I have been retired from the NHS for 11 years but I have remained a keen observer of events, and think I have been around a little longer than the ‘in-house doctor‘. I became a medical student in 1967, qualified in 1973 and was brought up prior to that by parents who were both GPs – so my exposure to primary care medicine started when I was five and first went out on house calls with my mother.
It’s not a question of whether the NHS will accept reform. It has. Frequently. As I outline in my book Mad Medicine: Myths, Maxims and Mayhem in the National Health Service, I have seen many ‘reforms’. None of them have worked. Over 70 years have passed since the NHS was established; if the best minds in medical and organisational thinking have been unable to come up with solutions in that time, perhaps there are none. I find the suggestion that doctors are to blame for inertia in promoting change is unfair – at least so far as hospital medicine goes. I spent the last three years of my professional life fighting managers who wanted me to do less work (i.e. see fewer patients) based on ideology developed by non-specialists. I was not supposed to overbook clinics, but did so regularly, as well as accommodating patients with an emergency problem. I wanted to prioritise appointments by need (by looking at referral letters); with the advent of computerised booking that became impossible. The brilliant diary appointment system of one of my obstetric colleagues was destroyed by the same system. I adopted the ‘treat early and treat aggressively’ mantra for rheumatoid arthritis a full 25 years before it became generally accepted in rheumatology circles. My surgical colleagues were constrained by the rigid application of operating theatre opening and closing times; thus, if an operation at the end of the list would be likely to be long, and therefore overrun, it would be cancelled. Was this the surgeons’ fault? Certainly not.
We must ask ourselves not what the problems are, but why they are there. One recurring issue, though, is the loss of NHS institutional memory. While people may dismiss aged, retired people like me as yesterday’s men, they carry such memory. Managers (and politicians) are here today and gone tomorrow. In my career I have lost count of the number of times that a new proposal was brought forward and I had to say, “We have been there and done that – and it didn’t work”.
For hospitals, primarily there is a lack of capacity. Some of that is because it is expensive to run a system where for much of the time there is spare capacity, with bed occupancy less than or up to 85% and therefore room for increased need at peak periods such as winter. Empty beds are still maintained and staffed, which costs a lot. Cutting beds, closing wards and running at over 95% occupancy saves a lot, which is why it has been done, but you get into trouble in winter (as the NHS has done for 20 years or more). The old overspill network of cottage hospitals closed because they were too expensive to maintain – small units are less cost-effective so are first to go when money is tight.
And the rest? People who 50 years ago would have died because there was no treatment for their conditions now have expensive investigations, even more expensive treatments and as a result live longer with multiple pathologies. When I became a hospital consultant, the biggest pharmacy spend in my hospital was on oncology drugs; with the advent of biologic therapies for inflammatory arthritis my departmental budget overtook it, and increased from an annual cost in the low thousands to over seven figures. Complex cardiac or neurosurgery and interventional radiology are time-consuming, labour-intensive and very expensive. There has been a recent resurgence of the idea that preventive medicine is the answer. That was what Aneurin Bevan thought in 1948; disease prevention would cut the costs. But he failed to foresee the enormous expansion in techniques, drugs etc. that make that a pipedream. When I qualified there were no CT or MRI scans, almost no ultrasound, no coronary artery surgery, no organ transplantation, no genomic investigation, no thrombolytic therapy for stroke and very limited drugs for cancer. Now we have all these things any savings made by shortening hospital stays is matched by the spend on them. Of course, if the current epidemic of obesity and consequent diabetes could be stemmed by education then a lot of medical work would vanish.
The strike issue is less relevant than an ongoing, year-round problem in the NHS – that of sick leave and maternity leave. Neither is predictable and both require locum cover at great expense. When I was a clinical director I had, at one point, three physiotherapists on maternity leave, all of who were being paid, and to cover their workload I needed to employ three agency staff, which more than doubled the cost. My budget was horribly overspent. Management was more concerned with the overspend than the clinical consequences of leaving the posts vacant. As for sick leave the sudden absence of a doctor required a major re-jig of rotas – or an expensive, short-term, at-no-notice locum which was often hard to find. If there is no slack in any system then a sudden problem will catch you out.
Managers and doctors will always be in conflict because the role of managers is to save money in a constrained budgetary system and the role of doctors is to spend it. So on the one hand you could reduce the constraint by increasing funding (which has been the way the NHS has sort of coped), and on the other you could get the doctors to spend less. But there is one major sticking point on that approach: doctors are programmed to treat, not to abandon hope. One could address this latter by not indulging in what I term futility medicine, where for example elderly patients have heroic surgery, require long ITU care and are then discharged back to their care home with their dementia probably worsened by the disruptive experience. Should we spend tens of thousands of pounds on cancer therapy that extends life by three months? Just because we can does not mean we should. Regrettably it is not just the health professionals who are averse to defining constituents of futility medicine, but a public who have been conditioned to expect that if a treatment is available then it must be employed.
An example. Take a 94 year-old lady in a care home who is very deaf, has lost some of her sight to macular degeneration, has lost half of what’s left to a minor stroke, who has a stiff hip, a chronic and resistant to antibiotics urinary infection and double incontinence and intermittently does not recognise her family. She becomes confused because she develops sepsis, and falls, breaking her shoulder. Admitted, her family has a meeting with the orthopaedic team who suggest they could pin the shoulder and replace the stiff hip in one operation. For what purpose? And before you say that I am callous, this is my ex-GP mother who I am talking about, and she is lucid enough to say she doesn’t want any more treatment and has already signed an advance directive. She occupied a hospital bed for 11 days before she died; it would have been three times that to get her fit enough after major surgery. Treatment would, in my eyes, have been a classic example of futility medicine. Just because we can does not mean we should. We must have a rational debate about what parts of medicine will be abandoned, either completely or to the private sector.
The pressure on A&E departments is heightened by patients’ perceived inability to get a GP appointment. In my parents’ day, in the 1950s and 60s, there were no booked appointments; you turned up at the surgery and sat and waited. If the wait was not justified by the severity (or lack of it) of the medical problem you went away. Indeed people were attuned to the system and it inhibited their demand. No-one in real need missed out. Why not abolish appointment systems? I concede that GPs might rebel at such a suggestion. Alternatively, or as well, introduce a charge for appointments. It won’t be the doctors that kick up, but patients will!
The cost-benefit of some interventions needs to be re-examined. For instance, statins are cheap but prescribed in vast quantities, so all in they are not cheap at all. Monitoring takes up GPs’ time. Re-evaluation of the evidence in their favour suggests that they have little absolute benefit, and anyway probably don’t work by lowering cholesterol. Such evidence – and there is a lot of it – is ignored by those with vested interests and conflicts of interest, and there is too much tramline thinking for an independent assessment to be easy, and acceptable – not for want of trying. But the money (and time) that would be saved by abandoning them is very large.
Elective surgery units are only a partial answer to the routine waiting list issue. You cannot safely operate on patients in such a unit if post-operative care requires an ITU, which elective units don’t have (too expensive). So complex surgery cannot be done there. Furthermore, if such units are contracted out to the private sector, experience has shown that contract over-ordering is common, so NHS money is being spent on work that is not being done. Using hotels as pre-discharge overflows is an idea that has been proposed before. I doubt it’s a safe option. Just before I left the NHS my hospital, as part of a group, became what was known as a step-down unit. A significant number of admissions had been rushed out of their acute bed too fast, were not well enough to be in the step-down unit and had to be returned. But everyone has forgotten this. Who will monitor patients in hotels? The nurses we don’t have? (Will ‘guests’ pay for their food? Probably not, although as everyone eats every day I don’t see why they should be fed for nothing, even in hospital.) This week’s news suggests that care homes may have spare capacity. Is delayed discharge the fault of the doctors? Certainly not; the assessment processes by social workers and therapists act as a gigantic drag anchor.
The idea that there is some sort of fast track for senior apparatchiks to access NHS care seems ridiculous. The reason that senior staff might be able to pull strings is that they have the knowledge of what strings to pull. They may be better placed to judge what needs more urgent attention and communicate this in a way that speeds up access.
The in-house doctor says: “The British medical establishment will die in a ditch before allowing remuneration to be linked to measurable productivity of individual doctors.” I would like to know how one might measure productivity. What a doctor does, and how he or she does it, will differ between specialties and grades. Comparing a neurosurgeon to a dermatologist is like comparing apples and pears. Outcome measures, perhaps, like surgical success rates? That will encourage all surgeons to stick to the simple, no risk stuff. Been there, done that. Outpatient numbers? As I have pointed out, it was managers who attempted to reduce my numbers, not clinicians with any knowledge of why I could not. I suggest that anyone trying to introduce a remuneration system linked to productivity will be the one dying in the ditch.
A few years ago I spent some time comparing the NHS with health services in Canada and Australia, and concluded that each had different advantages and drawbacks; overall, none was better than the others. The French system works reasonably well, but patients pay (not a lot). I believe that today a service that is free at the point of delivery is an unaffordable luxury. We pay prescription charges, so why not appointment charges? Usual exceptions of course, but the one principle that is truly outdated is that ‘Our NHS’ must be free. Dispose of that and we might make some progress. Identify and ditch futility medicine and we will make more. Streamline the discharge process. More still. If politicians were ready to listen to those who hold the institutional memory, and thus avoid introducing already tried and proven-to-fail ideas, we could be flying.
Dr. Andrew Bamji is a retired consultant rheumatologist.
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Catholic priests in Australia obviously don’t have the testicular fortitude of Polish Canadian pastors:
Polish Pastor Chases Cops Out of Church on Easter Weekend: ‘Get Out! You Nazis!’
The English church of all denominations seems to have gladly gone along with the whole lockdown scam. The unChristians running a major church near me removed all outdoor seeting in the grounds during the outside for exercise, essential shopping, etc. phase. Plenty of older people (myself included) used such seating as a place of rest and reflection during their ‘essential’ outdoor activities.
I’ll concur with this wholeheartedly.
But what is a Christian, to do? Literally, what would Jesus do in the age of covid?
Not a simple question, I think.
I don’t have definitive answers. I myself have struggled with this question. The very act of celebrating Eucharist: Holy Communion – implies the celebration of a sacred rite in the company of one’s fellow believers.
If 90% of one’s fellow believers are living in mortal terror of even breathing the same air as their brothers and sisters, then things get a little complicated.
Jesus, and the Gospels, give us very clear guidance as to how we should treat the poor, the homeless, those afflicted with disease.
But the unvaccinated? The maskless? Those who wish to live peacefully and lovingly amongst their fellow man? And I count myself a member of at least a couple of those groups.
These have been trying times indeed for those of us who call ourselves Christians.
@Drew63 – They’ve been trying times for everyone. It’s not clear how the church figures in your outlook, but do you not believe that it should seek to provide some kind of moral leadership?
Which is not to say that “Yes” yields an answer to the question of “how”. But it seems to me that since the start of virus-themed fascism most church hierarchies have functioned as little but arms of the Herodian state.
Some officials in the Church of England even allowed church buildings to become vaccination centres. Maybe if Satan asked them to throw nerve gas grenades into crowded railway stations they’d do that too? Then they could stand around a couple of years later and say “Oh, we didn’t know”. Did God tell them not to exercise their brains?
Sometimes when there is no political opposition (as now) then opposition will come from elements in the church, who will show great courage – there are many examples of that – but that doesn’t seem to be happening now.
Can someone report from Austria maybe?
Churches of many denominations in my small provincial city allowed their buildings to be used first as testing centres and then jointly as vaccination pods.
Excellent phrase: ‘virus-themed fascism’.
Jesus mixed with lepers and threw the traders out of the temple.
So,.I don’t think he would have kept the unmasked out of church or checked for vax passes. And he wouldn’t have condoned others doing it either.
The Christian churches, with few notable exceptions, have acted terribly these last 2 years. Another dark period to add to the many they’ve had throughout history.
Most of those who run the churches just want a quiet life. They’ve got no guts and little moral fibre.
See “payday loans”. When Israelis were running a loansharking operation in Britain called “Wonga”, aimed at some of the most vulnerable people in society, the archbishop of Canterbury defined usury as lending money at an excessive interest rate. He said that therefore they were being slightly naughty, and perhaps they could tone it down a bit, if they didn’t mind awfully.
Presumably if they’d only charged 5000% interest per year rather than 10000%, it would have been OK from his point of view.
But anyone could have told him that usury means lending money at ANY interest rate, and that the church used to know this and it banned usury for centuries.
Does he think muggers should use shorter baseball bats?
You really do have a problem with ‘Israelis’ don’t you? I say ‘Israelis’, but we both know whom you’re referring to.
After all, the founders of Wonga were South African, but you don’t say “When South Africans were running a loan sharking operation…”. Wonga was co-founded by Errol Damelin and Jonty Hurwitz, two South African Jews. So just say what you mean.
The medieval Church was able to ban usury only because it did not apply to Jews who could thus make themselves usefull to the rich and powerful who wanted to borrow.
As early modern bankers found ways of getting around usury laws those Jews became less usefull and so lost much of that earlier patronage and ‘protection’.
For those few that found themselves at the head of important transnational banking clans far more lost everything as their fortunes diminished allowing their secondary debtors to renege on the basis “they’re only Jews and anyway it’s usury innit”.
Ironic and sad but true.
The article says, at least twice, that places of worship are excluded from lockdown compliance regulations so the blame here lies with local Police overreaching their powers (unless the State put them up to it).
No sympathy for the diocese either since they did not check their position in law either before, or more bizarrely, after the event. Their only complaint being that such compliance checks should have been made before the service rather than they should not have been made at all.
Now is the time to identify those Police who harrassed that Polish pastor in Canada, and let everyone know who they are and where they live.
No it’s not the time for that. That’s focusing on what isn’t working and seeking retribution which isn’t what I understand to be very Christian. The thing I would do if I was a Christian is work within the system as best I could but if it gets to this stage (see above), then it’s time to start to set up groups away from the system.
Those who harass people for no good reason, should face the consequences of their bad behaviour. Wearing a uniform is not a licence to act like a thug.
What’s wrong with publishing their names and addresses? You say it isn’t working, I say it hasn’t been tried yet.
‘Setting up groups away from the system’ sounds like fantasy to me. ‘Alternative societies’ – living in yurts and making their own bread? No mobile phones?
It’s been a year already . . .
They should be known throughout that town as Nazis!
These lot have zero to do with Peel’s principles.
He is our hero here in Canada. He’s now been arrested four times and given hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and he keeps leading the freedom movement. He came from communism in Poland and knows what’s going on.
The difference is that Down Under, if the priest tried to do that, the Aussie cops would (IMHO) likely arrest him and give him a good kicking for his trouble. They appear to have ‘form’ on authoritarian and sometimes brutal practices.
This excellent film got a lot of traction here at Lockdownsceptics when it first appeared a year ago although not this version so that’s another million hits (or nearly).
There was also a prequel with the Police confining themselves to the lobby rather than barging their way upstairs before being forced outside onto the street. Their attempt at a second bite just made them look even more high handed foolish losers.
Weren’t they police supporting (protecting?) public health officials? As if they needed protection going into a church to serve a notice! ‘High-handed’ is definitely the right expression.
This happened to the Polish church in Balham, London, in 2020, you may recall.
It enraged me, as a Polish Catholic.
Some grass with personal beef reported ‘breaches’ to the swineherds, apparently.
No rules have ever worked, of course, making the Met raid doubly insulting.
It was in April 2021 in fact. Only a Good Friday Mass…
Would the new brown shirts have interpreted Friday prayers at a mosque?
Interpreted Friday prayers as what? Mime?
Assuming a typo for ‘interrupted’, they would not have interrupted religious practices at a synagogue, a buddhist temple, a shinto shrine, or a pastafarian noodle ceremony for that matter.
Or a hip-gyratory Abba-fest in no.10 when worship of political power and its attendant assassination was in full building-shaking swing to really rubbish music.
Or at a synagogue?
Just when you think that it can’t possibly get any worse!!
Every time I jump over to the Daily Skeptic, I wonder what abomination I am going to see highlighted today. A year ago such stories (and pictures) would have floored me. Today, I just say, “Oh well. Here’s our New Normal.”
…. BTW How does that police officer sleep at night? Did ANY fellow officer on this police force refuse to perform this duty?
I also wonder the same thing when I think about the army of “content reviewers” (read: censors) who now ban and flag unauthorized speech for a living. What a job, but it’s a job that at least 15,000 people have at Facebook. (They got me).
My most recent collision with Facebook content moderators occurred because I was quoting from a well-known (in Europe, at least) children’s comic series called Asterix & Obelix. The second main character is an overweight simpleton with superhuman strength who usually represents horse sense in the face of overblown sophistication. His most well-known line is
Die spinnen, die Römer!
[These Romans are all mad!]
and it’s usually – at some point or another – also applied to whatever other group of people features prominently in a certain episode, eg,
Die spinnen, die Briten!
[dito, Brits]
or
Die spinnen, die Menschenfreundlichen!
[dito, bleeding hearts in US slang]
To Facebook, this his hate speech, even when it’s clearly referring to a comic strip. Thank good the world got saved from that!
I’ve been banned three times now – each time my “timeout” is longer than the one before. My last post that “violated community standards” expressed disbelief that Austria’s elected representatives could mandate vaccines for all adults.
I said this story might be the “scariest article I’ve ever read.”
Well, that got me banned. What’s probably even scarier though is that I can’t even criticize a law that turns the notion of civil liberties on its head.
I stopped actively using Facebook a while back. Surely time to boycott?
I think someone needs to organize a boycott of all the oligarch companies that advertise on Facebook. These companies clearly endorse brazen censorship.
Facebook is important because it has so many users (at least in the USA). If you have any hope of changing or challenging the narrative, you would really need to try to reach these people. I’m preaching to the choir here. But the Establishment is NOT going to let any content that might challenge the authorized narrative ever “go viral” on this speech platform.
On a hopeful note, I think a lot more people are beginning to understand who these “community guidelines” are really designed to protect.
The more people they ban, the more obvious this will become. Or so I hope.
I have never swum in that particular sewer, and after a brief immersion, cleansed myself of Twitter and Instagram.
It has become faceless-tyrant-book, run by robots and dimwit nerds.
Yes!!
Here’s how sick Zuckerberg and his arseverse is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gElfIo6uw4g
why are you using FB, it’s EVIL!
I wasn’t alive in the 1930s, but I’m going to guess that the Nazi Party didn’t allow ANY dissent of their party’s program. I’m sure some government official also probably said at some point, “Well, we are not censoring the press or speech. We don’t have a press.”
But those who did have a printing press probably knew what their journalists and editors could or could not write. And most were probably happy to promote the government position.
Sound familiar?
I wasn’t alive during this time, either, but wringing the press from the Jews and employing if for the common good of the Volksgemeinschaft instead is a very explicit demand in Mein Kampf. The underlying idea of the Nazi ideology is that an open fight against the enemies of (mostly classic) European civilisation is urgently called for. Hence, they weren’t bigots in their enimity.
As per the message put up by some perceptive individual: “If you ever wondered if you would have been compliant in 1930s Germany, now you know.”
Check out the Night of the Long Knives.
Are you familiar with the expression Lugen Presse?
LOL! I suppose we’ve always known that authoritarians and zealots have no sense of humour nor tolerance for it.
The excellent English translators for the Asterix and Obelix books (Anthea Bell, Derek Hockridge for most of them) had it as:
“These xxxxx’s are crazy!”
I don’t know the French original but I consider These Romans are all mad! or have really lost it! a better translation (but then, I’m not a native speaker).
“Ils sont fous ces romains“
“These Romans are crazy” has exactly the right vernacular tone for native English speakers.
I don’t know the anonymous person who censored me, but someone sent me a message. This message did say, I “could disagree with this decision.”
I thought that was very nice of them. Now, I don’t know how I can disagree with them, or who at FB I can lodge a complaint with …. but they have not yet done away with the right to disagree.
Yes you can disagree, but that’s as far as it goes.
How condescending! I wouldn’t give them the time of day. Little twerps with “brains full of mush.”
These Globalists are crazy
The names and addresses of fb censors should be published.
The guy in red at the front is as bad, letting the desecration go ahead without any reaction. Churches have had a long history of refuge and sanctuary – no longer it seems.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
If the globalists do pop the economy to hide their theft then their bouncers should be worried every single time they venture out.
Is nothing sacred?
Quite literally, no – not to those who worship the “vaccine”. When the arms of little children are things to be experimentally injected, why bother about the symbolic space of a church?
Should have been “bother oneself”. Sorry – too angry to think straight.
The same way doctors and nurses who don’t allow families to visit dying relatives do. Or funeral.directors who didn’t allow mourners to hug. Or police who beat and arrest peaceful protestors. Telling themselves.and others they are just.doing their job.
Unless they enjoy it and are psychopaths like teachers who insist children must be masked. They probably sleep better than ever now that in the new.normal world we are creating so much psychopathic behaviour has become acceptable.
Yes indeed, Covid has made psychopathic behaviour acceptable to a large section of the public. Well done Johnson you ***t.
The COVID movement has brought out the inner fascist in many. It’s shocking to realize how many. Ours is a post-Christian society. Love thy neighbor? Not if he might infect me!
WA must be so safe, that police have nothing to do but raid churches full of peaceful people.
I complained about the mask atrocity on the American Airlines flight the other week. This was their considered response…
A customer traveling from Miami (MIA) to London (LHR) became disruptive after refusing to comply with the federal mask requirement. As a result, the flight safely returned to Miami (MIA) where local law enforcement met the aircraft. We thank our crew for their professionalism and apologize to our customers for the inconvenience. We expect our customers to comply with our policies when they choose to fly with us, and we take action when that is not the case.
Thank you again for reaching out to us and sharing your point of view.
All the big companies – like all the governments – expect people to “comply.” And I guess 99 percent do.
BTW, support those Canadian truckers!
Those that use these companies will almost certainly comply. Those that won’t comply will not use their services.
The question here is What are the legal limits to these policies? Eg, I strongly suspect that airlines couldn’t mandate that all their customers must convert to Islam prior to boarding a flight, must not wear any clothes during it or must have made a donation to a specific political party of at least $150 in the last year.
That airlines – presumably driven by union demands – have chosen to extend the reach of their legitimate business demands to Customers must not breathe unimpededly as that’s to dangerous to the cabin crew (as decreed by the president of China) doesn’t mean they were within their rights to do so.
That slope is indeed a tad slippery. And, you are right, once precedents have been established …. Who knows what the next decree will be.
Unfortunately, few citizens seem to get the “slippery slope” concept.
Bleh! Nauseating corpo-speak!
Outrageous, and obviously a deliberate statement by the police
No, it’s really not. What is ‘unfortunate’ (to put it very mildly) is that those checks were undertaken at all.
The pope (no longer worthy of capital ‘P’) is up to his neck in this Reset business. Bloody heathen.
Checkout the role of freemasons in all this. Apparently they are united by secrecy and satanic worship. To them, everyone else is just ‘vulgar and profane’..
When not obfuscating news about his minions touching kids, he is busy promoting vaccines.
Head of the Church of the profit Marx?
The pope is a confirmed globalist.
And commie, heretic, usurper!
About a year ago, I saw a video someone posted of a family being refused service at a NY City restaurant. When asked by the hostess and then the manager to show his COVID papers, The father said he had some kind of exemption and thus was exempt.
When told he had to leave, he then turned to fellow diners and asked them if they were okay with this? All of them were. Nobody came to his defense. He got a few curse words and one fellow diner shot him a bird.
This family was just out of luck. I guess they went to a convenience store and bought some potato chips.
Anyway, it was about this time I knew that half the population (if not more) would support these draconian mandates. Bottom line: a lot of people want a Nanny State or want Big Brother to get even bigger.
And a lot of people just loved lockdown, which is why they are so quick to support the idea of more.
Living in a popular West country location, I am amazed at the people who have moved out of cities (usually London) since March 2020 and on the back of the ‘pandemic’. They wfh, have bought the obligatory cockerpoo and generally inhabit Waitrose and Stroud farmers market, braying about their wonderful lifestyle. Their lockdown was simply marvellous, darling.
Until companies require people to move back to the office, and those who don’t are outpaced by those who do, and the electricity goes down, and the job goes. People are very short sighted. If a job can be done online from further away, it can also be done cheaper in India, which has a more and more educated, and less vaccinated, and more IVM protected workforce willing to work for less.
Well yes, absolutely, and I think that moment may happen sooner than people realise with the way things are going. The property market here is still totally crazy – agents have lists of buyers waiting. Give it a year and I think it will all have gone tits up.
That’s interesting. Here on the East coast of the US people who are still working “remotely,” (remotely working?) are leaving the cities and suburbs to buy properties beyond the expensive commuting orbit, where taxes are lower, and there is less congestion.
All good points.
Amazing how many people thought they would have resisted in Nazi Germany and have shown us all how much they wouldn’t have. There are few Bonhoeffers in this world.
… a lot of people want a Nanny State or want Big Brother to get even bigger.
That is the crux of the whole Covid problem. The main consolation is that these people are almost certain to be dutifully vaxxed and so they are using up what’s left of their borrowed time. God moves in mysterious ways.
NYC is the covidiots capital.
In the 90s when USSR collapsed and their ‘nanny’ state the suicide rate was through the roof in those ex bloc countries. When people get freedom they get confused. I would say majority of people love the ‘convenience’ of a tyranny.
I know censorship is now rampant, but some of these stories and photos are still reaching large numbers of people. If the whole world isn’t watching, a fair number of people in the world are.
But apparently the government of Australia doesn’t even care. That’s how brazen they have become. They must think most people in their country and in the world approve of this – which is really scary.
My suggestion would be that they’ve either been fooled into believing this to be a vote winner by partial pollsters or – even simpler – bribed by interested (foreign) parties.
They must think most people in their country and in the world approve of this – which is really scary.
Yes and to me even scarier is that most of the zombie masses will actually approve of almost all kinds of official thuggery.
As far as masks are concerned, now primarily a matter of personal preference in England, it’s quite chilling to note that certain supermarkets are still insisting on masks being worn. For example, Aldi requires (yes requires) shoppers to wear them and Lidl still have posters up saying that it is a mandatory government requirement. This just perpetuates the Covid theatre. Thankfully more and more people are ignoring this but many seem happy with their, in many instances, seemingly designer, face nappies. Just sad!
The new notice at Lidl says that the government expects and recommends them, but doesn’t actually state that Lidl does.
I assumed it was government pressure on Lidl that caused this. I don’t know.
Anyway, Lidl has never hassled me not for wearing a mask since mid-2020.
I haven’t been near Aldi since they refused me service 10 months ago.
If a shop refuses you service stay away, until it is crystal clear that they have seen the error of their ways. Signs like the one in Lidl are just a bit of misguided PC nonsense and are meant to be ignored. Only fools would take any notice, though of course there are still plenty of fools around.
Ours have both taken all the posters/stickers down – it must depend on the area/manager?
Thanks for this info. If I see the Lidl manager next Monday, I’ll mention it.
He wasn’t wearing a face covering last time I saw him in the store.
Tell him he may be scaring off customers to more mask free stores
He wasn’t wearing a face covering last time I saw him in the store.
That should tell you all you need to know.
Clearly some managers are more stupid than others.
Seen in the local NatWest branch today: A photo of someone wearing a cloth mask with the text Unless you’re exempt for a medical reason below it. They didn’t put this up the first time the mandate was lifted (at least, I didn’t notice it back then).
The psy-ops. organisers probably knew that via a brainwashing programme they could eventually get others to carry on their dirty work.
It’ll soon be time for Laura Dodsworth to write ‘State of Fear: Volume 2’.
Must be your Aldi manager. I have never worn a mask in Aldi. There may be a mask sign, but I haven’t seen it. Most of the staff are unmasked.
I think there is a lot of local variation.
all the lidl staff at the shop i just had a nose into had faces clear of cheap chinese cloth products
My wife was in Aldi today. She doesn’t do masks and she tells me that she was far from being the only bare faced shopper. If masks had been obligatory she would have gone elsewhere.
I still see signs up in places, but I simply ignore them, just as I always have.
My (English) friend who lives in a suburb of Perth is fine with everything. Says most people are happy with the way it’s all being handled.
I don’t know what to say to her.
I think special places should be arranged for such people and West Australia might be one such special place.
Seems to fit in here:
Without human rights, democracy is just the tyranny of the demagogues.
Any church that complies with or enforces these evil mandates has sold itself to Satan. Come on church, if we can’t stand for right who will? Time to be prepared to face the persecution Jesus promised us if we follow him.
The Church of England has accepted the ‘Covid rules’.
He used to be a banker
But then he found The Devil!
How do you spell ‘banker’ again?
One sect vs. another sect, wonder who’s gonna win?
It seems that Satan is at large in WA, and unchallenged by those who should banish him.
It’s “Lord of the Flies”, now set on Devil’s Island.
Why is the policeman wearing a high-visibility jacket? Did he think the priest would turn the lights down?
Give ’em a uniform, they think they’re Hitler.
For full dramatic effect he should have entered wearing all-body CBW protection, à la Salisbury, or shot the lights out first and stormed in yelling “Police! Stay calm!”
It’s staggering to think that a large proportion of the population probably think the kind of behaviour actually exhibited is not only sane, not only justifiable, but actually reasonable. It’s not their lot to criticise what their “betters” tell them. They’d be scared their heads would drop off or they’d get big black Covid boils under their armpits and then drop down dead from the lergy.
Still, expert graphs will show the administrators the facts, right? “If only they knew.”
Catholic church complit in all this.
Nazi scum. My (ex) country is well and truly dead.
Horowitz: The country the COVID cultists don’t want to discuss
https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-the-country-the-covid-cultists-dont-want-to-discuss?
DANIEL HOROWITZ
Saturday 5th February 2pm
Windsor Great Dog Walk for Freedom
behind one simple sign
“Covid Rules Are Barking”
All Canines and Humans welcome
Even if you don’t own a dog please come along
meet Alexander Park (near Bandstand) Barry Rd/Goswell Rd
Windsor SL4 1QY
Stand in the Park Sundays 10am make friends, ignore the madness & keep sane
Wokingham Howard Palmer Gardens Cockpit Path car park Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Henley Mills Meadows (at the bandstand) Henley-on-Thames RG9 1DS
Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
Are pigs welcome?
It’s happened here. South Wales police raided a Christian service in Cardiff at the start of the so-called firebreak lockdown in October 2020. Police officers were supposedly banging on the windows during the service, frightening the pensioners attending. When asked about it South Wales police said it was ‘protecting the NHS’
Was there an official response from the church?
calling them stasi is too generous!
Name those officers, then. Let everyone know who they are and what they did, and where they live.
I wonder whatever next in WA? My bet is on ‘compliance checks’ during birth. I mean of course it sounds nuts, but this in this context quite a possibility….
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if newborns in Britain don’t get their DNA put on file as soon as they’re born. Their actual birth gets recorded on a state computer before they’re handed to their mum or dad.
(This is even if “mother” is now considered a bad word in NHS-land, with “birth parent” being preferred.)
There are instances of babies being kept isolated from everyone (except mother, unless she’s got the plague in which case they’re confiscated) for weeks.
Sadly this is not in any way surprising. What is staggering though is that there is a WHITE newsreader on Sky right now. I cannot believe my eyes.
Not a man obviously, that would be utterly absurd, but a white newsreader nevertheless.
Maybe things are starting to get back to normal?
but why would I give a fuck about nonsense that happens in the antipodies , They are merely securing their position at the arse end of nowhere.
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Why didn’t the congregation tell those pigs to GTFO? One of the things that has annoyed me the most throughout all of this is the supine acceptance of outrageous abuses of power. Nobody seems to have the courage to stand up to it. It’s pathetic.
Either way, Australia is a place I have no intention of ever visiting. It seems to be inhabited entirely by cowards, retards and tyrants.
Watch the footage of the protests.
Everyone on the protests say they want to have peaceful protests – you’d think that when all the trucks arrived in Ottawa they’d have gone after the politicians who have made the ‘rules’ and ‘mandates’. Just grab them and lock them up somewhere – peacefully, of course!
I guess the World Economic Forum might just throw Trudeau ‘under the truck’ to appease the protesters.
My partner’s son and wife have arrived here, staying the weekend. They haven’t been jabbed and don’t want to be either, fully aware the ‘Covid’ is a scam/sham/con.
His wife is worried as ‘vaccines’ are being made ‘compulsory’ in Finland – she’s a school teacher and that will fall under this. Those who refuse the jabs will be suspended from their jobs without pay – they will not be fired, because then they could claim unemployment benefit or social security. Being ‘suspended without pay’ is the means of starving them into submission.
Make no mistake – Finland’s government are well in on the scam.
So they are definitely not rolling back the Covid restrictions then?!
Not here in Finland – I haven’t followed it, but I understand all ‘health workers’ are already ‘mandated’ to take the ‘vaccines’.
They started injecting school kids (over 12 years of age) last August here.
The ‘Vaxx Pass’ will stay in use for international travel – it has been ‘lifted’ a bit for domestic use, but the Government has decided they will not scrap it but keep it to one side in case it’s ‘needed’ again.
There is resistance in Finland, not everyone has been fooled. There was supposed to have been a truck convoy today – I don’t know what happened about that – I heard 15 trucks set off from Oulu… which really isn’t a lot! Oulu is about 12 hours drive for a truck to Helsinki.
It looks quite active to me. Eighteen hours or so ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVZJGCOzlWQ
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6Y3rWk4FFU
The Aussie Police have seriously gone down in my estimation since these sort of incidents have been brought to light. That and the stories of corruption and woke/heavy handed authoritarian methods as told by Aussie commentator Helen Dale.
This sort of thing is starting to feel like 1930s-40s Germany or the USSR afterwards.
Papuz pliz!
The Aus article is paywalled, but a report from a different source suggested that the cops had been tipped off by a member of the congregation.
Has anyone else noticed that people who have had three of these jabs seem to have become very angry? Either there is something in the ‘vaccines’ or people are becoming bitter now that they have the feeling they’ve been had.
A friend who was proud to be ahead of the curve at jab one was not quite so happy when he got jab two. I asked if he’d be going on to jab three and he was suddenly defensive. ‘Well, I have to, don’t I?’
I have noticed. Less of the smug sense of superiority; more a sense of dis-ease?
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Disgusting and shameful Fascism!
Hello! I want to know, is there anyone else out there feeling like me? Is there anyone else in a similar situation?
I live abroad, away from the country where I have citizenship and spent most of my life. I haven’t seen parents or sisters for over three years.
At the same time, I’ve been becoming increasingly alienated from them.
They’re all onboard with the covid hysteria, whereas I committed to looking into what was going on from the get go. And we are now continents apart both literally and figuratively.
A few days ago, I had a right proper dust up with my moth, one which I don’t feel proud of. In fact, I feel ashamed. But I’m also feeling at the end of my rope.
Today, I made the mistake of going onto Facebook, to see this shocking and disgusting picture that my sister had posted about my beloved niece.
I’m feeling at my wits end with all this and realize my family basically isn’t my family anymore.
Sorry to hear that
I doubt there are many sceptics who have not experienced some degree of alienation from family,
friends, work colleagues and the world in general
Working out how to deal with that will be a long term challenge for many
Not a sister I would want.
I feel for you.
You’re right. Those of us who began our thinking and researching and questioning from the very beginning, watching the nonsense evolving, have reached the point where we are today. Those who didn’t question, but just accepted the narrative, sank under the weight of propaganda and now can never crawl out. All those I know who are thralls (some terrified) will never change their minds – they can’t. Their minds seem to have been slowly and irrevocably changed for them through the spring and summer of 2020.
They’ve quite literally and most shockingly successfully established a global cult. And being one who isn’t brainwashed is utterly heartbreaking.
And not a word from our pope. People are leaving the Catholic Church in droves when it allowed the state to shutter churches and our pope said NOTHING?
Except, be a good Catholic and getcherjab.
Steps to overcome tyranny.
https://youtu.be/SdV0G6D2cmo
Deo Gratias
I’m an atheist but even I find this appalling
Reading the mealy-mouthed and cringing response by the Church to the incident (the word ”unfortunate” rather than ”outrageous”) it’s no wonder things there are in a parlous state. As for the silly, shallow words ”could do a lot better” – it’s obvious the Opposition isn’t going to be much help.
I wondered if there were any officers who declined this ”duty”, Catholics themselves perhaps. And it could be that this one just didn’t give a stuff, and was one of the local bully boys.
I also wondered at the video of a (large) senior police officer in Canberra shoving a woman from behind, very brutally (seen yesterday on Rebel News). His colleagues just let him carry on strutting around – he’d probably volunteered his ”strength” for such a duty.
HE reminded me of the Cave Troll in LOTR. How are these people tolerated in what should be a cohesive police force? Useful idiots?
They will either ignore it, talk it out or rubbish the figures. But they are guilty of all the mental illness of both students and school pupils. And no one will be sacked or censored or oenslisedwhilst our children suffer.
Proves that all over the world, even in so called “liberal democracies” both governments, civil servants, bureaucrats and particularly the police are enjoying their tyranny of the proles
Whilst police can enter churches in pursuit of criminals, only a few decades ago they would have been very circumspect about imposing themselves uninvited. To see police checking papers in the middle of a service worshipping Almighty God is something more extreme than even the Soviet Union; there they would have checked papers before or after the service! I cannot help but feel that our governments, in giving themselves over to this sort of act, have abandoned any notion that our roots are Judeo-Christian but instead are embracing satanic beliefs. It will not end well.