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We MPs Need to Recognise That What We Did to the Country During Covid Was Wrong

by Danny Kruger
30 January 2024 1:43 PM

Danny Kruger MP has written the afterword to the new book from the brilliant team at UsForThem, The Accountability Deficit: How ministers and officials evaded accountability, misled the public and violated democracy during the pandemic, written by Molly Kingsley, Arabella Skinner and Ben Kingsley. We reprint Danny’s afterword here in full.

The British state failed the British people in 2020-22. This book details how. The authors believe that ministers and officials were personally to blame for a series of bad decisions which inflicted what they call “an economic, social, medical, ethical and safeguarding disaster” on the public. I also have grave concerns about many decisions the Government took. But my real concern – and indeed the authors’ – goes deeper than personal culpability.

Better ministers and advisers may have made better decisions. But fundamentally what failed in 2020-22 wasn’t a handful of individuals. It was the system as a whole: the British state, its outer ring of expert advisers, advisory bodies and regulators, and the wider set of supposedly independent institutions, including the media and the pharmaceutical industry, which in this crisis rallied to the State and became to all intents and purposes part of it. And above and beneath all of them, what failed was the institution that is intended to hold the rest together and make them honest: Parliament. If we are looking for individuals to blame, look here. What failed was me, and my colleagues.

I was a late convert to scepticism about Covid policy. My view for at least the first year of the crisis was that the Government’s response – mass testing, mass lockdowns, mass vaccination – was the only one that could work. I trusted the experts and, as a loyal Conservative backbencher and then Parliamentary Private Secretary, voted for everything that Ministers put in front of us. I focused my efforts locally, in my Wiltshire constituency, where we saw both real suffering but also a remarkable spirit of neighbourliness and innovation.

In the Summer of 2020, I compiled a report for the Prime Minister exploring how we might harness the community spirit which we saw across the country to “build back better” after the pandemic. In those early months I regarded the whole Covid episode simply as a traumatic pause in the life of the country, thankfully managed by people who knew what they were doing, and I looked forward to a brighter future beyond it.

But as time passed I became slowly radicalised by the Covid experience. Indeed what turned me into a sceptic was the corruption of the concept of ‘community’. As a Conservative I have a deep respect for the institutions, formal and informal, that sustain our national life, starting with families, widening to neighbourhoods and then to the national bodies that give us identity and security. It was this respect for institutions that the Covid response relied upon for the public support it needed; and yet these institutions were its primary victims. The ties that bind us were used to throttle us.

People’s love of their families was exploited by instructions to “don’t kill granny” by visiting her. The strength of local communities, so apparent in the way that neighbours came together spontaneously to look after the elderly and vulnerable, to organise pop-up grocery shops in pub car parks, to stitch (useless, as it turned out) facemasks, was ridden over by a set of diktats that drew all power to the central state. Vital local institutions like schools and churches were closed down altogether in the name of community safety, to protect the young and old. And our national institutions – Parliament most of all, but also the Church of England and the BBC – effectively suspended their independence in the name of solidarity with the Government.

Now that we are out the other side of Covid we can look back and try to understand what we went through, and particularly what we MPs did to our constituents. I am sorry that so few colleagues want to do this. Like the rest of the British establishment, particularly the media which played such a central role in the saga, most politicians want to ‘move on’ from Covid. In this they probably reflect the views of the public. Most people would like to discuss test and trace, lockdown tiers and the vaccine programme as much as they want to discuss Brexit.

But MPs have a duty to do the boring and the difficult stuff. In order to move on safely – and in justice to the many victims of Covid and the response to it – we need to look back and learn the lessons. What, then, can we learn? This account is compiled by three heroic campaigners who, like me, began the pandemic as neutral citizens, happy to trust the state, but – much quicker than me – became dismayed by the tendency of Government to reach for universal coercive measures rather than trusting in the good sense of individuals and families and the resilience of communities. My own experience, and my perspective of this period as a parliamentarian may differ from theirs, but still I agree with their overall analysis and conclusions.

Informed by their analysis, I ascribe the failures of the British state to the following factors: functional failure in Government itself; bad advice and practice from the official experts; and, most fundamentally, the failure of Parliament to do its job. The authors have explained how the normal systems of decision-making fell apart in the pandemic. As the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee reported in 2021, official processes were more or less abandoned in the urgency of the crisis, replaced by WhatsApp groups and ad hoc committees of ministers, advisers and civil servants.

It is perhaps understandable that informal, relationship-based systems arose spontaneously to respond to the unfolding emergency. As Dominic Cummings has said, it turned out that the official processes had already failed. The state was utterly unprepared for the pandemic, and showed itself unable to adapt with the speed and at the scale the crisis demanded. In due course, irregular guerilla operations, on data – and, famously, on vaccine procurement – outperformed the cumbersome systems of Whitehall. But irregular forces need a regular army to form around. The problem with guerilla government is partly one of accountability: it was unclear then, and it is unclear even with hindsight and the divulging of WhatsApp messages, who was responsible for what advice and what decision. But more profoundly the failure of proper government meant an absence of the natural balances which a good system of decision-making includes.

This is most apparent in the evidence of Professor Mark Woolhouse, a member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), to the Science and Technology Select Committee in June 2020. The focus on modelling public health scenarios – infection and mortality predictions – to the exclusion of other considerations such as the economic and social impact of the proposed measures meant that, in Professor Woolhouse’s words, “we [were ] looking literally at only one side of the equation”. The Government seems to have taken no account of the risks of harm posed by the interventions which the public health advisers recommended.

This leads to the second failure of the British state: bad advice and practice among the experts. The modelling that the Government commissioned into the epidemiology of COVID-19, particularly from Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, at the beginning of the pandemic has become notorious. Just as bad was the graph presented by Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance in September 2020, suggesting that infections were doubling every seven days and that within a month 50,000 people a day would therefore be catching the virus.

The Covid era was defined, as cultures and civilisations tend to be, by its object of worship. During the pandemic we worshipped science – or to give it its proper name, ‘The Science’. The singular definitive suggests the essential error of this religion. Science involves the use of multiple facts and hypotheses. What the authors call the “reductive simplicity” of “the science” meant that the normal scientific processes were laid aside, and instead the clique of credentialled advisers at the top of Government acquired a total supremacy.

Dominic Cummings has said that the dominance of these advisers was welcomed or encouraged by ministers who could use ‘The Science’ to justify their decisions and excuse any bad results. As I have written elsewhere:

We are in thrall to a priestly class of professional scientists who, like the druids of old, reveal to the rulers the mysteries of the other world – or at least offer auguries which serve to excuse a decision. Government may be utterly bewildered but at least it can ‘follow the science’, as in old days it heeded the flight of birds or the entrails of a chicken.

The mysteries of science were invoked most powerfully in the case of the vaccines. Here we need to distinguish between the undoubted operational triumph of the vaccine programme, and the actual value of the vaccines in terms of public health and our liberation from lockdowns. The Vaccine Taskforce, led by Kate Bingham, capitalised on our new Brexit-found freedoms to procure the vaccine doses the country wanted. It was an example of effective government – probably because it took place outside the formal systems of the state. What followed, however, raises serious questions which have yet to be answered.

The vaccines were licensed by the U.K.’s medical regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), in record time in order to facilitate the end of the lockdowns. This process deserves proper scrutiny, not only because of the speed of licensing but because the technology involved in some of the vaccines was comparatively novel.

The licensing of the vaccines was the responsibility of the MHRA. The Government, advised by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), then had to decide which members of the public should receive the jabs, and in which order. Initially the Government’s view, expressed by Kate Bingham in October 2020, was that “it’s an adult-only vaccine, for people over 50”. Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, reiterated in November that “this is an adult vaccine”. Yet within 18 months the parents of children aged five were being encouraged to have them vaccinated.

This followed the obscure episode in September 2021 in which the JCVI refused to recommend the vaccination of healthy 12-15 year olds, and then the Government’s Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, overruled the advice and “on public health grounds” recommended the vaccination of young teenagers – despite the miniscule risk of Covid for this age group. As the authors argue, this represented a very serious breach of the important ethical principle that medical treatments should be administered for the sake of the patients receiving them, not for the sake of others or ‘the public’ in general.

It has never been satisfactorily explained why the official advice changed so completely during 2021 – even as our understanding of the efficacy and the safety of the vaccines developed, and in the wrong direction. It was originally believed that the vaccines would stop the transmission of Covid. They turned out to do no such thing. And it gradually emerged, as more of the public was vaccinated, that for many people the jabs had significant side-effects, including serious heart conditions and in some cases death.

The licensing of the COVID-19 vaccines was the responsibility of the MHRA. This body was frequently described by ministers as “the best in the world”; rather like ‘the science’, the religion in which the MHRA performed a leading priestly function, the regulator gave the Government a plausible cover to hide its decisions behind. Yet the majority of the funding for the MHRA comes from the very pharmaceutical companies whose products it is supposed to regulate.

As successive investigations over the years, including by the Health Select Committee, have found, the pharmaceutical industry exercises an excessive influence over healthcare in the U.K., and is particularly influential over the regulator. In May 2022 Dame June Raine, the head of the MHRA, approvingly described the MHRA as having changed “from a watchdog to an enabler”. This is not an appropriate description of the agency which is supposed to decide, on behalf of the public, which drugs and treatments are safe and effective for use.

When the pandemic first appeared the view of the Government, and especially of the then Prime Minister, was that the British people and their institutions would resent and even resist the degree of state control that the necessary response might entail. In the end this belief in the spirit of British liberty was disproved. People were content, even keen, to trade their freedom for what they were told was their security. And this is partly, I believe, because of the near unanimity of establishment voices saying the same thing.

Here the role of private sector players is significant. Because it wasn’t just the official agencies of the Government that recommended mass lockdowns and later mass vaccination. The mainstream media, including the major social media platforms, overwhelmingly backed the Government’s position. As the authors explain, this included deliberate action to suppress the online presence of the Great Barrington Declaration, the open letter signed by eminent scientists from around the world questioning the lockdown policies. UsForThem, the authors’ campaign group, found its online reach restricted by what appears to be deliberate action to mute its campaign.

The group was also subject to an early version of the ‘debanking’ scandal that later engulfed Coutts and Natwest when they arbitrarily terminated the account of Nigel Farage. In September 2022 Paypal suspended UsForThem’s account, along with that of the Free Speech Union, apparently for the crime of being out of step with the Government’s Covid policy.

I was the first MP to raise the Paypal scandal in the Commons. By then it was obvious that many of the initial assumptions about the virulence and lethality of Covid, and the interventions (pharmaceutical and otherwise) intended to combat it, were mistaken. And as an MP I share the responsibility for this. Because if the operations of Government were dysfunctional, and the advice and practice of the ecosystem of official advisers and regulators and the wider establishment (including big companies) was also at fault, the third and final body to blame for the disaster of the Covid response is the one supposed to mitigate the faults of the others and hold them to account: Parliament.

A depressing theme of this book is what the authors call the “passivity” of the organisations theoretically supposed to defend the rights of people harmed by the Covid response, such as the children’s organisations which tacitly or overtly endorsed the closure of schools and the lockdown of children in unsafe homes. But the passivity really emanated from the institution which more than any other should have held the Government to account for its decisions.

Parliament effectively went on leave for the duration of the crisis. For months we operated a ‘virtual’ Chamber, with speeches and questions beamed in from MPs’ homes to giant screens hung over the gallery, to be met with stock pre-prepared responses from ministers. Debate was non-existent, and even Written Parliamentary Questions – the way MPs get more detailed answers from Government departments – were discouraged by the Speaker. In no way can the House of Commons or the House of Lords be said to have given Government policy the scrutiny it needed.

The legal framework for the Covid response was a set of laws, some of them already in existence and some of them hastily put together in the first phase of the crisis. As the authors explain, the Coronavirus Act – creating sweeping new powers to ban gatherings, delay elections and organise health resources, including for quarantines – was debated for just six hours and passed in a single day on March 23rd 2020. It required a vote in Parliament to renew its provisions every six months, though without the opportunity for amendments, so MPs were required to accept or reject the whole act in full.

In the end, however, it wasn’t this exceptional legislation that the Government used to order the lockdowns. Three days after the Coronavirus Bill passed the Commons, Matt Hancock signed into law the Health Protection (Coronovirus, Restrictions) Regulations 2020, using emergency powers conferred by the 1984 Public Health (Control of Disease) Act. The Public Health Act was designed to enable the Government to order the quarantine of dangerously infected, identified individuals. It was used in 2020 to order the entire country to “stay at home”. The regulations were not presented to Parliament until 90 minutes after they were signed and came into force; but the previous day Parliament had risen for the Easter recess, and did not get the chance to debate the measures for another six weeks.

The suspicions of the authors, and of Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court judge who has written extensively on this episode, is difficult to dispute: the Government used the Public Health Act because it granted more sweeping powers than the Coronavirus Act or the Civil Contingencies Act (the existing vehicle for organising society in an emergency, which nevertheless entails a tight regime of Parliamentary control), and because it allowed the use of the emergency procedure to circumvent Parliamentary approval.

Five-hundred and eighty-two Covid-related measures were presented to Parliament in the two years of the pandemic. One hundred of them followed the model of the Health Protection Regulations, being signed into law by ministers before they even came to Parliament, using the emergency procedure of the Public Health Act. A further 417 were passed using the ‘negative’ procedure whereby a measure becomes law automatically, without Parliamentary debate, unless the Commons actively resolves to annul it.

In September 2020 I wrote to constituents about my decision to vote for the first six-month renewal of the Coronavirus Act. It was, I said, “an appalling situation for a free people, with a tradition of personal liberty and freedom of association going back many centuries… I am deeply uneasy about it all, but I accept the Government’s leadership, based on its assessment of the scientific advice”.

As I have outlined, and as the authors make clear, that scientific advice was not adequate, and the Government’s leadership, while sincerely intended to protect the public, was wanting. The official enquiry into the pandemic, led by Baroness Hallett, will, I hope, help us understand why decisions were taken and what their effect was. But we also need to make some decisions, as a society – in Parliament and in Government – about the future.

I regret that my proposals for a renewal of civil society and community responsibility, presented to an indifferent or distracted Government at the height of the first wave of COVID-19, have not been adopted. I still believe that the pandemic taught us the power and generosity of local neighbourhoods, and the capacity for innovation and flexibility in all parts of society, from universities and local government to businesses and the public services.

But it also taught us the power of the state, aided by the media and the wider establishment, to persuade the public to give up their liberty and their responsibility. The great lesson of the pandemic must be to ensure we never do that again.

The promise of Brexit was the transformation of the British state. This was the great domestic reform which was due to follow our departure from the EU, and it remains the imperative priority for the Government now. The authors show what happens when a cumbersome bureaucracy, without clear processes or the backstop of accountability, meets a dynamic and large-scale threat. More such threats are hanging over the U.K.: economic, ecological, military; as well as the expected next pandemic. We need a leaner, more strategic, more capable state, with more responsibility for local decisions devolved to local decision-makers and a more effective system of accountability.

And we need Parliament to do its job. I for one, with the benefit of hindsight – though some brave colleagues, and many brave people outside Parliament, were making these points at the time – recognise the mistakes that were made during the pandemic, and I apologise for the role I played in authorising them. Next time – whatever next time looks like – we need to do much, much better.

Danny Kruger MBE is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Devizes in Wiltshire.

Tags: COVID-19DemocracyLockdownParliamentReckoningUsForThemVaccine

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64 Comments
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Hugh
Hugh
3 years ago

“Jabit ‘expects’ chief medics to overrule JCVI on ‘vaccination’ for 12-15 year olds”.

He is going to destroy public trust in government at this rate.

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0
OnceIWasARemainer
OnceIWasARemainer
3 years ago

I must say things are suddenly looking a lot more upbeat today. We seem to have won against vaccine passports, although must keep ever vigilant both to ensure the free market eradicates places which choose to use them and that they can never be tried in future. I’m now in a place where I can make an informed medical choice about whether or not to have the vaccine without fearing I’d be submitting to coercion, so I’ll likely sign up for it as soon as I’m fully confident cancelled plan means cancelled plan.

The potential of Boris finally changing direction and doing what he claimed he was planning for from the very start looks hopeful, Sweden after all is doing very well. We just have to ensure our hopes are not dashed against the rocks this time.

If he’s truly serious the coronavirus act will be binned rather than voted on again, that will be the key evidence as to whether the leaked announcements are finally a junction off the road to tyranny, or just new lane signage.

5
-2
Hugh
Hugh
3 years ago
Reply to  OnceIWasARemainer

But Morrison’s and other businesses can still discriminate against the “unvaccinated”, as well as the problems that remain for people travelling abroad.

Still, I seem to remember there has long been a suspicion that “vaxports” were merely a ruse to “encourage” the young to get “vaccinated” which would later be dropped (I wonder if they’ll drop those patronising adverts now?). So this would fit that narrative. You never know, we might get away with it, at least for a few more months.

2
0
Annie
Annie
3 years ago
Reply to  Hugh

Yesterday the Beeb- yes, the Beeb! – was running a feature about youngies who were saying that the Nazipapiere threat would make them less likely to take the snake oil. Straws in the wind…

11
0
RickH
RickH
3 years ago
Reply to  OnceIWasARemainer

“ I must say things are suddenly looking a lot more upbeat today.We seem to have won against vaccine passports..”

Polyanna isn’t a good model!

2
0
BungleIsABogan
BungleIsABogan
3 years ago
Reply to  OnceIWasARemainer

I must say things are suddenly looking a lot more upbeat today. We seem to have won against vaccine passports…

If only that were likely true…this is lying POS Johnson we’re talking about…

5
0
Sandra Barwick
Sandra Barwick
3 years ago
Reply to  OnceIWasARemainer

Could you explain why you are considering taking the vaccine?

3
0
Hugh
Hugh
3 years ago

“Grotesque conflicts of interest on NIH Ivermectin non-recommendation”.

Thanks for drawing attentin to this Michael. I repeat, it is vital that people are aware of conflicts of interest with people and organsations who are telling us to do, or not to do something if we are to make an informed choice..

13
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Brett_McS
Brett_McS
3 years ago
Reply to  Hugh

It used to be that exposing conflicts of interest among the powerful was one of journalist’s favourite things.

17
0
Hugh
Hugh
3 years ago
Reply to  Brett_McS

I remember Christopher Booker writing about Tim Yeo’s conflict of interest over wind turbines. HOw we could do with journalists of his ilk today!

11
0
Brett_McS
Brett_McS
3 years ago

I suggest that the Chinese Hockey Team, rather than experiencing fear, are actually trying to jin up fear. Especially since Sweden didn’t fall for the CCP’s propaganda and lock down their country.

48
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Amtrup
Amtrup
3 years ago
Reply to  Brett_McS

Exactly. This ^^^^^

12
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Annie
Annie
3 years ago
Reply to  Brett_McS

The picture encapsulates the attitude of slave states towards free states. It isn’t Covid that the Chinkies fear catching from Sweden.

19
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beancounter
beancounter
3 years ago
Reply to  Brett_McS

I have never played ice hockey, but, having played “hockey” as we call it in the UK for over 50 years, I doubt whether the person on the right with the crutches has much to do with playing the sport.

5
0
BungleIsABogan
BungleIsABogan
3 years ago
Reply to  beancounter

Might have been clouted with a Hockey stick perhaps? They are wicked things when wielded “accidentally”, as I’m sure you must have discovered from time to time.
Lol!

0
0
oblong
oblong
3 years ago
Reply to  Brett_McS

Bed wetters.

1
0
Milo
Milo
3 years ago
Reply to  Brett_McS

They look absolutely ridiculous – even more so considering the role played by their country in this whole farce

2
0
Encierro
Encierro
3 years ago

Welcome back Flu. After an absence of what must be two winters you are back.
Where did you go? How come you disappeared off the face of the earth?
We did not have to inoculate against you. There were no outbreaks ruining the lives of our elderly.
What a strange world it has been.

19
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Aleajactaest
Aleajactaest
3 years ago

and it’s about to get worse for the vaccoids….

Tickerguy (Karl Denninger) is starting to see evidence of subsets of ADE, called VEI (vaccine enhanced infection) appear in the US

Basically, the vaccines (they’re not vaccines) enhance infection from new/different coronaviruses and the infected person crashes much harder than normal.

https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=243548

Tickerguy got a 7 day ban on Twatter and has asked to get this out as much as possible.

5
0
kate
kate
3 years ago
Reply to  Aleajactaest

Cannot get to site.

0
0
Fingerache Philip
Fingerache Philip
3 years ago

Dear Deirdie, I am really worried and I do not know who to turn to.
I visited the Bronte museum at Haworth in Yorkshire last Thursday and I was the only person there who refused to wear a face nappy and the place was crowded.
Should I now expect there to be a massive Covid infection outbreak in Haworth because of my selfish irresponsible behaviour?
My sense of guilt is becoming overwhelming and I feel that I cannot live with myself.
Please help me or should I take the honourable way out?
Yours in desperation, “Worried” from Shropshire.

15
0
arfurmo
arfurmo
3 years ago
Reply to  Fingerache Philip

Dear Worried

Everyone there was wearing a face mask to protect others , not themselves . This means that the only person who could have been infected anyone is you . The good news is that if you didn’t have any symptoms you were probably not a spreader . It was estimated that about 1 in 75 in England had the virus so the odds are in your favour.
In the unlikely event that you were a spreader , as they were all masked up, the chances are that they were double innoculated so completely immune from infection and death.
Continue as you were.

12
0
Fingerache Philip
Fingerache Philip
3 years ago
Reply to  arfurmo

Many thanks Arfurmo.
I feel much better now.

3
0
Zoomer@14
Zoomer@14
3 years ago

The Chinese hockey team should stay ‘under the bed’ rather than travelling as though they are on a ‘space’ mission…space…outer space or convid space…ha ha!

4
0
Major Panic in the jabby jabbys
Major Panic in the jabby jabbys
3 years ago

Did the the clown in No. 10 just lead the wee communist crawnkee into a vax passport trap – knowing she would announce VPs early like she does with everything else – only for Bozo to pull the plug on the VP madness…

Hope he does the same thing with medical experiments on Kids…

7
0
iane
iane
3 years ago
Reply to  Major Panic in the jabby jabbys

No – he is much too dim for that; the vax passport threat was just to get the unthinking yoof to take the poison.

2
0
Sandra Barwick
Sandra Barwick
3 years ago
Reply to  Major Panic in the jabby jabbys

He hasn’t stopped the passports. They openly admit they are still on the cards. It’s just that there aren’t enough”cases” yet to ramp up the fear to introduce them. But this winter there will be – see Israel.

3
0
ComeTheRevolution
ComeTheRevolution
3 years ago

Incredible broadcast from Max Igan here, reporting the madness from Australia. Includes a clip of a US military official announcing that the Taliban has been left with $85 BILLION worth of US military equipment including 70,000 vehicles, 200+ helicopters & planes, weapons etc. Meanwhile the British military is being jabbed with something which Molecular Biologist and Immunologist Dolores Cahill says could kill a very high % of the vaccinated in the next few years. Do the math, as they say.

Never Give An Inch To A Despot
https://www.bitchute.com/video/s3FXYW62Gi3M/

Also here is a great video looking at the infamous DEAGEL website – the military spending forecast website which UK population dropping from 68 million to 14 million by 2025. Massive drops in US and German populations also predicted.

DEAGEL Forecasts Massive Depopulation by 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY4Wahyo5n0

1
-1
milesahead
milesahead
3 years ago
Reply to  ComeTheRevolution

I came across the Deagel information about a year ago – it terrified me. If you read the comments below the Youtube video, you’ll see people who claim that the information was available in 2010.
People still can’t bring themselves to accept that this is about depopulation.

2
0
Mark
Mark
3 years ago

Chickens coming home to roost:

Australian man brutally beats a policewoman who told him to move on while enforcing Sydney’s draconian lockdown that only allows people to leave their home with a ‘reasonable excuse’
Here is the likely default response of a decent conservative person to this kind of story a couple of years ago:

“This is a shocking attack on people merely trying to do their jobs, not making the laws themselves, but having to enforce them, etc etc.”

This is my response now:

This is what happens when the police are used to impose tyrannical, authoritarian laws on people against all principles of decent governance. Any member of the police force who has remained in uniform while these laws have been imposed by brutal force, and while dissenters have been beaten and fined by police, should expect no sympathy when they encounter this kind of pushback.

The individual officers might well be innocent and might well hate the laws they have been told to enforce, but so were those beaten and fined by the police for disobeying the wrongful laws they have been enforcing. And in this case it appears from this report at least that they chose to enforce the laws in question,when they always have the choice in these cases to turn the blind eye – these are not laws that protect citizens from attacks of any kind, that a police officer ought to be expected to respond to. The correct response from a police officer seeing someone breaking these wrongful laws is to walk away.

In Australia even more so than here, the police collectively chose their side on the coronapanic, and they chose the wrong side.

No sympathy.

Last edited 3 years ago by Mark
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Noumenon
Noumenon
3 years ago
Reply to  Mark

I’m surprised worse hasn’t happened given the extremely disproportionate events of the last 18 months.

5
0
Mark
Mark
3 years ago
Reply to  Noumenon

Especially in Australia, where police collaboration with tyranny seems to have been far worse than here.

3
0
Phil Shannon
Phil Shannon
3 years ago
Reply to  Mark

Australia is an example of Covid madness, and its totalitarian enforcement, in extremis because of our delusory pursuit of Zero Covid. The police have been infected by the hyper-hysteria as much as any other institution and the individuals within it, but because they wear the blue uniform they can exercise their power against lockdown opponents with abandon, and to public acclaim.

It must also be easier for them to arrest and beat ordinary civilians than to tackle genuine criminals who are difficult to catch and who pose some threat to them – a much easier way to boost the number of ‘collars’ and fines meted out to meet their KPIs in their peformance agreements with their bosses (I’m still waiting for the police to find out who stole my last two, quite expensive, bicycles – not holding my breath, though).

Dissenters within the police ranks are few and far between, though their number is edging upwards as both the New South Wales and Queensland state governments are coming after them with ‘No Jab, No Job’ policies. Now the cops might start to find themselves the victims of their own Covid zealotry. Those with a conscience will be weeded out or resign, and that will leave only the hardcore lockdown enforcers in the ranks.

It’s grim Downunder. I’d book a flight to the Mother Country to escape it all but the regime won’t let anyone leave the country.

Phil
South Australia

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Mark
Mark
3 years ago
Reply to  Phil Shannon

Yes, it’s clear in this country as well that a lot of policemen and policewomen believed the regime and media fear propaganda, and bought into the scapegoating of dissenters. More fool them.

“It must also be easier for them to arrest and beat ordinary civilians than to tackle genuine criminals who are difficult to catch and who pose some threat to them“

All the more reason not to feel any sympathy when they get occasional pushback, as in the case described.

Not good for anyone, but as always it’s vital to remember “who started it”, and that was the panicking scum who thought it was ok to impose their personal cowardice on decent folk, by force.

5
0
Liam
Liam
3 years ago

The tweet at the bottom of the round up about the Chinese hockey team is from a psychopathic lockdown zealot who spends his life portraying Sweden as a mass grave where every single person has died of the rona. Please don’t sully our screens with the ravings of a lunatic.

6
0
RickH
RickH
3 years ago
Reply to  Liam

The follow-up tweets are a hilarious tribute to blind idiocy 🙂

2
-1
Sandra Barwick
Sandra Barwick
3 years ago
Reply to  Liam

Pic still hilarious though.

1
0
RickH
RickH
3 years ago

“Sajid Javid warns of possible bad flu season due to concerning levels of immunity following COVID restrictions last winter”
It’s known as “having your cake and eating it”

3
0
Fingerache Philip
Fingerache Philip
3 years ago

Isn’t it strange how being a lockdown sceptic also reinforces your belief in the King’s new clothes syndrome?
I think that the TV quiz show; Pointless is absolutely brilliant and one of the best of it’s type that I’ve seen in over 60 years of viewing.
BUT: Dispite spending weeks at the top of the best sellers and Steven Spielberg buying the film rights,
Richard Osman’s debut novel, The Thursday murder club, in my opinion is one of the most boring and forgettable books I’ve had the misfortune to read.
It was a Christmas present from Mrs FP and when she tried to read it, she couldn’t get past the first 30 pages or so.
Like lockdown, people just seem to go along with every fashionable opinion and trend that experts, advisors and critics tell them to follow, dispite what they truly think themselves.

1
0
Pavlov Bellwether
Pavlov Bellwether
3 years ago

Information, resources and useful links: https://www.LCAHub.org/

4
0

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