Allison Pearson has written a terrific piece for today’s Telegraph about how vindicated she feels as a lockdown sceptic by Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages. I know how she feels. Here is an extract:
I was spied on, reported, publicly denounced, called a murderer, banned and shadow banned. At times, it felt like we were living in East Germany under the Stasi. Our blessed, free country had become an island of hysterics, snitches and obsessive Dettol wipers. Driving in my car one morning to take the dog for a walk in woods two miles up the road, I thought, “Am I allowed to do this?”
Am I allowed to do this? Dear God. Where had Britain gone?
And now, vindication. So much that we “conspiracy theorists” suspected turns out to be true, from the Wuhan Covid-19 lab leak (“racist” back in 2020 but now highly likely says the FBI) to Matt Hancock’s imaginary “protective ring” around care homes to the brutal collateral reckoning for lockdown. Vindication is bittersweet, alas, because you cannot mend all the people they broke (over a million children with mental health problems, millions more awaiting hospital treatment – where do you begin?) nor bring back those who died without a loved one to gentle their passing.
And don’t tell me thousands more would have died if we hadn’t locked down because thousands more are dying because we had lockdown. Men and women in their thirties, forties and fifties with families; fit, younger people whom the virus could not harm, now presenting with incurable cancers. Will they be putting their names on the National Covid Memorial wall? They should.
Human beings have an astonishing capacity to forget, especially when something is embarrassing to look back on or when it makes us feel a bit stupid.
“The tingle of a remembered shame,” George Eliot called it. But we should force ourselves to remember, I think. The Lockdown Files, drawing on the WhatsApp messages vouchsafed to the superb investigative journalist Isabel Oakeshott by Matt Hancock, the former health secretary of state, and published this week by The Daily Telegraph, are an extraordinary aide-memoire to the madness we all lived through. They also provide a remarkable insight into the behaviour of those running the country at the time. What a bunch of arrogant, clueless, emotionally stunted authoritarians they turn out to be for the most part.
The biggest shock revealed by the Telegraph scoop is quite how often our leaders, who always claimed to be guided by ‘the science’, were making decisions on the hoof.
Astonished, we read conversation after conversation where, it becomes clear, that decisions affecting the suffering of the elderly entombed in care homes, of children shut out of schools and playgrounds is filtered through the prism of something called ‘Comms’.
So, when Boris Johnson asks his top team whether masks in schools are necessary, Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, replies: “No strong reason against in corridors etc, and no strong reason for. The downsides are in the classroom because of the potential to interfere with teaching.”
But Lee Cain, the PM’s director of Comms, is not happy. Scotland has just confirmed masks in schools so England is under pressure to follow suit lest Nicola Sturgeon gain the advantage. “Why do we want to have the fight on not having masks in certain school settings?” asks Cain.
Oh, I don’t know, Lee. Maybe because imposing an unevidenced and alienating NPI (non-pharmaceutical intervention) on vulnerable adolescents is a really bad idea? Perhaps because forcing children into futile masks for protection against a virus they largely don’t need protecting against is just a repugnant piece of political power play. Perhaps because, with their young worlds turned upside-down, the reassurance of seeing smiling faces would have been really nice. Finally, as that WhatsApp conclave of geniuses somehow failed to foresee, permitting masks in school corridors would be the gateway to the teaching unions demanding (and getting) masks in classrooms.
(While the big boys’ club was throwing kids under the devolution bus, a group of mums who founded an organisation called Us For Them to stick up for children’s rights, were fighting furiously to get the school mask mandates withdrawn under threat of pre-action letters. They succeeded, twice. So often during the pandemic, it took the defiance of ordinary men and women – parents, publicans, restaurateurs, shop owners, small business people – to restore some sense to the senseless edicts.)
Worth reading in full.
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Isn’t “stakeholder democracy” something of an oxymoron? Seems like code for “experts who know best will decide”.
Stakeholders, unlike share holders, have invested nothing so have nothing to lose when things go tits-up.
The idea is that stakeholders, unlike share holders, are the one’s who’ll be directly affected by decisions and that’s why they should all get together to make such decisions in a way that’s sensible for all of them (or the best possible compromise which can be achieved). Share holders have no direct reason to care for the outcome of any particular decision, just for the indirect effect of share price changes.
Government… Budget Responsibility. Side-splitting laughter is heard around the parish.
Central economic planning and control aka fiscal policies = root of Socialism and Fascism. In the former the State owns the means of production, in the latter the State directs the means of production giving the appearance of private ownership in a free economy.
The technocratic aspects plants it in the Fascist economic model.
The Industrial Revolution occurred because there were no fiscal policies, had there been we would all still be working on the land, as soon we shall be as Net Zero progresses.
(The primary means of production is the Human Being.)
Off-T
Paula Jardine at TCW with her thoughts on the next Scamdemic.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/big-pharma-is-the-lottery-winner-in-the-great-bird-flu-myth/
“So which strain of bird flu do you have on your bingo card for the pandemic flu mark 2 public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) this coming winter? The UK government has just signed a pandemic preparedness deal with CSL-Seqirus, the vaccine company now running the old Chiron factory in Speke, to supply 100 million doses of an unidentified flu vaccine in the event of a pandemic. But I can see another switcheroo coming. My money is on an outbreak of H9N7, the other influenza strain in Moderna’s new mRNA-1018 vaccine.”
‘The mRNA technology allows us to be much more agile in developing vaccines; we can start creating a mRNA vaccine within hours of sequencing a new viral strain with pandemic potential,’ said Dr Hensley. ‘During previous influenza pandemics, like the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, vaccines were difficult to manufacture and did not become available until after the initial pandemic waves subsided.’
Read: Nobody needs this shit and pandemic waves have so-far always subsided without it. But thanks to mRNA technology, we’ll be to market quickly enough in future to avoid this!
Deborah Birx is also again making noises about “avoiding the mistakes made with COVID”, start mass testing of healthy people now and stop requiring symptoms for diagnosis in favour of using PCR test results instead. Deborah Birx would seem to be one of the mistakes made with COVID. After all, she admitted to tricking the Trump administations into principally endless lockdowns by lying about her true intentions.
Aren’t they just establishing a costing oversight which will simply state that every Labour plan will bankrupt the nation? Net Zero is going to bankrupt every Western Nation that wants to die by just aiming for it.
it would be simpler to go back to rotten boroughs and University MPs.
And back then MPs got no pay or expenses. Voluntary contributions from constituents defrayed some of their costs, and the size of contribution was linked to how well constituents thought their MP was serving their interests.
We should go back to that.
Can we have Budget Accountability instead.? That thing that if you don’t spend wisely, we have the means to fire you..?
Fire you and fine you, say, 50% of the cost to the public purse.
I am in favour of a fiscal lock.
A fiscal lock that doesn’t allow a government to spend more than it collects or better still one that puts a hard limit, like maximum 10% income tax.
But this isn’t a fiscal lock. It’s a shift of power from parliament to bureaucrats.
A fiscal locks takes the power away from everyone.
How about abolition of all taxation except limited taxes on land value and consumer sales.
Such tax to cover essential working of government and defence, public services returned to the private sector, no welfare, and borrowing limit of 5% of GDP only in times of stress.
Oh. I’m up for all that. I was just trying to be “realistic” to illustrate my point. But, yes, that would be even better.
You could argue that a fiscal lock is undemocratic, but then you could argue that a limited democracy, where certain rights cannot be removed by simple majority, is better than what we have.
This stakeholder¹ democracy resembles Mussolini’s corporatist state a lot, ie, it looks very much like a fascist core concept.
¹ Can we have steakholder democracy instead? Sounds like more fun, especially if there’s also some pintholding.
The Swamp is truly Septic !!
“Stakeholder democracy is different in that it views the electorate as only one voice in the lawmaking and governing process – and not necessarily the most important.”
Actually I think this understates it. It views the electorate as fully irrelevant. Voters only get a legitimate say if they are directly affected by a measure as a” stakeholder”.
“Stakeholder democracy” is nothing less than the complete repudiation of democracy. We are seeing our ancient democratic system being literally dismantled.
It is dismantling the Crown in Parliament, so allowing Parliament to evade responsibility.
Henry Ford – “you can have any colour car you want as long as its black.”
British Establishment – you can have any Government you want, as long as the policies don’t change.
At least you would have a car!
If there’s no possibility that policies can change, you wouldn’t be having a government, one that represented us.
“If the Fiscal Responsibility Bill passes, all future governments will have to request that the OBR prepares an analysis of any proposed fiscal measure”
This isn’t true, any future government can, if it chooses, repeal the Bill. No government is bound by the decisions of a previous one.
Successive governments have abdicated responsibility to unelected, unaccountable bodies. This is shameful and a disgrace, elected politicians should be responsible not quangos.
It is an interesting question , why economics is not a science.
Frederick Soddy, a Nobel Laureate chemist, pointed out that in science, wealth is positive and money is negative. Who knew ?