For much of Downton Abbey, viewers are treated with glorious eye candy of British aristocratic life in a mighty estate, robust at first but fading as the seasons progress. What we are not given is a rationale behind the whole cultural structure of the house and the social order surrounding it. This is particularly important for American audiences who know none of this from modern experience.
Over time, particularly after the Great War brought Labor governments to power, some of the workers in the house get restless in “service” and seek out new professions and political systems. Viewers are hard-pressed to disagree with them, even if our sense of nostalgia and affection for the Crawley family elicits a protective sense.
It’s not until the sixth season, episode four, when we get the full theory behind the structures as they exist at Downton. The Dowager Countess is being pushed to turn over control of their own private hospital to a municipal government. Of course all the ‘progressives’ in the family and estate support this move but she is intransigent. Control must remain with the family, she insists.
The supposition is that this is all about her pride, control, and irrational attachment to tradition above good sense and modern sensibilities.
Finally, in the course of a conversation in the library, she lays out her thinking. In a short soliloquy, she summarises 800 years of British history in a paragraph, and elucidates the understanding of such great thinkers as Bertrand de Jouvenel and Lord Acton. It’s the kind of history that is routinely denied to students and has been for decades. It’s a good lesson in political science too.
“For years I’ve watched governments take control of our lives,” she says, “and their argument is always the same: fewer costs and greater efficiency. But the result is the same too: less control by the people and more controlled by the state, until the individual’s own wishes count for nothing. That is what I consider my duty to resist.”
“By wielding your unelected power?” asks Lady Rosamund Payneswick, the daughter of the Dowager Countess.
Ignoring the swipe, the Dowager answers: “See, the point of a so-called great family is to protect our freedoms. That is why the Barons made King John sign the Magna Carta.”
Surprised, her distant cousin Isobel responds: “I do see that your argument was more honorable than I’d appreciated.”
And her daughter-in-law Cora, an American who doesn’t understand what’s at stake, answers too: “Mama, we’re not living in 1215. The strengths of great families like ours is going. That’s just a fact.”
The Dowager continues: “Your great-grandchildren won’t thank you when the state is all-powerful because we didn’t fight.”
Now we know why she cares so much about this one seemingly small issue. For her entire life, she has seen the state on the march, most especially during the Great War, and then the pressure of the state mounted against all the old estates, as they fall in status and wealth year after year, as if by some inexorable force of history.
The Dowager, on the other hand, sees not some Hegelian wave at work but a very visible hand, that of the state itself. In other words, she sees what nearly everyone else has missed. And whether she is right or wrong on the particular matter of this one hospital (and later history proves her correct), the larger point is precisely right.
As the great fortunes of the nobility declined – the very structures that had not only carved out the rights of the people against the rulers and protected them for 800 years – the state was on the rise, threatening not only the nobles but the people too.
Incidentally, this history of freedom is not entirely alien to the American experience either. New history likes to point out with great ire that the prime movers of rebels against the crown in 1776 were larger landowners and businessmen along with their families. They were the Founding families and the main influencers behind the Revolution, which Edmund Burke famously defended on grounds that it was not a real revolution but a revolt with a conservative intent. By this he meant that the colonies were merely asserting rights forged in British political experience (which is to say, they were not Jacobins).
And there is a point to that. The rights-based fervor that birthed the War of Independence gradually mutated into a Constitutional Convention 13 years later. The Articles of Confederation had no central government but the Constitution did. And the main controlling factions of the new government were indeed the landed families of the New World. The Bill of Rights, a thoroughly radical codification of the rights of the people and lower governments – was tacked on by the ‘Anti-Federalists’– again, a landed aristocracy – as a condition of ratification.
The issue of slavery in the colonies massively complicated the picture, of course, and became the main line of attack on the American system of federalism itself. The landed gentry of the South in particular always had grave doubts about Jefferson’s claims of universal and inviolable rights, fearing that eventually their ownership claims over human persons would be challenged, which indeed they were and less than a century after the Constitution was ratified.
That aside, it remains true that the birth of American liberty rested with the U.S. version of the nobles, but also backed by the people at large. So the Dowager’s history of British rights is not entirely inconsistent with the American story at least until recently.
This has also been the prism with which to understand the broad outlines of the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in both the U.K. and the U.S. The ‘Right’ in a popular sense has represented mostly the established business interests (including the good parts and bad parts such as the munitions manufacturers) and tended to be the faction that defended the rights of commerce. The ‘Left’ has pushed the interests of labor unions, social welfare, and minority populations, all of which happened also to be aligned with the interests of the state.
Those categories seemed mostly settled as we entered the 21st Century.
But it was at this point that a titanic shift began to take place, especially after 9-11. The interests of the “great families” and the state began to align across the board (and not just on matters of war and peace). These family fortunes were no longer attached to Old World ideals but to technologies of control.
The paradigmatic case is the Gates Foundation but the same holds true of Rockefeller, Koch, Johnson, Ford, and Bezos. As the main funders of the World Health Organisation and ‘scientific’ research grants, they are the main forces behind the newest and largest threats to the freedom of the individual. These foundations built from capitalist wealth, and now fully controlled by bureaucrats loyal to statist causes, are on the wrong side of the crucial debates of our time. They fight not for the emancipation of the people but rather more control.
With many sectors of the ‘Left’ naively signing up with the bio-medical state and the interests of the pharmaceutical giants, and the ‘Right’ triangulated into going along, where is the party to defend the freedom of the individual? It is being squeezed out in an attack from both ends of the mainstream political spectrum.
If the ‘great families’ have fundamentally shifted their loyalties and interests, in both the U.S. and the U.K., and the mainline churches can no longer be relied upon to defend basic freedoms, we can and should expect a major realignment to take place. Marginalised groups drawn from the older versions of both Right and Left will need to mount a major and effective effort to reassert all the rights forged and earned over many centuries.
These are completely new times and the Covid wars signal that turning point. Essentially, we need to revisit the Magna Carta itself to make it clear: government has definite limits to its power. And by ‘government’, we cannot just mean the state but also its aligned interests, which are many but include the largest players in media, tech, and corporate life.
The groups that want to normalise the lockdowns and mandates – thinking of the Covid Crisis Group – can count on the financial support of the ‘great’ families, and freely admit it. This is a problem completely unlike what freedom fighters have faced over the long course of modern history. It’s also why political alliances these days seem so fluid.
This is ultimately what is behind the great political debates of our time. We are trying to make sense of who stands for what in times when nothing is as it seems.
And there are some strange anomalies extant too. Elon Musk, for example, is among the richest Americans but seems to be a backer of free speech that the establishment hates. His social platform is the only one among the high-impact products that permits speech that contradicts regime priorities.
Meanwhile, his competitor in riches Jeff Bezos does not join him in this crusade.
So too when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – a scion of a ‘great family’ – has broken with his clan to support the rights of the individual and a restoration of the freedoms we took for granted in the 20th Century. His entry into the race for the Democratic nomination has disrupted our whole sense of where the ‘great families’ stand on fundamental questions.
The confusion even impacts political leaders like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Is Trump really a populist who is willing to stand up to the administrative state or is his appointed role to absorb the energies of the pro-freedom movement and once again turn them toward authoritarian ends, as he did with the lockdowns of 2020? And is Ron DeSantis a genuine champion of freedom who will fight lockdowns or is his appointed role to divide and weaken the Republican Party in advance of the nomination fight?
This is the current fight within the GOP. It is a fight over who is telling the truth.
The reason conspiracy theory has been unleashed as never before in our lifetimes is because nothing truly is what it seems to be. This traces to the reversal of alliances that have characterised the struggle for liberty over 800 years. We no longer have the barons and lords and we no longer have the great fortunes: they have thrown their lots in with the technocrats. Meanwhile, the supposed champions of the little guy are now fully aligned with the most powerful sectors of society, yielding a fake version of the Left.
Where does this leave us? We only have the intelligent bourgeoisie – products of the middle class that is currently under assault – that is well-read, clear-thinking, attached to alternative sources of news, and only now in our post-lockdown world has become aware of the existential nature of the struggle we face. And their rallying cry is the same which has inspired the freedom movements of the past: the rights of individuals and families over the hegemon.
If the Dowager Countess were around today, let there be no doubt as to where she would stand. She would stand with the freedom of the people against the controls of the state and its managers.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
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“One thing the editorial omits is that the current Editor, Fraser Nelson, himself threw his support behind the third national lockdown in January 2021, as well as having supported the first. I’m not aware he has apologised for that, but perhaps in light of this blistering editorial he will.”
Fair point, but this kind of article is a step in the right direction, and I think The Spectator and Nelson were among those who pushed the story of the SAGE modellers who admitted they had not bothered modelling anything other than worst-case scenarios which I believe had some effect on those in the backbenches and in Cabinet who decided we’d had enough lockdowns just after Christmas 2022.
Fair play to Nelson for uncovering that.
A Mea Culpa from him would be welcome, admitting he was in error on lockdown. He seemed to be for and against lockdown at different points.
And Frazer Nelson can apologise for hosting the director of GAVI’s call to block criticism of vaccines from social media in 2017, also a totalitarian project of Johnson:
https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3099/rr-5
Still, the only way forward is if people do change their mind.
It’s quite a big step forward to have someone change their mind and to be celebrated.
Not that I disagree with the rest of your post.
I was a Nazi, now I am not a Nazi
Ok, but don’t expect a pat on the back
Stupid post.
Luke 15:7
Perhaps we should have a truth and reconciliation committee.
Those can have their uses, as they can be used to destroy the reputations of people sufficiently that they’ll never be allowed to hold office again.
“hold office again,” ???
The vast majority of the current executive are guilty of crimes against humanity.
Never Forget. Never Forgive.
OK but I want my money back as well.
Sinking ship.
Rat.
You seem to have mistaken him for Hillary Jones.
Meanwhile Rishi has the money hose out again, yay more inflation, lockdowns just keep on giving.
He can only spray money hose contents he’s nicked from workers and it tends to get drunk mostly by his wealthier mates!
Slightly less blatantly wrong than bailing out bank bondholders but not much more.
He has to keep the money printer on brrrr mode at least until September. Bread and circuses (Jubilee, Wimbledon, World Cup) will give him enough cover through summer. Then “oh look why don’t we just sort of reset…”
It’s time the sheeple stopped blindly following the narrative.
“Does he realise, even now, that he made it illegal for anyone to do this during lockdown? Where, in his lockdown rules, was the exemption for the ‘essential duties of leadership?’ Where was the clause allowing those outside the ruling elite to have a regular ‘wine-time Friday?’ Does he realise that he personally used the powers of his office to send the police after anyone else who would have attended a gathering to salute a departing colleague? Or, for that matter, to console a friend, visit a dying relative or even attend a funeral in numbers greater than stipulated by the staff of No. 10.”
Does this author realize that he’s completely wrong?
“Does he realise, even now, that he made it illegal for anyone to do this during lockdown?”
Wrong. There were never, ever, any legal restriction on meetings, whether of number or duration, in the workplace. Only guidance.
“Does he realise that he personally used the powers of his office to send the police after anyone else who would have attended a gathering to salute a departing colleague?”
Wrong. It was no business of the police. That fell to the HSE. And saluting a departing colleague was never against the law in the workplace. Step off the premises into the street and it was outlawed. But not in the workplace.
“Or, for that matter, to console a friend, visit a dying relative or even attend a funeral in numbers greater than stipulated by the staff of No. 10.”
Ah, well here we have an invalid comparison. Because those things were proscribed by law in many cases. But they have no bearing whatsoever on the workplace.
How does Will Jones think the country carried on in those essential businesses where people had to go to work and couldn’t work from home? The laws didn’t apply to the workplace. The most you had to do was a risk assessment in case the HSE came calling.
Johnson’s workplace defence is 100% right.
Legally perhaps, but explaining how the virus knew when you’d stopped being paid is still a mystery…
Bit like how the smarty pants virus wouldn’t assail you if you were sitting down, but would be deadly if you were walking through a cafe to use the loo.
Which just goes to nail the lie – if it was just “guidance” in a workplace, enforceable by the HSE, but was legally enforceable by the police when someone was sitting on a park bench (that is if you could find one that wasn’t barricaded off with hazard tape like something out of Chernyobl) then there was no deadly virus like the government told us all there was.
That was the lie. Told to the whole UK population.
Yes, it was a great lie. That’s what we should be angry about, not Johnson doing something normal.
That’s what I am angry about.
Which part, the conditions or Boris himself.
Factually, both.
‘Legally perhaps’
Well, isn’t that the whole point? He didn’t break the law.
Even getting a FPN is not a determination that a person has broken the law: only a court can determine that, and if you pay the FPN it doesn’t go to court. Moreover, the CPS makes it quite clear that paying a FPN is NOT an admission of guilt. So, in law, Johnson is as innocent as the day is long.
Starmer knows this, and he was DPP. Yet he still says that Johnson ‘broke the law’. He should know better. Johnson could sue him for slander for representing it as a fact. Whether it’s the police, Starmer or Sue Gray, at the end of the day it is merely AN OPINION that Johnson broke the law, never an established fact. And even expressing such opinions can be regarded as defamatory.
An FPN is simply a means to save the police and courts time. It is, in fact, an unjust aberration of the lawful process as it’s a form of guilty until proven innocent.
If one pays the fine it’s an admission of guilt.
One is perfectly entitled to seek a court hearing.
Starmer is correct. Johnson broke the law.
Utter fantasy.
Isn’t knowing when you’d stopped being paid or were standing upright in a restaurant part of the Wu-flu’s ‘Gain of Function’?
Will Jones didn’t write the Spectator article you’re quoting from, just to be clear on that!
As has been widely reported, the Police did whatever the hell they wanted during the lockdown – ‘guidance’ was treated as ‘law’ – be it hassling women out for a walk while drinking coffee, walking masked and armed with handguns into gyms, holding up people and searching their shopping bags, telling a young black man if he argued with them that he’d be arrested on a charge they’d make up or even, in one case, arresting a young woman, then raping and murdering her.
Johnson created the very definition of a police state: a place where were no laws except ‘guidance’ that the police could interpret as widely as they wanted. Johnson was as ‘guilty’ as anyone else persecuted by the armed militia that was once a police force. Downing Street running drunken parties involving vomiting, fist fights and passed out civil servants, was a clear violation of the spirit of the disgusting laws and ‘guidance’ that they passed. Rest assured that if any restaurant, or gymnasium was caught having a wild party like that for its staff, masked police would have kicked down the doors and the owners fined. Add to that, the use of behavioural conditioning used on the public by behavioural control scientists such as the communist Susan Michie and SPI-B, created an atmosphere outside of Downing St of fear where ‘guidance’ was certainly treated as law.
At the core of ‘Partygate’ is the complete contempt for the draconian laws the Government itself had laid down, because clearly they knew that the situation was not as serious as they were claiming. They lied. In drinking themselves paralytic, the laughed at all of us. The reaction to COVID-19 was a mix of panic, fraud and lies of omission. Much as the powers involved in World War I knew by 1915 that the war was a disaster that needed to end at once, no one had the cojones to admit they’d made a mistake.
If Johnson were to walk on to Downing Street and admit that the lockdowns, track and trace and every other restriction was a huge mistake in an extreme circumstance where all countries took leave of their senses, then apologise, some people might at least forgive him, even if he had to quit. As it stands, we see pictures of the people in charge behaving like ‘normal’ when they’d turned the rest of the UK into a prison. On the back of Partygate, every fine handed out in the lockdown should be handed back and all convictions and arrests struck from the record. Otherwise it’s about ‘them’ and ‘us’ and there are more of ‘us’ than ‘them.’ If the cost of living crisis continues, the possibility of mass civil disturbance becomes tragically more likely.
Johnson can use the ‘workplace’ excuse as legal trickery, but it doesn’t wash with most people.
Had Boris just fessed up to all the illegalities he participated in he could probably have got away with the whole thing and it would be dead by now.
But he just lied incessantly.
That’s my issue. What else is he lying about?
No, he has to acknowledge as little as possible.
Were he to have been open about having flagrantly ignored his own rules, far too many normies would have got around to realising he had oppressed them in bad faith.
As he has played it, the public mind is focussed upon technicalities, and inconsistencies in his story.
Most of the gullible masses, including most talking heads just want him to get on with the REAL issues ie Ukraine , net zero , online harms bill , cost of living crisis etc.
They all lied about everything. They turned us into a police state and partied until dawn. Pert of me wishes Johnson had died in hospital, because I would have fond, sad memories of an oddball British politician. Instead, he’s alive and I hate him for all he’s done and I don’t want to carry that level of contempt and hatred for any human being. As CovidiousAlbion says below, Johnson oppressed us in bad faith and people have to be distracted from that.
As it stands, I’ve voted independent in every local election since December 2019. It won’t make a jot of difference (although in my ward, the Tory only beat Labour by about 30 votes and the independent had roughly 50 per cent as many votes as either Tory or Labour, so a lot of people obviously voted the same as me.)
I literally cannot vote for any party that supported lockdowns at the next election, so God knows what we’ll end up with!
Find a Libertarian candidate.
The last local election gave us a choice of Tory, Labour, some kind of Socialist (probably communist) party, and Independent and a Green (the Green being invisible because of the way the voting paper was folded! The Tories beat Labour by under 50 votes. Significantly, the independent got half as many votes as the Tory and came third, so that’s a lot of independent votes!
Could do with a lot more independents.
He was never in any danger in hospital, that was all staged
You don’t get to hone a skill by taking a breather…
True enough, Will Jones didn’t write the Spectator piece. That’s why I said ‘this author’ because he or she is nameless. But Will Jones has chosen to repeat this drivel from such nameless author without pointing out that it is not legally sound, so I mentioned him after pointing that all out.
I agree with practically all you have written. Johnson and his acolytes are responsible for a catastrophe, and the police state thing is continuing – there’s more legislation coming down the track.
But there is a bit of inconsistency in describing the workplace excuse as legal trickery. On the one hand, people are saying that the one who wrote the laws was breaking them, and people get off on some hypocrisy rant. But actually, he wasn’t breaking them, so it wasn’t hypocrisy. The same workplace exemption applied to every single person in the whole country, not just Johnson. And if he wrote the rules (as the argument goes) then he wrote in that exemption, which every person in the country also could have availed themselves of. It’s hardly ‘legal trickery’ when it’s open to everybody who cared to read the law.
The problem is, hardly anyone read the law. The BBC lied about it. The police over enforced it, unlawfully. If you want to know what the law says, read it: don’t rely on the police, the BBC, or Downing Street broadcasts to be purveyors of truth.
It was a massive con trick: hand out FPNs and hope no one refuses to pay, or seeks judicial review. But the thing is (which the courts at least understand, although they were largely culpable in allowing this nonsense to continue) not all laws are lawful. Just because Matt Hancock produced reams of secondary legislation, even when it was nodded through Parliament, doesn’t make it lawful. Merely legal.
Unlawful laws should be struck down. Where were all the civil liberties campaigners during lockdown? Why were there not hundreds of applications from them for judicial review.
Because 90% of them are, at heart, fascists masquerading as libertarians.
Totally agree with you. That was what I couldn’t understand – and terrified me most – in the lockdowns: almost no one stood up to what was going and the ones that did were persecuted, prosecuted, traduced and essentially brushed aside. When the laws are replaced by government edict and loose police interpretation of those edicts is permitted, the basis of our entire civilisation is threatened!
Which makes me wonder, since he was part of the con, why Johnson (allegedly) paid his FPN.
Maybe he did an ‘Amber Heard’ and pledged to pay it!!!
If a government employee pays anything, by definition the taxpayer pays.
And you did?
Certainly not, judging by the utter lack of knowledge you demonstrate here.
The media certainly had plenty of interpretations of the laws! Which begs an interesting question…..if so many of us are so fed up with the media propaganda that we stop watching the news or reading anything online, how we would ever get to learn about any new law?!
Thoughtful comment. When you put it like that, it reminds one that Bunter really is a scheisskopf.
JFTR: Shithead doesn’t exist in German. One could use Wichser (a person dedicated to a male form of solitary bodily entertainmant), Arsch (means what it suggests), Spast (spastic) or possibly, Vollpfosten (a real fencepost, more emphasis on stupidity than obnoxiousness) here.
On reflection, I should have gone for Arschloch.
Class.
Restrained but CLASS.
Thanks.
Assuming the meetings were for work, not for partying.
LOL, I must remember never to use that feeble excuse for an after work piss up and curry.
Quite apart from anything else, why are government officials allowed to go on the piss whilst running the country? That big red button doesn’t push itself you know.
Why is there a bar in Westminster, never mind Taxpayer subsidised booze?
“New Covid crackdown begins: Four people are fined for ‘going to McDonald’s’ together, officers stop CARS to quiz drivers and masked cops arrest 28 activists for ‘breaking lockdown rules’ during London protests” (Daily Mail – PUBLISHED: 07:04, 6 January 2021)
“VIRUS BREACH Edinburgh cops raid funeral wake as three men arrested and 12 fined for breaking Covid rules” (Scottish Sun – 10:14, 16 Apr 2021)
“Press release
Police given new powers and support to respond to coronavirus
The government has today (26 March 2020) made new public health regulations strengthening police enforcement powers in England, to reduce the spread of coronavirus, protect the NHS and save lives.
To ensure people stay at home and avoid non-essential travel, from today, if members of the public do not comply the police may:
instruct them to go home, leave an area or disperse
Individuals who do not pay a fixed penalty notice under the regulations could be taken to court, with magistrates able to impose unlimited fines.
If an individual continues to refuse to comply, they will be acting unlawfully, and the police may arrest them where deemed proportionate and necessary.
However, in the first instance the police will always apply their common sense and discretion.” (From: Home Office and The Rt Hon Priti Patel MP – Published 26 March 2020)
H&S executive my arse.
H&S officials do not have the powers of arrest!
Well, you’re making the same mistake all over again. There is simply no point in trotting out what the police could do outside the workplace. Come on, you are being illogical.
As for powers of arrest, has anyone been arrested at No10? I think not. So let’s not talk about powers of arrest. The HSE can take you to court.
Are you actually denying that the police did not have the powers to ‘police’ the workplace, and that it was the HSE? Very simple fact to check. Why don’t you check it before bringing your arse into it?
The police have the power to enforce the law anywhere, in the workplace or otherwise.
HSE can take you to court on a civil matter, not a criminal matter. They would refer criminality to the police.
I am telling you as a flat out fact, as a former cop, that the police have every right to investigate criminal activity, suspected or otherwise, anywhere they damn well please.
Until you have the slightest clue what you’re talking about, you might want to get your arse out of it.
Blowhard know nothing.
Oh come on, you’re really claiming that Johnson’s actions are beyond criticism because they were technically legal, and he should be exonerated from any blame?
Even though the guidance was always vague and opaque in almost all areas, that the majority of people took them as mandates, and the misinformed police enforced them as law?
But hey, it’s a grey area, so lets forgive Johnson?
Did you know that schools were never ordered to shut during March 2020? Serious. It was only guidance. But the fact that my two boys – along with millions of other children – missed out on months of education, socialization and immune system strengthening is my fault, right? Or the schools? Or someone else’s … surely not Johnson and his cronies: they followed the law!
It’s not that he’s exonerating Johnson, far from it: it’s that the interpretation of the ‘guidance’ in the wider public sphere was far more brutal than in Downing St. That’s the standard of police state Johnson, Sturgeon and Drakeford created. Johnson didn’t necessarily break the law, but the application of the laws on the public were draconian and Johnson’s mob partied while doing nothing to put a stop to that.
That’s pretty much it.
Did you know that schools were never ordered to shut during March 2020? Serious. It was only guidance.
Yes, I knew that. And some private schools carried on regardless.
And I never said that Johnson’s actions were beyond criticism, merely that they weren’t illegal. That’s quite a difference.
I spent the whole of the time from March 2020 telling people that they had no obligation to follow much of the so-called rules. The government put out a booklet to every household stating that you could only exercise once a day – for an hour. Absolute rubbish. People were told all sorts of stuff that was absolute lies.
This is what we found to be true with regard to keeping our manufacturing business. Under intense social pressure to close the business my husband decided to stay open but with far fewer staff who could work well apart. He had had conversation with European suppliers, including one in Italy, in the week or so before lockdown was announced and they were remaining open so he knew it was possible. On investigation he quite quickly discovered that guidance was being presented on mainstream media as a legal requirement when it was nothing of the sort.
The moral of the story – never take what the MSM says at face value and never rely on the group to do your thinking for you.
And btw, he didn’t have to do much research to find this out. It was two or three calls to business organisations, it wasn’t consulting lawyers or anything.
And yet, it does seem to have been the business of the police, since they did the investigations (when shamed into it, admittedly) and issued the fines. The HSE doesn’t seem to have been involved that much, if at all.
The HSE have no power relative to private dwellings.
Johnson’s workplace defence is 100% right.
Johnson’s workplace defence may be 100% legally sound. On the other hand, him getting together with his coworkers in order to salute a departing colleague by having some drinks and conversation seems suspiciously similar to a couple of people meeting in a pub to do the same. But all pubs were forcibly closed and people whose workplaces didn’t lend themselves to informal socialising were prohibited from doing it at all. Due to circumstances of my work, I had a single two sentence conversation with an aquaintance in passing during the time from introduction of the 10pm curfew until the third lockdown was lifted, and even that was technically illegal. Dito for the first and second lockdown.
That the people who invented all these rules basically self-exempted themselves from them because they could just demonstrates that they really believed this was all just nonsense the plebs had to put up with because they’re, well, the plebs. Johnson is prime minister of the UK and supposed to govern for the benefit of its inhabitants. He’s not some kind of (decadent) emperor by the grace of god who’s therefore a being that’s simply above mere subjects of his crown.
Absolutely.
This is a vacuous argument using semantics to make your case and as such not credible.
Any good law would be based on proper research and even such archaic practices as ‘cost / benefit’ analyses, rightly referenced in the article.
This smarter than you approach is soulless but I suppose this leads to your inevitable conclusion.
A sign of the times.
I think this is a valid point as I personally didn’t consider many of the rules as legally binding. I felt that it was mostly guidance but it was strongly suggested that it was law. My interpretation could be wrong of course but it really was hard to work out whether or not something was strong guidance or a law.
Consider if it wasn’t law but the government simply wanted everyone to believe that it was. How could they ever admit it now? They can’t say Downing St parties were legal, we just wanted everyone else to believe it was illegal. Haha the joke’s on you.
So people let their loved ones die alone on the false belief that they’d be breaking the law and others believed that they were upholding the law in stopping visits.
Bear in mind that things kept changing so at some point strong guidance may well have transitioned to law but who knows anymore.
I was only allowed 20 attendees at my mothers leaving, with no ‘party’ at all afterwards. If I had wanted to see her dispatched through the curtains for her cremation I could have watched it on TV from outside the crematorium. My sister, who lives in America had to dial in to join the festivities by FaceTime. Because travelling was impossible, and even if it were possible, employers and governments in lockstep punished travellers with expensive and impenetrable bureaucratic requirements. Boris Johnson? He is an amoral charlatan who I would be more than happy to see as the guest of honour at his own necktie party. In recognition of his senior government position and to minimise his carbon footprint, I would offer him the choice of polypropylene or hemp.
100%
And he’s got certificates (well, FPNs) to prove it.
FPN’s, as I have pointed out elsewhere, are recognition of a low level crime. They are a form of guilty until proven innocent.
Pay one and it’s an admission of guilt.
Bozo is DIRECTLY responsible for thousands of depths in promoting the Scamdemic and he will be responsible for thousands more in the coming years. Never forget that.
Never Forget. Never Forgive.
Sorry “deaths” not depths.
Bonhoeffer‘s Theory of Stupidity. Clearly demonstrated over the last two years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
Of course he misled parliament but are any of the major MSM players prepared to accept this? No, they are trotting out his risible defence and going with the accepted narrative.
The risible defence seems to be “when I was there it wasn’t a party – it might have deteriorated into a party after I left, but I wasn’t aware of that at the time I made my statement to parliament when I said that none of the covid rules had been broken.”
AS IF.
I’m not buying a single shred of that – why are the MSM journalists all so prepared to swallow that whole?
Lets take just one of what were something like 16 or 17 events spread all over Whitehall, but mostly in the offices of No10. The “BYO garden party” that his officials thought they had “got away with”. That was outdoors, at the height of summer, was so raucous that people were sick and a child’s swing was broken. It was hot, so windows would have been open. If Johnson was there how could he not have heard the noise? and therefore have taken steps to have it broken up? If he was at chequers and not staying in the No10 flat please do not try to tell me that there is not a security staff at No10 who would not have witnessed the whole thing and reported it to their boss and thence to the PM (he is after all in absolute charge no?) afterwards. So, I’m not buying the “I didn’t know there had been a raucous party when I made my statement to the House of Commons ” defence at all. How stupid do they think we are??
Then the pictures of the christmas party with the alcohol and the stuff thrown over the CCTV (to hide what was happening) where the PM did the christmas quiz and they had the secret santa. He was there. There are pictures. How can he maintain that he didn’t know it was a party? At that time were others up and down the country permitted to engage in similar??? No.
And it does matter. It matters a lot.
Unfortunately a LOT of people were FORCED to take “health advice” from him, when he imposed through fear and the threat of mandate that millions of people in this country take not just one but a whole series of injections of a medical treatment which was a) novel so they were part of a giant experiment and b) licensed under EUA (but his behaviour demonstrates the “emergency” it was licensed under wasn’t real at all), and a lot of those people are already known to be dead or to have suffered vax injuries, and for the remainder we have no idea what is going to happen for their health outcomes in the years ahead.
ALL of that happened on the say so, and under the ultimate authority of, someone who LIED to the country about the gravity of the situation that they faced and employed a whole team of people to think up ways to terrify the country, many of whom are still terrified, to do their bidding. In the main, people did obey the edicts – he and his team of civil servants and ministers did not.
The lie is in the fact that he told people covid was deadly – a granny killer – when his own behaviour and that of the people who worked closely with him showed it wasn’t, otherwise they would have limited their contact, social distanced etc. They certainly wouldn’t have been trying to “get away with” a BYOB garden party which lasted until 4.30am and was so raucous people were sick and a child’s swing got broken.
And we keep being told we need to “draw a line under this and move on”. If you do that it gives them carte blanche to do similar again.
Note that recurring phrase “get away with” – used by Neil Ferguson (would we get away with locking down the whole of the UK?) and then by one of Johnson’s inner circle.
What do they next plan to “get away with”?
Good analysis.
The MSM are in no position to criticise, since Beff and Burley were off breaking rules themselves.
That’s the point, isn’t it? They clearly were not afraid, because despite what propaganda they were pumping out, they KNEW THERE WAS NOTHING TO FEAR.
They were mocking all those people who did their best to observe “the rules” because they thought it was the right thing to do. In private, they probably had a right good laugh about some of the stupidities they brought in.
That’s what concerns me.
Milo, I salute you.
The workplace loophole was legendary, and lots of people used it.
Have we all forgotten the workaround for the Christmas restrictions on how many could gather? You simply formed a limited company with your home as the registered address and appointed all your family as directors and/or shareholders. And then you had your first board meeting or members meeting as a working lunch on December 25.
What’s more, if you were in England (didn’t apply to Wales) you had the right to refuse to admit any police into your home to check up what was going on. You could politely have told them to go away, and there was nothing they could do. They had no powers of entry to ‘police’ Covid breaches on private property.
Why is Keir Starmer not using the “work place defence” for the Durham Miners Hall beergate mess he is in?
Or perhaps he is and that is why he is so confident he won’t have to resign either.
But I don’t understand why the “workplace defence” didn’t work for Matt Hancock. How come he had to resign? He was only having a party for 2 people .
Starmer might yet, or the police might exonerate him on the same grounds so he gets the benefit of the workplace exemption all the same.
The workplace defence didn’t work for Hancock because he never used it. He was hoist by his own petard, anyway, because he told us that all the nonsense he was telling everyone to do that did not have the force of law was not a suggestion or guidance but AN INSTRUCTION. And then he rubbed it in with all this ‘civic duty’ claptrap. People who play the little Hitlers like that usually come to a sticky end.
Proveritate, I completely agree with what you have said. In Wales as opposed to England there were regulations that were worded to require everyones compliance with ‘guidance issued by the Welsh ministers’. Whether they were legally enforceable or not was a moot point but with the magistrates largely bought and paid for, such a defence might have needed to be taken to a higher court. There were and never have been restrictions on alcohol consumption in the workplace and the mention of this is surely a smokescreen. Although Wales attempted to interfere in where alcohol might be being served in some settings, other than the workplace in which gatherings were ‘excused’. I was told recently that Drakeford was a teetotaller only after he had recovered as an alcoholic; I know not if thats true.
I have advised several persons accused of breaches of these regs as to how to defend themselves, largely successfully. There is no mention of these Downing Street attendees challenging the uneforceable FPNs reportedly issued; they may have been instructed not to or may have; the MSM are famous for their propagandising. If not already experienced in law such as Starmer, they will certainly have had access to legal advice to do so, unlike the many public who were bullied and abused by the Police and local authories. I can only conclude that Johnson and Starmer et al have chosen to whip up this trivia to divert attention from far more egregious acts
shipping ill people into care homes in 2020, sticking untested non-vaccines in everyone’s arms including kids, just two of a long list.
” this country needs to have a conversation about mandatory vaccination” or something like that .
Starmer is the biggest hypocrite of them all. He was DPP once, so knows a thing or two. He actually knows that Johnson broke no laws, but that doesn’t suit his political agenda to admit that.
Of course Johnson had the best legal advice, and would have been told that there were no breaches of the law, so he can rightly say that there were none, and that he believed that he hadn’t broken the law. That’s what legal counsel would have told him. They were right.
Starmer would have been told the same, but he is relying on lying and whipping up public anger about some sham hypocrisy. That’s political opportunism. And it makes him a bigger liar and hypocrite than Johnson. Don’t forget that Starmer wanted longer and tougher lockdowns as well. This is his chance to project everything bad, and righteous public anger about the lockdowns, onto his opponent. He is playing the public and laughing at them.
Clearly, most of the country isn’t as devious as you.
However, the concept would fall flat on it’s face when the police applied their “common sense” (see my earlier post) and determined that sitting around a table with a turkey dinner, wine, Christmas music, presents, and children running around wasn’t in the spirit of a business meeting.
Not a very bright idea.
The police always have power of entry if they have reasonable cause to suspect a crime is being committed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjw4sv25uMY
Entirely unreasonable as far as I’m concerned but it was legal.
The police during COVID-19 could have made up any excuse they wanted and got away with it. The entire police force should be abolished and completely new one replace it.
I’m still of a mind that 95% of ordinary coppers are basically okay. What’s required is a clean out of the Common Purpose hierarchy.
I’ve known a few. I even heard from one who worked with Ian Blair that Blair was an ok bloke and life in the force was more like the Sweeney than the average BBC portrayal. I think it’s the culture and that probably comes from outside the police itself, as it’s impacting all our institutions.
Perhaps have a police force based on Peel’s Principle’s not wokism?
A bit too novel for our Orwellian times.
Exactly! The Peelers were created because Peel knew that a European-style gendarmerie was fundamentally unBritish and unacceptable. Nowadays, police officers are armoured yobs prancing around wearing baseball caps and brandishing weapons, looking for easy target middle class people to harass for fines for their league table, who would talk past a bunch of unruly yobs and say ‘Evening lads!’ Trash!
The police always have power of entry if they have reasonable cause to suspect a crime is being committed.
Not in England, unless it is a serious crime. The police were explicitly told that they had no powers of entry whatsoever to enforce lockdown regulations on private premises. That’s why the HSE had to do the entry in private businesses, because they did have the powers of entry, whereas the police didn’t.
Define “Serious crime”
Then define at which point a minor crime escalates to a serious crime……..
Utter bollox.
Where and when were they told this?
Police powers of entry into private dwellings without a warrant are limited to certain offences (and a few other scenarios). Powers of entry for police were never written into covid legislation for the type of thing you are referring to.
Another pigeon home to roost.
Court cases must follow against ministers, editors, scientists, health chiefs, Big Pharma.
Surely the real issue here isn’t the draconian measures imposed by Johnson (and Macron, and Merkel, and Rutte, etc. etc.). The executives in all Western countries took liberties (literally), but where were the legislature and the judiciary? All Western ‘democracies’ are supposed to have a separation of powers, precisely to stop such heinous abuses by a handful of powertrippers.
In most cases these self-same leaders had overwhelming support from their parliaments, including from what were supposed to be opposition parties. Few questioned any of the liberties being taken, indeed many clamoured for even more abuses. Every MP was out to show they cared more about granny than anyone else, civil rights and the economy be damned. Even worse was the judiciary, who just sat back and didn’t even bother to have a look at whether any complaints about the measures had merits. “Well, if that’s what the experts say needs to be done and a majority of parliament is happy to help the PM trample over constitutional rights, who am I, a simple judge, to pipe up about the wholesale rape of the rule of law?”
I couldn’t care less whether Johnson gets booted out or fined a million more times, but I do care that those people who were in a position to stop him (and the other PMs, they all took the piss, not just Johnson), were content to sit back and let them get away with it and now pretend like they are representing the people by throwing the leaders they supported under the bus.
One can expect a political leader to grab whatever power they can – that is why we supposedly have a system of checks and balances. How about focusing on the utter failure of said checks and balances?
Well said. It wasn’t just Johnson and the Conservative party: the Labour party spent the whole time trying to outdo the government’s draconian policies. No one was standing up for truth and liberty. Not the legislature, not the judiciary. With few exceptions.
Indeed. As has become clear, ‘guidance’ meant something to be treated casually for ‘them’ and as law for the rest of ‘us.’ Labour helped make things worse by demanding ever-more-brutal restrictions. It shows a major issue lies with what’s become of the political parties. Labour is far left progressivist, the Tories are Blairite progressivist. There’s no conservative party and no libertarian party of any significance to stand up for the country and people are badly educated enough not to look far beyond the ‘football team’ politics they follow. The mentality of ‘I got Labour cos my great grandad did and every generation since’ needs to be shattered.
And then from Silkie Carlo there is this just now – Scottish Police now prosecuting these people they traumatised horrifically Jan last year. All in a day’s work apparently
https://twitter.com/silkiecarlo/status/1529816132860846081
Unbelievable! Or perhaps not!
BTW. Sod off Twitter! Whenever you take a Twitter link and aren’t logged in the bloody application forces a large pop-up in your face. I know there’s a way to get around this but I can’t remember it.
Click the link to sign up then click the X in the top left, scroll away forever.
Absolutely shocking.
Those police officers… that’s home invasion in the style of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I’m literally shaking with anger watching those images. That’s what Johnson, Sturgeon and Drakeford have turned this country into. The gallows is too good for them..
LOL. That’s nothing. The new Hurty speech law in Scotland has the potential to have you arrested for speaking your mind in your own home.
The Coronavirus 2020 Act and the 1984 Public Heath Act are still on the Statute Book and will/can be used whenever the Government (any) wishes to enable it again.
I know it’s been said before, but….If these Downing Street party attendees truly believed that covid presented a serious threat and the consequent laws/rules/regulations were an essential safety device for us Brits, why did they happily contravene said laws? If, say, Ebola was doing the rounds (and the way things are going that may well be along in a few years with a nice bit of gain of function added) you can bet your bottom dollar that any sensible person would be only too happy to keep away from his fellow man for fear of catching it. The only conclusion you can draw is that they thought it was all a load of b****cks, and the laws were just for show and for the plebs.
Exactly so, this exposes the lie. But Johnson et al can continue to get away with it because most people still appear to believe in this cult.
Boris broke lockdown rules … I don’t care. I’m not interested. Which critical thinkers didn’t break lockdown rules?
I don’t want to see Johnson go. Have you considered the alternatives?
This is a truly disturbing commentary on our predicament: what we need to see is an entire political and media class apologise for this evil project rather than crow over Johnson’s embarrassment – preferably prosecuted for treason.
Okay downvoters, who do you want to see – nominally – running the country? Names and political parties please.
I think replies should be limited to realistic candidates only. I can’t really think of any realistic candidate who would be less bad, other than perhaps a caretaker leader while they chose someone to take them into the next election.
Steve Baker, Conservative.
Not that I downvoted you, but Johnson isn’t just incompetent, he’s a liability.
Mark Steyn would be a better choice, obviously that would require a revolution first.
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The Tories need to get rid of Johnson and Sunak as quickly as possible if they are to stand any chance of winning the next General Election.
This Tory government has 1997 written all over it with sexual misconduct and lies characterising them, while manifesto promises are thrown out with the empties. I absolutely dread the prospect of a Labour government or Lib-Lab pact because of the damage they will do to this country. But can we say this Tory shower are really any better?
Johnson is no longer an electoral asset. He’s dragging his party down and failure to deliver on his promises is letting the country down too.
No, Labour are so terrible that it really doesn’t matter who is in charge of the Tories. The Conservatives will win again, probably with a reduced majority. And nothing will change, because we don’t live in a democracy.
If the Tories dont make a majority. it could easily be Labour and SNP forming a coalition. A truly frightening prospect..
Can’t wait .
There’s no salvation for the country via the ballot box.
What happened to the response to Ian Rons?
I think Irons is the DS web master. So, go figure!
This is a terrible “indictment” of the PM.
“Johnson is often said to be a leader who manages to do just that – and certainly on Ukraine that claim can reasonably be made”
If it is demonstrated that the PM contributed to stop the negotiations with Russia, all his leadership will be a clear failure.
Its on record that he was worked hard to persuade Ukraine not to enter into negotiations. Whether they have actually been influential is irrelevant, blood is on his hands.
He’s fallen for the Ukrainian leadership’s propaganda and want’s a crack at pretending to be Churchillian.
The catalogue of doom:
Northern Ireland Protocol
Lockdowns
Afghanistan debacle
No 10 parties and deceit
Energy prices/green levy
Tax rises
Immigration unchecked
Failure to improve infrastructure
Failure to reform
Inflation
Nationalisation of rail
Uncle Tom Cobley
Well stuff my old boots. Who is going to vote for Bunter and the rest of this shower?
But if not voting for Bunter, who do you vote for?
I’ll never forgive him for being the lynchpin of Brexit, but as I said below, just look at the alternatives.
Brexit was the only good thing he did, and he didn’t even do that very well.
I only vote for independent candidates now. I will never vote for a mainstream party again. If we go for PR as the next labour government almost certainly will, I hope for a countryside party to start up similar to the one they have in France.
Thus far, I’ve voted independent in local elections. God knows what I’ll do at the next general election: I can’t currently bring myself to vote for any lockdown-supporting party.
When you get it right, you pull out all the stops.
Great post.
Don’t forget the slavish backing of Ukraine.
Where has this article gone?
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/05/26/in-defence-of-jacques-baud/
When I clicked on the “Read More” link, it was told the page could not be found, and, when I went back to the home page, the summary had vanished!
Not the Online Safety Bill in action, is it?
I don’t want to parse this, I just want to fling dung at everyone involved. No logic, no legality, no philosophy, just dung. Dung dung dung. Here have another scoop.
Give BJ a break. He was only following orders.
Delingpole made an interesting remark, never followed up on, that Johnson had told major newspaper editors that he was no longer in charge and making decisions,
Yes, I remember that too.
Just as an aside, that banner in front of Bunter – it’s telling the sheeple that men and women should stay (2 metres) apart. Woke knows no bounds; it even trumps ‘health and safety’. Not that H&S has anything whatsoever to do with all the COVID bollocks we had to put up with.
“H & S” – HSE _ certainly has quite a lot to do with all “the COVID bollocks we had to put up with.” Witness the story of Burnley College being investigated for not implementing measures correctly, which were according to a recently-deceased student adviser. Licenced sadism.
Never mind misleading Parliament, the lying lard-bucket has been misleading everyone.
It’s the best MSM article I’ve seen on the subject of lockdown, but as Will points out:
Just like Jeremy Hunt, is the Spectator trying to rewrite history on their previous position on lockdowns?
I had to give up subscribing to the Spectator and the Torygraph as they had got so supportive of the lockdowns and the garbage spouted by their friends in the the government, especially the Great Fat Idiot. I cannot see I will ever be subscribing to them again as there are far better unbiased sources of information.
Yes, I ditched the Telegraph in December last year, the day Philip Johnston wrote a vicious piece attacking unvaccinated people, having previously been supportive of people making their own choices. It read almost detail for detail the same as an article in the Mail by Andrew Neil and in The Sun (IIRC) by Karen Braddy. Clearly the MSM had been told to make one last ‘push’ to intimidate readers and the writers in question acquiesced, even if it made them – Johnston in particular – a hypocrite. I now subscribe to the Daily Wire, which means I get to watch good TV shows and movies too, presented by people like Candace Owens, who are down to earth and so… normal compared with anyone in the British media!!
My family goes back decades in connection with the Telegraph, due to my late grandfather having been a reasonably significant journalist there at one time (he retired decades ago.) What it’s become under the Barclays (the men who took over Maxwell’s The European) is a disgrace: half of its articles would be at home in The Guardian and they took a £3 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which funded Paul Nuki’s Stalinist-sounding ‘Global Health Security Team’, which pumped out endless catastrophic propaganda through the lockdowns, which were being contradicted by their own columnists. And they sacked Bob Moran!
It’s significant that the Telegraph Media Group been on the market for for years now and no one wants to buy it. One might have thought a conservative or libertarian billionaire in the US might have been interested, but maybe it’s too far gone. The rewriting of history by these publications is of great amusement to me. How long before they hire ‘Winston Smiths’ to rewrite lots of their articles?
Yet the Telegraph and the Spectator regularly featured pieces by journalists and others increasingly critical of lockdowns etc. Not defending them, just pointing out they may have been the least bad of the bunch.
They took an interesting approach: they did as they were told on the news pages and Nuki and his toerags were allowed to run propaganda, but the likes of Allison Pearson did a cracking job arguing back. I did say in the above piece, by the way that they carried propaganda articles ‘which were being contradicted by their own columnists.’ That’s why Johnston’s piece was so shocking: he did a complete volte-face out of the blue. As someone who has held off being jabbed (still unjabbed) there was a definite sense of ‘We’re coming after you!’ last winter, with prison camps being mooted around the world.
So the Spectator is running running with the story that they’re laughing at Davos by saying Covid was the biggest money earner in history. System propaganda at its finest.
It’s hardly trivial when laws are introduced allowing
1 The police to enter your home by force and take your children away and not tell you where they are
2 Old folks to be isolated and murdered in care homes
3 People subjected to detention without trial
4 Cancer patients left to rot
We must not rest until these people are brought to justice
WE WON’T!!!!
I think calling them ‘people’ is rather too forgiving.
What’s never mentioned is that in all the photographs of the Boris parties, there’s not a mask to be seen. We were all urged to wear them everywhere, but it seems they were not required by, or around Boris.
Despite allegedly being at deaths door with covid, Boris was disdainful enough of covid not to bother with masking precautions he coerced everyone else to take.
Could he possibly have been lying about having the disease?
Judging by his predisposition to lying, I would say he never had it, but pulled a stunt to convince everyone of how serious it was.
He is a globalist.
He has lied relentlessly in order to further the globalist agenda.
One thing puzzles me. Boris and Putin were allegedly WEF ‘Young Global Leaders’ but never ‘graduated’.
The wisdom of some is that they didn’t respond in the prescribed manner to the indoctrination so were ‘let go’.
As I recall, Matt Hancock was one of the ones who did pass. Of course Viktor Orban passed too, IIRC, but he’s not exactly followed ‘the path’ either (although he’s signed up Hungary to the Belt and Road initiative.)
Orban is pretty much following the path.
I agree. Initially I fell for the C1984 and Bozo story. Now I tend to the view that possibly he went on an enormous bender by way of assuaging his guilt for all the crimes he had signed up to.
(I know … I am ascribing humanity where none exists.)
He is guilty of imposing the lockdown full stop.
It was pretty clear that whatever covid19 was it wasn’t very dangerous unless you were very old and riddled with other disease andthis was well known veryearly on.
He knew the lockdown policy was seriously dangerous, he did it any way, he is a crook.
He’s a criminal who ranks with Stalin, Hitler, Goebbels, Pol Pot and others for me. Just because he didn’t kill as many people, he inflicted restrictions on the behaviour of the entire public that even those monsters didn’t and created a psychopathic police state to enforce those restrictions that hasn’t been disassembled and likely won’t ever be fully. Any leader – notably Sturgeon and Drakeford – who inflicted lockdowns, any MP voted in favour of them and any police officer who enforced them belongs on trial for crimes against humanity.
The legacy of unnecessary deaths, mental illness and societal despair that revolting man has left makes him one of of the true monsters of British history. The fact that he cracks jokes and messes up his hair for pubic appearances just exemplifies the blandness of real evil.
“Just because he didn’t kill as many people….”
Yet.
Otherwise I agree with your post 100%.
I think “crook” belongs with ‘breaking and entering,’ not multiple harms and deaths of thousands.
Blimey!
The Speccie. Who’da thunk it?
Well – it wasn’t going to be the Guardian with an article like that! They won’t hesitate to lay into Johnson for breaking ‘the rules’ but there’s no way on earth they will condemn the assorted dystopian rules enacted to “keep everyone safe”!
‘Orchestrated opposition’ I suspect. They’ll be backing him again soon enough… By the time of the next election, we’ll be told he’s made amends.
Yeah, turning on one of their own, shocking .
Sweden had no lockdown and only short term very light restriction.
After two years of supposed pandemic they have lower all cause mortality than for the preceding five years.
This is rock solid evidence that the whole covid19 story was a con.
YES! Exactly. AFTER the event we find that it’s a con. But not before…
“…even more seriously, of putting “the lockdown laws on the statute book in the first place…”
Not sure what else he could have done.
He was told by the ‘best specialists in the land’ that we had to lock down immediately. What would you have done in that position?
Where I take issue is that when it began to be obvious that the best specialists in the land were completely wrong, the government should not have attempted to cover for them, but investigated the other options with an open mind.
The country had a sane and workable pandemic plan. Bozo should have implemented it, as sane experts were recommending.
He did. Then the medical experts changed their minds. Not a lot he could do about that…
He could have stood his ground and stated that he had more confidence in a plan evolved from many years’ experience than in a knee-jerk over-reaction under pressure. There was already evidence that the risk was being grossly exaggerated (e.g. the Diamond Princess).
Bit that would require a strong leader, and Johnson is a weak populist who normally goes with what he thinks will play best with the crowd.
Well, he could have pointed out that the country had a pandemic plan, written with the benefit of years of experience, and followed that plan!
Not sure when the Imperial modellers becamse the ‘best specialists in the land’.
Hancock was likely told by his handlers at the WEF to abort the plan.
I am absolutely certain that Margaret Thatcher would have explored the issue herself and would have rigorously cross-questioned these so-called experts and specialists. It would have been obvious to her and most of us here that there was no sensible scientific reason to go for lockdown.
You have been scammed by the government, the BBC and virtually all of the MSM.
But Thatcher was a scientist by training, not an Oxford PPE graduate (or similar).
She also qualified as a barrister, specialising in taxation.
It was NOT obvious initially. The only available data that the scientists passed to the politicians suggested that it could be very lethal.
Then, when better data came in showing that it was not so dangerous, they hid it….
It was completely clear by the time of the first lockdown: your memory is obviously troubling you.
Agree.
Now Maggie would have done a Churchill.
After the 3 weeks to flatten the curve lie. All the stats were clear that there was no need to carry on the shutdowns. Bunter’s illness ended that debate. Very convenient that for some.
That was the point that SAGE and the rest started lying to the politicians…
He could have displayed leadership, honesty, integrity, some balls, done what Sweden did, not lied, scared everyone half to death with their own money.
Not with his scientists telling him and the people that they were all going to die, and the people and media baying to be made safer…
Indeed. And Diamond Princess data was available very early in the Scamdemic.
“Not sure what else he could have done.”
He thinks he’s a bloody Churchill.
Chamberlain came back from Munich with “Peace in our Time.”
Churchill said ‘bollox.’
Bozo had a chance at glory and blew it for thirty pieces of silver.
I retired at the temporary end of my working life in June 2020. Everything had been arranged months before for a hog roast, time off work for an hour for the factory staff, exactly the same as we had done the year before when our payroll lady retired.
But no, all knocked on the head due to the dystopian diktats from Johnson and the communist and Marxist cretins from SAGE. Not even a drink or communal sandwiches on my last day – just a small gathering in the office to wish me farewell and to give me a few gifts.
I am not really bothered about “Partygate” per se – like others I am more concerned about the insidious removal of our civil liberties by an unelected cabal, aided and abetted by 650 supine MPs who have clearly demonstrated their total lack of medical, economic and parliamentary knowledge (with a handful of exceptions). I will never forgive or forget what they did to my wider family, who were unable to hold a proper funeral for a well-loved aged aunt. May they all rot in Hell.
Hard to believe anything this government says. I don’t even believe the Bunter was at deaths door with China Virus story. He clearly wasn’t that concerned about it a few weeks later.
I said at the time it was a lie … and so it turned out to be. Boris was never in ‘intensive care’ for ‘Covid’.
Anyway, much wailing and gnashing-of-teeth, but Boris will still be Prime Minister tomorrow and farting in your faces.
If he’d been at death’s door, he’d have been brutally intubated and killed.
“tens of thousands taken to court”
Is that true? I thought people were issued with Fixed Penalty Notices accompanied by a letter telling them that if they challenged it they risked ending up with a much larger fine. It’s a proven business model as we know from the speed camera scam. It’s also why we are now in the position of elected political leaders being potentially toppled on the say so of a team of coppers. It’s beyond satire.
Hmm I cancelled my subscription to the Spectator because of their support for lockdowns so they can f right off
Hands Face Space. Guilty of misleading the British public right from the start.
This political pandemic panic attack has been witnessed in so many countries. Australia and NZ two of the worst. Still not clear if it is political stupidity or public health guesswork, lies and incompetence or more likely a combination of the two. Either way the people resonsible will go down in history as the ‘leaders’ of the greatest scam in history, regardless of whatever else they do.
THE Prime Minister said on Wednesday, the day Sue Gray’s report was released, that the hundreds of billions spent on dealing with the pandemic had left Britain in a ‘very difficult fiscal position’. So, there it is – what we have been telling you for weeks is that this cost of living crisis is a cost of lockdown crisis.
Johnson’s mob have got away with all of it. More fool us
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/johnsons-mob-have-got-away-with-all-of-it-more-fool-us/
Laura Perrins
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Stand in the Park Sundays 10.30 -11.30am
make friends & keep sane
from the globalist covid & climate propaganda
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Wokingham –
Howard Palmer Gardens Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
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Telegram astandintheparkbracknell
For many, they cannot link the damage to the £400 thousand million pounds of printed money from the special tree.
The irony of printing another £15 thousand million from the special tree to ease the damage from the 1st £400 thousand million also seems to have passed most by!
You will own nothing and be happy.
Hung on the gallows they so callously prepared for others, I think is the phrase.
The Spectator’s chairman, Andrew Neil, expressed the flatulent view that anyone who declined participation in the trial of an unlicensed, ineffective, experimental therapy with known but unquantified serious side effect risk for a virus from which they had fully recovered without incident should be “punished” by further restrictions on our freedoms.
It’s not clear to me what authority Spectator thinks it has to express any opinion on this matter until they find his replacement.
Neil is just a rancorous journo with opinions best kept to himself. That he and others seem to think that what they say is important or have any bearing on ordinary life is to show him for the self-important, egotistical a***h*le he is.
Nobody mentions that Labour voted with the Conservative Party on each draconian measure. They knew once and for all that it would finally blow the “perceived” financial competence of the Conservative Party in any election manifesto out of the water. Thicko Johnson couldn’t spot it.
Gosh these journalists have no honour ……. Didn’t the Spectator support wholeheartedly the lockdowns and Johnson, when it must have have known what was going on. Legacy media Journalists have lost all respect and really need to take much of the blame for what has happened over the last two years.
Legacy media Journalists have lost all respect and really need to take much of the blame for what has happened over the last two years.
ABSOLUTELY SPOT ON!
And the visible message, as I wrote elsewhere-they knew there was no deadly virus…..as did the G7 leaders pictured in informal gatherings close together unmasked.
I stopped taking the Spectator and cancelled my subscription with them because they were supporting the unnecessary, damaging and darn right dangerous government policies that were being put in place at the time. All they were doing was trundling out government propaganda like everyone else. Now they’re like rats on a sinking ship. It’s pathetic.
Because of the pro lockdown editorial line I sacked my Speccie subscription. Good to see the editor changing his mind. No shame in that. Hoping for more reverse ferrets from senior politicians, Govt scientists and the MSM. Not taking out a fresh Speccie sub though. Slashed on the pomme frites.
Nelson is at best, a Conservative apologist and at worst a Conservative propagandist. Whoever wrote this Spectator Leader should replace him as Editor (and I hope it was Douglas Murray).
You’d have to persuade Douglas to come home from NYC.
As I recall the Spectator was generally very supportive of government policy. That’s why I stopped my subscription. No use changing opinion now, that’s just following* the toed, what the majority of MSM have done from day one.
I don’t want Boris to resign, neither do I I want any change in Government personnel going into winter. Currently this shower have zero chance of forcing people into any restrictions or compliance.
Yet I fear the likes of a Hunt, Gove or others in Cabinet would cave in to scaremongering scientists and the Looney Tunes in SAGE.
Starmer 100% would.
Parliament may have been misled but where Covid was concerned it rubber stamped every loony and draconian Government edict. There was no scrutiny just fawning reverence for ” the science” as if there ever was such a thing. Apart from a handful of rebels, in the main our MPs and peers deserve only derison and contempt.
This advert from the govt was a deliberate lie. Proof? PartyGate. None of those there were scared of spreading the ‘virus’ or causing people to die.
It’s this disgraceful fear-mongering propaganda that is the crime, not ’parties’. It is for this crime that the PM should resign.
I haven’t read the article in full but I do wonder whether or not it addresses in any way the completely illegal move to have our sovereignty overruled by the WHO who can impose lockdowns and other draconian actions seemingly at whim. Is the Spectator making a stand against this? I would argue that this is far more important than pursuing the lying blond blob over his lack of principle – we know he is and does – but the WHO pandemic treaty that is being currently being talked about is something that we should resist at all costs. This unelected body with the greatest influence from that quite frankly evil and appalling man Gates should not be given these powers. Can the Spectator actually talk about this rather than distracting us again with the PartyGate nonsense. We can deal with PartyGate later but for now all eyes must be on the WHO.
Who could replace Johnson? Those least willing to forgive his becoming hoist, and likely to stand against him in a Tory leadership election, tend to give the impression they’d appreciate Boris even less if he did the right thing, which would be apologising for deploying a petard in the first place. I, for one, fear them more than I fear Boris.
It’s a step in the right direction but, it needs a thousand or millions more similar steps of the same ilk to even make a dent in the thinking of the true covidians.
Some of them will spend a thousand lifetimes living as they are. And nothing will change them.