, I doubt it. They even had the Woodstock festival for Christ sake!
I was disappointed by Michael Gove’s responses to Toby’s questioning on the Speccie podcast. It sounds as if he has learned nothing at all. Disappointingly he was not really even able to acknowledge the damage done to the economy by shutting down almost all commercial activity.
It would have been interesting to hear his response to questions about the relentless extensions and reimpositions of lockdowns. If the first lockdown was difficult to justify, the subsequent ones were impossible.
I know an awful lot about a very limited subject, that which gave me a living throughout my working life. It was sometimes described as being very wide, but therefore necessarily shallow. It certainly didn’t seem that way when I was trying to learn it. It did span medical, statistical, physics, mathematics, meteorology, and all branches of engineering. It was being a commercial airline pilot.
When dealing with COVID came up my whole professional being screamed ‘if you don’t understand what is happening – do nothing. You can only possibly make the outcome worse’. There’s a thing in flying training called ‘unusual attitudes’. You are put in a (real) blacked out cockpit, not able to see out, and the instructor literally flings the aircraft around the sky until your senses of what is level, direction, accelerations are all thoroughly shot. So are the basic flying instruments in front of you so not only do you not know which way up you are, neither does the aeroplane. And the task is to safely recover the situation. How in the hell do you do this? Simple. You let go of all the controls and wait until a situation develops that you can recognise. A steady increase of airspeed. A steady turn. A steady climb or descent. You then correct for these in turn until you are once more flying straight and level.
This is what the huge expensive government machine conspicuously failed to do. And we crashed as a nation as a result.
I was also having none of this – I could see from the off this was no mistake. This was an induced mass hysteria built on the fact that most qualified people are grossly over schooled, like show horses, and utterly under educated. They accept the edict of authority without question. They are incapable of free thinking. Schooled out of them deliberately to have a compliant intelligencer.
I’m as grateful as ever for all fellow non-compliers and rational dissenters. The relevant politician’s options were not Lockdown or Do Nothing. Their ears were directed towards the likes of Ferguson and his quackery whilst choosing to ignore world experts like Guptra, Kulldorff and Bhattacharya, who were all untainted by Professor Pantsdown and his calamitous garbage. In fact as we so often see, one didn’t need any expertise to accurately predict that lockdown’s and their consequences would be so much worse than the disease. And indeed, so many of us did accurately predict dire consequences at the time. Carry On, Toby. Thank you!